Kitty in the Underworld

Chapter 6

MY HEADACHE, spurred by darkness and stress, grew worse, working to pull me into exhaustion. I must have already slept for hours because of the tranquilizer, but I slept again, and more time slipped by. I jerked to wakefulness, scratching my hand on the stone floor, without realizing I’d even fallen asleep in the first place. With the cave’s darkness pressing down on me, I wondered if I’d woken up at all. My throbbing head lived in some weird, unconscious twilight state.

I retrieved the bottle of water from where I’d set it by the stone wall—far from the panel in the door, so it couldn’t be taken away from me—and drank. The headache dimmed.

The same faint lamplight seeped through the bottom of the door. They’d need some kind of lighting to find their way through the tunnels. With the weight of the air pressing around me, we had to be pretty far underground. Based on the scents I could track, the same set of people had been passing by. Their scents were strong enough, even in the chill, unmoving air of the place, that I imagined them lingering. I wondered if they had some way of looking in here without me knowing. I stared at the door, imagining I was glaring at them with all the challenge I could muster. My Wolf’s gaze, amber and terrifying. My lips curled, baring teeth.

Calm down. Heaving a sigh, I made myself relax, rubbed my shoulders to keep them from bunching up. I couldn’t afford to shape-shift here, not like this. I couldn’t lose control. When my captors finally showed themselves, I wanted to be able to talk to them. To yell at them.

I took another drink of water. And wondered what I was going to do when I had to go to the bathroom, which was going to be soon.

Lying on the floor, I put my feet up against the wood of the door. With my back braced, I pushed with all my strength. The wood flexed; I grew hopeful. Before the plywood bowed more than an inch, though, I slid back on the stone floor. I tried again, pushing until my muscles cramped, and slid on the stone. I could brace, but not well enough to make a difference. I didn’t have enough leverage to beat whatever bolted the door in place. I was only wearing myself out.

A drumbeat started. No, a set of drumbeats, from relatively close by—down a tunnel outside the door. Hard to tell, because the sound echoed against the stone. As if rising up from the stone itself. The beat was gentle, steady—the thump of a heartbeat at rest. Not mechanical, though. I pressed my ear to the edge of the door and listened for clanking, clicking, the sound of metal on metal—had some mining equipment been set into motion? But no, this was skin against skin—a hand on the head of a drum. Two of them, just enough out of synch to be distracting.

Something was happening. Something had to be happening. I crept back from the door and crouched, waiting. As soon as it opened, I’d be ready. Not exactly sure what I was going to be ready for, but there you go.

I waited. The drumming continued. Nothing happened.

Human hands definitely made these beats. Over time, the pair of drums grew more out of synch, then back into rhythm. A scattered hiccup of sound, a rumble of thunder put on an endless loop. I started counting beats. Stopped after two hundred. The drumming went on a long time, until my headache grew, my temples throbbing in time with the pounding, on and on.

Yeah, something was happening—someone was trying to drive me crazy. On reflection, that was probably exactly what was going on. So I had to make sure I didn’t go crazy. I caught the burr of a growl in my throat. I could decide not to go crazy, but Wolf, I wasn’t sure about.

The next hour or so I spent on my back, pounding my feet against the door, shoving into it as hard as I could until I was sweating, gasping for breath. The door must have been braced from the other side; however much the wood bowed, something held it fast. It would have just taken a couple of crossbeams. Those weren’t budging.

The drumming continued. While I struggled with the door, it faded to background noise. I could almost forget about it, so much white noise. I had to admire the stamina of the drummers. They lost the rhythm, changed it, picking up a new one to replace the old as they maintained their noise.

I was so preoccupied by the drumming, I almost didn’t hear footsteps approach—different footsteps from the ones who’d brought the water. Heavier ones, from a larger person. A scrape on stone that jarred against the drumbeats simply because it was different. My ears pricked, straining to learn more. Holding my breath, I listened to the shallow breathing on the other side of the door. Male—and wolf. He was trying not to draw attention to himself. The skin down my back prickled, fur and hackles stiffening at a potential threat. Strange wolf, strange territory, all of it strange, and we couldn’t see our enemy. He was watching us, but we couldn’t match his challenge—we could only stare at the blank door.

I stayed still, crouched and frozen, not wanting to give him any kind of clue about my apprehensive state of mind. I kept my breathing calm, even though I felt like I wasn’t drawing in any oxygen at all. I didn’t shout, though I wanted to.

What the hell did these people want with me?

I waited for him to open the door, but he never did. He stood for a long time, no doubt smelling me, listening to me, studying me, the way I was trying to study him. I could stay quiet and calm, but he had to smell the anxiety on me.

The longer he waited in silence, the more I wanted to scream. I wanted my captors to do something, anything. Well, not anything. But I couldn’t fight darkness and a barred door. Continually throwing myself against the barriers was only going to make me bruised and exhausted.

I wanted to pace, just to be doing something. But I didn’t want him to know I was pacing, that the anxiety was getting to me; I didn’t want to give away anything.

Then he walked away. Just like that, without a word, without a sign.

This was some kind of test, wasn’t it?

A moment later, the drumming stopped. The silence throbbed in my ears, a memory of noise that would take hours to fade. I sank to the floor, lay down, pressed a flushed cheek to the cool stone. Only felt a faint and distant itching from the pervasive trace of silver. Pressed my arm over my head to try to still the throbbing.

So, I’d been kidnapped. Apparently for the express purpose of driving me crazy. Really, that didn’t bother me so much.

But what happened if my captors really did manage to drive me crazy—that worried me.

ANYTIME THEY approached, their footsteps began to sound like thunder. I had nothing else to listen for, so when I heard them, they broke through my muddled awareness, sending shocks along my nerves. My now-constant headache throbbed with every hint of noise. I jerked into a crouch and watched the door, glaring at it as if I could challenge it.

The woman, the were-lion who’d brought the water, returned, her steps soft and hesitating. She stopped outside the door and I clamped my mouth shut, to keep from shouting. I wanted to wait to see what she would do. As ridiculous as it seemed, given our respective situations, I didn’t want to scare her off by being belligerent. More belligerent. The bolt or latch or whatever it was on the panel clicked. The seam split open.

I bolted. Dived forward, hands out toward the gap made by the open panel, reached through and made a grab. What did I have to lose?

My hand closed on a wrist. I held tight, squeezing. The limb was solid, not particularly dainty. The muscles and tendons flexing under my touch were strong. Bracing against the doorway, I pulled, trying to drag that arm in with me.

She grunted but didn’t scream, and yanked away from my grasp; I held on. A tug-of-war ensued. Both of us braced against the door and pulled against the other.

I shouted through the door. “Please, just talk to me! What do you people want? Why are you doing this?”

My nails dug into her skin in an effort to hold on. She scrabbled, kicking against the door and the stone; her voice wheezed with her panting breath as she struggled. She was gaining on me. My reach through the door was past my elbow. My fingers cramped. The sweat breaking out on her skin made her slippery.

“Just say something, please,” I begged, my voice squeaking into a higher pitch, tightened by desperation. I just wanted one word.

She won the tug-of-war, her sweat-dampened skin sliding out of my grasp. I shouted a growl, a jagged noise containing all my frustration over the last however many hours. Or days. I kept my hand through the slot in the door, waving, grappling, my fingers hooked like claws. I must have looked like a wild animal.

I expected her to run in a panic, but I heard no footsteps. Her breath came in pants. She was still here, out of reach, watching me. I took a deeper breath and settled, stilling my voice, my body. But I kept my arm outstretched, reaching toward the outside with some kind of hope.

We might have stayed like that for long minutes. I didn’t dare pull my arm back in, no matter that she could have stabbed it or cut it off or anything while I held it out to her. This was the farthest I’d gotten in trying to get out of this hole they’d trapped me in. As soon as I pulled my arm back, she’d close the panel over the opening, and I’d be stuck again. I just wanted to hear a word, a single word, a shout or a curse, anything. I didn’t want to be the inhuman thing in a cage, not even worth a shred of sunlight. If she would just talk to me …

Something touched my fingers. I lay as close to the floor as I could, pressing up to the opening trying to see out of it and into the darkness. I couldn’t see her, only her arm, edging into my vision as she nudged an object into my hand. Instinctively, I clutched at it. Plastic crinkled. A cellophane wrapper. At least it wasn’t a grenade. I’d kind of wondered. I took a deep breath, trying to smell it—food, it smelled like food. All this struggle over feeding time. Could this get any more ridiculous?

She ducked away, out of my line of sight, and waited. The impasse was well and truly complete—I didn’t want to pull my hand in, because she would close the panel. But I wanted to see what she’d given me. She clearly wasn’t going to say anything. Since she didn’t so much as swear at me when I was clawing at her arm, she wasn’t going to speak now. Even with the panel open, I couldn’t escape. She could walk away, and I’d still be here, sprawled out on the floor, choking on dusty air, sweaty, chilled, exhausted.

I didn’t want to give up. Pulling my hand inside felt like giving up. So did continuing to lie here, exposed and helpless.

“Why won’t you people just talk to me?” I didn’t like the way my voice came out rough, like a growl.

Nothing. Something—fear, power, purpose, whatever—was driving her patience. Me, I wanted to pace, faster and faster, until I could wear a hole in the stone and maybe escape that way. Wasn’t going to happen, but that didn’t stop the restless burning in my muscles. If I couldn’t pace, I wanted to punch something. If I couldn’t punch something, I wanted to scream. I wanted to do them all at once. Any of that would show them I was weak, so I didn’t. Instead, I gave up. Just this battle.

I pulled my hand back inside.

The plastic-wrapped object she’d given me was a sandwich. The prewrapped deli kind from the supermarket. It even had a label that I couldn’t quite make out in the dark. Shit, these people probably shopped at Safeway. Pulling back the packaging, I got a better smell of it—turkey and swiss on whole wheat. All that for a cheap fucking deli sandwich.

A thump and a click, and my “visitor” closed and latched the panel back in place. I was shut in, again. As bids for freedom went, this one had been awfully lame.

I rubbed a hand over my face as tears fell. Just a few, burning on my cheeks. My next breath shuddered. Then I was calm again. I held it together, somehow.

Bringing my hand to my face, I smelled her feline scent. Sensing deeper than that, I tried to find the person underneath. Female, with the ripe undertone of someone living in close quarters for a long time. She wasn’t filthy, but she was probably longing for a shower. Sweat, mustiness. A jumbled scent of others, male and female. The wolf I’d smelled before, the chill of the vampire I thought I’d sensed. Whoever they were, they’d been together long enough for their scents to blend, as if they’d become a pack. An eclectic pack, but still.

Her scent reminded me of the werewolf army veterans I’d met, when they were at their worst: beaten down by trauma, at the edge of giving up. This group had been on some kind of campaign for a long time, and they were tired. But they must have also been incredibly determined, to go through all this. To capture me, to keep me here.

I didn’t smell Tom on her. The only werewolves I smelled on her were me and the male we’d scented in the forest. I let myself believe that they hadn’t captured Tom as well. That gave me hope.

One of my nails had a fleck of blood underneath it; I’d broken her skin. Despite being lycanthropes, my captors must not have been too worried about all the silver in the environment. Or maybe they were. Maybe she’d rushed off to get a bandage. Not that it mattered; a wound that small would have healed already.

I set the sandwich aside with the bottle of water. After a day without food I should have been starving. Mostly, though, I was numb. I couldn’t feel anything at all.