Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,80

him even more when we eventually got out of here.

My familiar was a tubby, lazy, pampered prince, but when we finally escaped, he would ascend to king status. I owed him my life ten times over, even if what he had done—finding me in an uncharted supernatural prison—was what familiars were supposed to do for their witches. To some, familiars were servants, underlings, there to do as the witch or warlock ordered, to make them stronger and complement their magic. Tully had been my partner from the moment we locked eyes, him a malnourished kitten and me a depressed teenager.

He had saved me more than once, helped me cope with loss, with soul-crushing grief, and now this?

Tully Fox deserved to be knighted.

“Okay, okay, okay…” Begrudgingly, I loosened my hold on him—not all the way, an unwelcome fear flaring that if I let go, he might vanish. “You need to tell me everything.”

But I had to release him—had to trust that he was well and truly here, that I wasn’t losing my mind. Sniffling, I busied my hands with my tearstained face, wiping away the damp and dragging my nose across my forearm. Tully, meanwhile, positioned himself on my lap, nestling in the dip of my crossed legs, prim and proper again, tail swishing. With my back still to the open door, I hoped—prayed to anyone who might be listening in this forsaken place—that the guard monitoring the cellblock this afternoon wouldn’t suddenly have an interest in doing his job.

Taking a deep breath, I locked eyes with Tully. Blue to blue, I peered into the depths, picking through the fine flecks and streaks, until slowly, the world around us went hazy. First it blurred, then it darkened—then it was all gone. Black. While witch and familiar had an unspoken bond deeper than any she would have in all her life—although the arrival of a fated mate certainly threw that theory for a loop—we couldn’t communicate telepathically. No words shared between minds; magic bound us, and it was Tully’s magic that wove the tale.

Pictures flashed by my mind’s eye, snippets of memory, the figures shadowy but their faces clear, tinted by a sepia filter. After the bounty hunters—two men and one woman—had crashed Café Crowley and hurled Tully into an unused oven—

Wait.

Those fuckers tossed my familiar into an oven?

My hands balled to such tight fists that my nails bit furiously into my palms. But the images didn’t stop, moving fluidly like some artsy indie flick, flashes and flares, the figures almost dancing.

Screaming for someone to call the police, a horrified Annalise had freed Tully from the oven, which must have locked when the hunter slammed the door shut. He’d then shot out of the café, hot on their trail, scenting their footsteps through Seattle. Found them at a bar, the trio wasting away my bounty on liquor. Detected my location from their conversations—Siberia—and snuck aboard a plane.

My familiar couldn’t teleport, but he excelled at shadow magic. Tully could blend with a shadow no matter the intensity or size, and in the darkness, he disappeared.

The images came faster now, time passing, Tully hitching rides around the globe, catching snippets of chatter from other supers about Lloyd Guthrie’s new criminal empire at the top of the world. He eventually found the prison, but it stayed hidden behind the ward. From his perspective, the vast grassland was empty except for the faint rainbow shimmer, but he sat for days in the shadows of the nearby mountains, watching trucks and cars rumble down a dirt road and then vanish into oblivion. Warlocks came and went to a nearby village, and although he didn’t take the time to show landmarks or much of the scenery, it was obvious Guthrie had stationed his mob henchmen—now guards at his prison—there with their families.

Tully had found a family.

The Thompson family.

He had chosen the least threatening of the Xargi warlocks as they climbed off the transport bus and rubbed up on his leg. Purred. Really put on a show. Exhausted but receptive, Thompson had brought my familiar home to his three kids and a wife pissed to be living in the middle of nowhere instead of their Manhattan brownstone.

But the young Thompsonites seemed to adore Tully, bits of their arguments over which bed he’d sleep in that night making me grin. At least they had taken care of him, this huge, bushy stray who slept by the fire and on their laps, who watched Thompson’s wife cry after he left for