Make Me Read Free Page B

talk, I’ll let you out. I promise.”
    Yeah, as soon as I was able to use Lola, he’d do anything I wanted. “At least turn the lights up,” I said. I wanted to see more of the area, figure out where I was, locate potential weapons.
    David shook his head. “The low lighting is for your benefit. The drug makes you hypersensitive to light. If I turn them up, you’ll get a migraine.”
    It pained me, but I looked at Fang for confirmation. He nodded to indicate David was telling the truth. The hellhound’s big brown eyes pleaded with me to understand, to forgive him. I closed my eyes, desperately wanting to believe my best friend really did have good reason, a reason I didn’t yet know, but I couldn’t hear him to get that reason. And I couldn’t hear him because he’d let someone drug me. I hate this.
    “Please,” David said. “Have a seat.”
    Why not? I was still feeling wobbly. I glanced around and noticed that there was a soft-looking armchair sitting next to the bars, with a sink and toilet on the other side in the small cell. The chair looked really out of place, so I guessed they must have put it there to make me comfortable.
    I sat in it, and the guy seemed to relax. He and the girl pulled wooden chairs from along the wall opposite my cage and set them on the other side of the bars. David stared at me solemnly for a moment, turning the ruined part of his face away from me. “This is what it used to be like, you know,” he said softly.
    “What?”
    “During the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. Humans didn’t understand us, were afraid of us, so they labeled us witch and imprisoned us, drowned us, burned us.”
    “Us?”
    “Part-demons,” he explained. “Like you and me. And Pia and Fang.”
    Part-demons? I wondered what their powers were, why they felt it necessary to take mine away. Why Pia didn’t feel safe until I was behind bars. Or so David said. She hadn’t said anything so far. I wasn’t willing to give them the benefit of the doubt yet. “Well, you’ve got the imprisonment part down pat. What’s next? Drowning or burning?”
    He looked taken aback, offended even. “Neither. What kind of people do you think we are?”
    I didn’t really believe it, but wanted to throw him off guard. “I think you’re the kind who would drug and kidnap someone just to talk to her. Are drowning and burning really that much of a stretch?”
    He shook his head, and the soft light created shadows on his scars, making the side of his face look like a pockmarked, desolate moon. “We’re not monsters. And we did this partially to show you what it’s like to feel helpless, under someone else’s control. How… awful it is.”
    I glanced at Pia whose eyes hardened as she gave me a challenging stare. No help from that quarter. And I revised her age upward again. “Okay, so why was it necessary?”
    “Do you know why the Demon Underground was formed?”
    I felt my brain start to clear. I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but I played along. “Sure. To help us find our place in the human world, find us jobs, help us blend—that sort of thing.”
    He shook his head. “That is what it has become, but that isn’t why it was originally formed. It was created to help people like us, to protect us, keep us safe from human witch hunts, and to ensure no one learned of our existence who could harm us.”
    “Is that really necessary anymore? I haven’t heard of any modern-day Inquisitions.”
    “Haven’t you?” David asked with a raised eyebrow. “And why is that?”
    “Uh, because there aren’t any?”
    “Oh, but there are. You just don’t hear about them.”
    “Like what?” I poked at the limits of the sticky strands encasing Lola. They seemed to be giving way a little.
    “Like a small town afraid of a family who were a little different. So afraid that they torched their house and burned them alive—a part-demon father and daughter, and a human mother lost their lives, killed