different times and at irregular intervals, just to fuck with me — someone, maybe Nate, lobbed a large plastic bottle of water and a chunk of bread down the stairs. The first time probably wasn’t Nate, because the asshole’s aim sucked.
In the evenings, one of the goons came lumbering down the stairs and carried the bucket I used for waste into the basement’s attached bathroom to empty it.
If they thought making me use a bucket while a working toilet was only ten feet away was effective torture, they were right. I hated being dirty. Hated it, hated it, hated it, and when I could, I bathed several times a day.
On the fourth day, probably, the bread had been so dusty and dry and my stomach so upset I’d forced it down and then thrown it up again.
The smell was still festering a day later. Maybe a day. Too long, anyway. No one had come yet that morning.
Just as well, because I didn’t think I could keep any more bread down, or even the water. My stomach churned, and my head was swimming. All my limbs felt loose and weak.
I didn’t deserve this. Yes, I’d helped a trio of psychopaths try to kill the Armitages. I’d plotted with Jonathan Hawthorne, possibly the most terrifyingly emotionless bastard I’d ever met, so that he could enslave his own son. (Hawthorne would’ve deserved this.) I’d turned another one of my co-conspirators into a mindless half-undead monster and driven him into battle, where he’d injured I didn’t know how many of the Armitages’ pack and allies.
So objectively, maybe I did deserve this — from a certain point of view, that being that I’d had a real choice in my actions, rather than simply trying to survive. And also objectively, what they were doing to me wasn’t so bad. But I hated to be dirty, and I hated being cut off from my magic, and I needed to wash my hair before I lost my ever-loving shit. And I felt so sick. Why did I feel so sick? I hated being so weak.
How long were they going to leave me down here? They were supposed to be the good guys, right? The heroes. Where the fuck did they get off using tactics I might have used against someone else? The fucking nerve.
The creak at the top of the stairs turned into the door opening all the way, and then footsteps thumped their way down.
“Fuck, what’s that smell?” Nate’s voice.
“What do you think?” Ian replied. “He’s using a bucket. I told you I could handle this alone.”
“I’ll manage,” Nate grumbled. He’d manage? He’d probably had a shower that morning.
Nate and Ian appeared at the bottom of the stairs and stood shoulder to shoulder, examining me. Like they’d get any joy out of that.
“Where’s my bread and water? Run out of budget for grocery shopping?” The Armitages were notorious for being one of the brokest-ass werewolf packs in the west. A lot of the pack worked low-paid blue-collar jobs — or had, before the paper mill in the area shut down. Now they were unemployed and living off of odd jobs as handymen or furniture movers, and I was pretty sure they owned a junkyard.
An unprofitable junkyard, even as junkyards went.
I expected a sneer, or a mocking retort, but it didn’t come. Ian was pale and exhausted-looking, and he frowned at me silently.
“He looks like shit too,” Nate said. “He’s white as a ghost. And he’s sweating.” Come to think of it, he wasn’t looking his best either.
And…too? Little alarm bells were starting to go off.
Ian’s frown deepened. “What kind of spell did you put on my brother?” he demanded at last.
“As I told you in our first charming conversation the day after your fluke of a victory, I don’t share my proprietary techniques.”
I slumped back against the end of the couch. That long of a sentence had really taken it out of me, not to mention the effort of sounding like I wasn’t about to start begging for a bottle of Tums. Fuck, there was really something wrong with me.
And given Ian’s question, I was starting to suspect what it was.
“No, not gonna fly,” Ian said grimly. “Not this time. Something’s wrong with Matt. He’s sick. Like you are, it looks like. So you’re going to tell me what you did, and you’re going to do it now, or I will start torturing you. For real. No fucking bread-and-water bullshit.”
“He’ll die if you kill —”
“I didn’t say