He closed his eyes. I kept mine open and spoke softly. “What is your name?”
“The name they gave me is Ernest, but that is not my real name.” He gasped and pursed his lips as if he’d said something he wasn’t supposed to.
“You can trust me,” I parroted his words back at him and he relaxed, as did the fingers inside my skull.
“My real name is Eligor.”
The thing under his arm squirmed again. Matte black steel.
“Eligor,” I whispered his name and he shivered, his eyes fluttering open. “I know that name.”
Damn it. I clamped down on my thoughts, keeping them to myself as a chill whispered down my spine. If his name was on point, then I knew what he was, but I would not say the word. Not out loud and not even in my mind. I’d faced his kind before, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to do it again. Still, he was young. Maybe that meant he was malleable too. Maybe it meant I could use him.
I let a slow breath slide out. “I am very well read, you see, on certain subjects. I believe I know who you are. More importantly, I know what you are.”
Slowly his eyes opened. I had leaned in close enough to kiss him, had I any desire to do so. Dark lines drew my eyes to his neck. I lifted a hand slowly and touched his left cheek, turning his face away from mine, baring his neck fully to me. The tail end of a tattoo peeked above the edge of his collar and then swept away, likely straight down his spine. The tip of it looked like feathers.
A tattoo matching my own.
“I have a mark like that,” I said, my heart rate spiking to where even I couldn’t control it. “Have you seen it?” Mine was a tattoo; I doubted his was, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use the similarities to my benefit.
Eligor shook his head slowly, his eyes widening. “No. That can’t be.”
“Have you not seen me naked when I meditate?” Shocking if he hadn’t looked. His cheeks flushed.
“I’m not like that. I don’t look at you like that.”
I breathed in, and with that breath, I tasted fear in the air. A smile slid over my face. “Eligor, I like you. I want to trust you. I realize that you could have destroyed my mind, like what happened to Easter.” I waited for him to correct me on her name and when he didn’t I went on. “By all accounts, I should hate you for holding me here. For watching my every move. For caging me. But I don’t. I should, but I don’t. Because you kept me from losing myself.”
The waves inside of me crashed against the shore, demanding action, demanding that this was the time and the moment. I’d waited long enough and every instinct in me was rising to the surface.
“I can see your soul,” he whispered.
That was interesting. “I don’t think I have a soul, Eligor. Not with my past.”
“Everyone has a soul.” He frowned as if I’d said something to upset him. “Even abnormals.”
I raised my eyebrows, his admission as shocking as anything else. “You don’t want me to think my past is not my past any longer? You are saying that I am an abnormal?”
His jaw opened and he stuttered. “I didn’t mean—”
“I won’t tell.” I smiled, the closest I’d come to a real smile in this place. “After all, who would believe me? I’m not supposed to believe I am anything but a crazy human who lost her mind to drugs and found herself locked up here for her own good, right?”
We sat there and he stared into my face as if he were trying to read a book in which all of the words were jumbled. Even though it didn’t make any sense to him, he was trying. He was trying so hard to make me a better person than I was.
“And what do you see when you look at my soul?” I lifted my hand and cupped his face between my fingers and thumb.
“I see fire,” he whispered. “You burn bright, your soul is like nothing I’ve ever touched before. Destruction and creation in one. It is . . . mesmerizing.”
Tears filled those strange blue eyes and his whispered confession was all it took to break the last of the barrier. Words tumbled from him. “I don’t like it here. I’m always afraid. They hurt the others. Like Easter. She was hurt so much, and I didn’t know. I would have tried to stop them!” A cry slid out of him and I circled an arm around his shoulders.
The tide turned, and the power between us shifted. His thoughts no longer felt like fingers gripping my mind but like the wings of a bird. Frantic. Afraid. Alone. Bits and pieces of why he was afraid filtered through our connection, and it made me understand why he’d come to me now, of all times. I saw the boss he feared, who was more powerful than any of his kind I’d encountered before. And that was saying something.
I squeezed his shoulders tightly and took the leap into the abyss with a frail rope to hold me if I fell. “Are you going to help me escape?”
“How?” The question was asked with difficulty. “I can’t even help myself.”
“Let me guess, your boss is thinking of terminating me? That he doesn’t trust me?”
He gasped and his eyes filled with tears. “Yes, I think so.”
“And when they do that? You die as well?”
His lips trembled. “How do you know? How could you possibly know?”
I tightened my grip on him. “I know your name, Eligor. I know what you are. I have hunted your kind before, and I have killed them.” I bit the words off as the current swept over the banks of the river, the rage rising.
“You’re going to guide me out of this place,” I said softly, pushing the
