Spellfire Read Free Page A

shoulder and whispered in his ear:
You’re an idiot, a moron, useless, unworthy.
    Gods knew he’d spent those years trying to prove Red-Boar wrong. But maybe his old man’d had a point there, too. Just look where he’d wound up.
    *    *    *
    Gasping, gagging, Rabbit went limp in his shackles, numb to the outside world as he cursed the place where his old man’s ghost had been.
    Or maybe there hadn’t been anything there at all. Maybe he was finally losing his grip on sanity. Gods knew it was past time.
    “Enough!” The word cracked in the air, yanking him back into his body. He groaned as the agony of the beating flooded back through him, only then realizing that the flogging had stopped, that Phee was scowling at him. “This isn’t working, and we’re running out of time.” Her lips curved. “I guess we need to take a little trip and pick up that leverage we’ve been talking about.”
    “No!”
Rabbit bellowed with a force that turned his throat raw. “Don’t you fucking touch her!” The demon bitch meant it this time. Where before she had used the taunt to twist him up inside and make him bleed, now it was for real. He had stalled too long.
    But Phee just laughed and swept out on a buzz of dark magic. The
camazotz
followed without a backward glance, dropping the blood-soaked whip into the small pool of salt water that collected near the door. Its barbed tail was the last to leave, lashing with a force that sent the wicked, knifelike point skittering across the stone floor.
    Rage hazed Rabbit’s vision. He hated Phee and her
camazotz
minions, hated the part of him that had allowed itself to be poisoned by her lies, the part that hadn’t ever outgrown feeling unloved and unwanted. He hated this fucking cell, with its line of stone skulls carved up near the ceiling, watching him with empty sockets, and he hated the trickle of seawater that ran from a crack near the door to fill that blood-tinged depression, bringing the smell of the ocean and taunting him with the hint of the outside world. But most of all, he hated knowing that Myrinne was once again in danger because of him.
    Maybe he’d been wrong to steal the resurrection skull and try to bring her back from the verge of death. But after what he’d done to her, betraying his teammates had been all too easy. The spell hadn’t worked, though, and the Nightkeepers had come after him, leaving him with just one option: a life for a life. He had offered himself to the gods in exchange for her, and had wound up in Phee’s hands instead. It was a sacrifice he would make again, though, a thousand times over. He would do anything for her, damn it. Give anything.
    “You can have the magic!” he roared, straining to the ends of his shackles. “Come back. You can fucking have it!” But there was no answer.
    He went mindless, berserk, lunging against the chains over and over again, howling threats, curses, pleas, words that stopped having any meaning beyond the fury in his veins and the roar of the creature he had become, which lived only to rip into his enemy and protect what had once belonged to him. The chains clattered
rat-a-tat
like automatic fire and then snapped taut with grenade
crack-booms
. Agony howled through him, but he didn’t care about the damage or the pain; the whipped dog had finally reached its breaking point.
    “Come back, damn you!” He slammed to the end of the chains—
crack-boom!
—and then fell back—
rat-a-tat
. “I’ll give you the magic. I’ll give you whatever you want!” Shouting, foaming at the mouth, he kept flinging himself forward, and then falling back.
Crack-boom
,
rat-a-tat,
three more times, four. But then the noise went
crack-clunk
.
    It took a second for the difference to penetrate, another for him to feel the give in the manacle holding his right wrist. Whipping his head around, he saw that one of the bolts had sheared off where it held the chain to the wall, and another had bent partway. Sudden