Alaskan Fury by Sara King

Author:Sara King [King, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-22T12:58:39+00:00

Imelda slept only two hours that night. The rest of the time, she spent lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to tell herself that she wasn’t hearing voices in the basement.

There is a foot of insulated, soundproofed floorspace between me and them, she told herself, for the thousandth time. I do not hear voices.

Yet every time she started to drift off, the result was the same. The whimpers, the pleas, the moans and grunts of anguish seemed to drift into her awareness, until it was all she could hear, blotting out even the sounds of her own dreams. She heard the wereverine’s brazen taunts between screams of agony, the phoenix’s confused voice, rising in fear and pain, the bastet calling for his children, the various fey, their tremulous voices alternating between flinging insults and offering bribes. Hundreds of voices. More voices than they held in the prison below, Imelda knew.

It’s in my head, Imelda thought.

There was one voice in particular, though, that made her blood feel like acid in her veins when she heard it. When it first came, Imelda started awake, heart thundering in her chest, and laid there in the dark hum of silence, wondering if this was what it felt like to lose one’s mind.

He’s not in the basement, Imelda thought. He’s not.

After she heard the voice of her Padre cracking with tears for the third time that night, however, Imelda climbed out of bed and threw on her clothes. She barely took the time to knot the laces of her boots before she was out the door and rushing down the hall to the keycode-locked basement.

The basement itself was cool and quiet. As she rumbled down the metal staircase, Imelda saw multiple heads lift in mixed states of disgust and fear. Mostly fear. The wereverine was one of the few who still seemed to be able to manage disgust. The rest were too…tired.

…and had been sleeping.

Though Zenaida never turned the light off in the basement, a tactic that Inquisitors used to disorient their victims and disrupt their sleep cycles, her fellow Segunda Inquisidora was not in attendance.

No one had been screaming. No one had been whimpering or begging. And her Padre, after a thorough search of the premises, was not bound to a rack, slowly bleeding to death for Zenaida’s magics.

Imelda paused in the hallway after doing a circuit of the prison. The phoenix was still unconscious in her cage, though her naked body showed plenty of signs of…purification. The wereverine was still strung up on the rack beside her, his body likewise covered in welts and cuts—healing slowly, doubtlessly, because Zenaida had been draining the Third Lander from his veins.

“What the fuck do you want?”

The tremble in the wereverine’s voice caught Imelda off-guard, and, startled, she met the wereverine’s glare.

There were tears in his eyes.

In that moment, the very foundation of Imelda’s world took a blow. This was not the look of a monster with a soul destined for Satan’s horde. This was not a demon lusting to corrupt the souls of innocents.

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