Murder of Crows by Annie Bellet

Author:Annie Bellet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

I came to with the mother of all headaches. I hate getting knocked out and this was the second time in as many days. It’s disorienting as fuck. Most knock-outs are pretty quick, not like in the movies where the person goes down and stays down for a convenient amount of time. I had a feeling more time had passed, however. I remembered the hit first, that explosion of pain, then the where and what next.

It was pitch black when I opened my eyes and I couldn’t make out a thing. I hoped that meant I was still underground rather than blind.

I took stock of my body, flexing fingers and toes. I was still dressed, but there were restraints of some kind on my wrists and ankles. My arms were pulled back behind and half under me as I lay on my side and my fingers felt swollen, though they wiggled so they weren’t totally asleep. With the painful tingling in them, I found myself wishing they were. I tried to push my legs apart, but they were stuck together with whatever was binding me. Something clanked and I guessed I was chained up. The bindings felt rigid enough to be metal. Shit.

I listened, hearing breathing near me. All I could smell was dirt and the faint scent of cooked meat. I figured I had to be in the cavern still, or near it. Pushing through the pounding pain in my head, I tried to call up my magic and bring light into my talisman.

The magic flowed into me grudgingly and hanging on to it hurt so much I whimpered. Something moved near me and I froze as the breathing noise grew closer, almost drowned out by the clack of metal on stone. My talisman didn’t light up. I realized I couldn’t feel the chain around my neck, couldn’t sense the residual power that I stored in it. My D20 necklace was missing.

“Hey,” said a soft male voice. “You awake?”

Was it a trap? Probably a trap. I decided I didn’t care.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “Are we alone?”

“The kids are sleeping, I believe. And I haven’t heard the man in a little while,” the voice said. He had an accent, very slight, but almost Hispanic in how he accented some syllables and not others. He was near me now, I felt the warmth coming off him, felt his breath as he talked. A hand touched my arm and I tried not to flinch. “You were very beat up, I did not think you would wake. You are not a shifter.”

“Carlos?” I guessed, going with the most obvious explanation.

“Yes,” he said, a little louder now, excited. “Who are you?”

“Jade, a friend of Aleksei Kirov’s,” I said, knowing that he and Alek talked all the time. He might know who I was, if Alek mentioned me. I hadn’t ever been brave enough to ask. “Alek is here somewhere, in the woods. He didn’t come into the mine. Are we still in the mine?”

“Yes, I think so.

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