Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,131

elbow, revealing the ancient symbol for Mercury, the god who walked every road, on his pasty forearm. “Tattooed on their skin—keys to the ward. Clever, no?”

While I could see the logic in that, there was still one giant, obnoxious elephant in the room.

“And when do you intend to do all this?” I motioned to the sun cutting across the block from Katja’s cell window, the beam sprinkled with dust. “In case you haven’t realized, it’s sunny as hell today.”

“We’re going to cover you with our jumpsuits and just go,” Katja offered, tugging at her purple lapels. “It’ll be temporary, but you’ll be fully covered… and then we can figure it out outside the ward.”

“Touching.” It might have sounded sarcastic, but I had to bite back a genuine smile—because they had considered me and all my failings. They weren’t going to leave me behind, even if I slowed them down. Still, this plan was weak at best, and I wasn’t about to risk it—wasn’t about to risk her, my bite looking fresh as ever on her throat, the memory of it both painful and exhilarating. “But I’m not thrilled about the, er, just figure it out part.”

“For fuck’s sake, you dark cloud,” Fintan growled. “It’s the best we’ve got, so stop moaning and just get on with it.”

Elijah’s eyes narrowed. “Fintan.”

“He has a right to express his concerns,” Katja said tersely, shooting the fae a glare to match her mate’s. She then looked to me, her fear spiking within the connection we shared—vampire and victim, those puncture wounds refusing to heal, tethering us together for longer than anyone who came before. Perhaps forever. In a way, we shared what she and Elijah had: a mental, possibly even spiritual link, wherein we could communicate without saying a word.

Her expression faltered when I gritted my teeth, mild annoyance sparking on my end. “How thoughtful of you, allowing me my opinion about the thing that will kill me instantaneously—”

“Come oooonnnnnnnnn,” Fintan droned, nodding back to the door with a long, drawn-out groan. “This is a waste of time. Someone just put a bag over his head and be done with it.”

“Fuck you, fae.”

“It comes from a place of love, vampire,” he purred, blowing me a kiss over the sniveling warlock’s shoulder. “Just move your ass already and we—”

A shrill cry detonated over the cellblock, sirens of varying pitches and intensities exploding from the ceiling speaker. I clapped my hands over my ears, but that didn’t stop the horrendous noise from slicing through my skull. Elijah felt it just as severely, the intensity forcing his eyes to roll back into his head before he folded over with a snarl. Doubled in size again, Tully flung himself away from Katja and rocketed into her empty cell like a missile, leaving his mistress to suffer the assault alone. Her knees buckled, and Katja plummeted to the ground, wrists shoved against her ears, hands in her hair, eyes wide with panic.

Xargi had so many sirens—but this was new, something of Guthrie’s design, no doubt. Something to subdue everyone, so calamitous that I felt the sound vibrations in my marrow. Fintan had even abandoned our ticket out of here, but the warlock couldn’t withstand it either, rolling around on the ground, lips moving like he was screaming for someone to make it stop. I dropped to one knee just as a cool, viscous liquid dribbled from my ears—my eardrums had burst. They stitched themselves back together, vampiric healing abilities slow but present even with this damn collar, but then they burst again, another spurt of dead blood splashing against my palms.

When the shrieking stopped, it felt like the blitz again, my hearing muffled even with the bells ringing, ringing, ringing inside my skull. Shadowy figures darted across the remnants of the cellblock’s busted main door, and seconds later someone hurled a dark, round disc into the room. I blinked, stunned, as it clanged and bounced across the floor, wondering if this truly was wartime.

“Grenade—”

The flash bang exploded in a hail of light and sound, tossing me onto my back and making Katja screech. Her terror reverberated through me, brighter and more focused than anything else, and I fought hard to blink the spotlight out of my eyes. The ringing between my ears intensified, and I rolled onto my stomach and twisted forward just in time to see another grenade tossed inside, detonating before it landed in a cloud of thick, black smoke. Through the swelling darkness, I spotted it: