Jaxon, telling me to run, trying to protect me even when he’s drugged out of his mind.

It’s enough to have me rolling over, enough to have me trying to crawl to him even though I don’t have the strength anymore to push up to my knees.

“Jaxon,” I call, but his name comes out so slurred I can barely understand it. Still, I try again. And again. Because the voice inside me is screaming that if Jaxon knows I’m in trouble, he’ll move heaven and earth to get to me. Even if it involves waking up from a stealth-tranquilizer-gun attack.

Lia must know it, too, because she hisses, “Stop it,” as she towers over me.

Which only makes me try harder. “Jaxon,” I call again. This time, it’s little more than a whisper, my voice failing as everything else does, too.

“I didn’t want to do this the hard way,” Lia says, raising the tranquilizer gun and aiming it straight at me. “When you wake up feeling like a herd of elephants is running through your head, remember you’re the one who chose this.”

And then she pulls the trigger.

   57

Double, Double,

Toil and a

Whole Lot of Trouble

I wake up shivering. I’m cold…so cold that my teeth are chattering and everything—I mean everything—hurts. My head worst of all, but the rest of me is almost as bad. Every muscle in my body feels like it’s being stretched on a rack, and my bones ache deep inside. Worse, I can barely breathe.

I’m awake enough to know something is wrong—like really wrong—but not quite awake enough to remember what it is. I want to move, want to at least pull the blanket from my bed up and over me, but the voice deep inside me is back. And it’s ordering me to lie still. Ordering me not to move, not to open my eyes, not to even breathe too deeply.

Which won’t be a problem considering I feel like a fifty-pound weight is crushing my chest—kind of like how I felt when I was fourteen and got pneumonia, only a million times worse.

I want to disregard the voice, want to roll over and find a way to get warm again. But flashes of memory are starting to come back, and they scare me into lying very, very still.

Jaxon, with hellfire burning in his eyes, shouting for me to run.

Lia brandishing a gun.

Jaxon falling over, passing out.

Lia screaming at me that everything is all my fault right before she—

Oh my God! She shot Jaxon! OmigodOmigodOmigod.

Panic slams through me, and my eyes fly open before I can think better of it. I try to sit up, determined to get to him, but I can’t move. I can’t sit up. I can’t roll over. I can’t do anything but wiggle my fingers and toes and move my head a little, though I’m still not coherent enough to figure out why.

At least not until I turn my head and see my right arm stretched out to the side and tied into an iron ring. A quick glance to the other side shows my left arm in the same predicament.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that my legs are tied down, too, and as more of the fogginess fades, I realize that I’m spread-eagled on top of some kind of cold stone slab. And I’m wearing nothing but a thin cotton sheath, which, honestly, is just adding insult to already egregious injury.

I mean, she drugged me, shot me, and tied me up. She has to freeze me as well?

As my memories come flooding back, adrenaline surges through my system. I try to tamp it down, try to think around the sick panic winding its way through me. But with the cold and the drugs and the adrenaline, clear thinking isn’t exactly easy right now.

Still, I have to figure out what happened to Jaxon. I have to know if he’s alive or if she killed him. She said she wasn’t going to, but it’s kind of hard to trust anything she says considering her original invite for tonight was for mani-pedis and look where I am now.

Just the thought of something happening to Jaxon has emptiness yawning inside of me. Has my panic turning to terror. I have to get to him. I have to figure out what happened. I have to do something.

For the first time since coming to Katmere Academy, I wish I had some supernatural powers of my own. Namely the power to break through rope. Or teleport. Hell, I’d even take a shadow of Jaxon’s telekinesis at this point—something, anything that might possibly get me untied and off this horrible rock.

I shake my head a little, struggle to clear the light-headed, packed-with-cotton feeling that’s going on in there. And try to figure out how the hell I’m supposed to get these ropes off me before Lia comes back from whatever level of hell she’s currently visiting.

Wherever I am, it’s dark. Not pitch black, obviously, because I can see my hands and feet and a little beyond where I’m lying. But that’s it. Only about four feet past my hands and feet in every direction, but after that it’s really dark. Like really, really dark.

Which isn’t terrifying at all considering I’m in the middle of a school filled with things that go bump in the night. Lucky, lucky me.

I think about screaming, but the chill in the air tells me I’m not actually inside the main school anymore. Which means there probably isn’t anyone around to hear me—except Lia, and I definitely don’t want to attract her attention one second sooner than she wants to give it to me.

So, I do the only thing possible in this situation. Strain against the ropes as hard as I can. I mean, I know I’m not going to be able to break free from them, but rope stretches if you pull on it long and hard enough. If I can just get some wiggle room around one of my wrists, I can slip my hand through, and I’ll at least have a fighting chance.

Okay, maybe not a fighting chance. More like a teeny tiny chance. But at this point, I’m not exactly complaining. Any chance, no matter how small, is better than just lying here, waiting to die.

Or worse.

I don’t know how long I tug and strain against the ropes, but it feels like a lifetime. It’s probably more like eight to ten minutes, but terrified and alone in the dark, it feels like so many more.

I try to concentrate on what I’m doing, try to put all my focus into escaping and nothing else. But it’s hard when I don’t know where Jaxon is, when I don’t know what’s happened to him or if he’s even alive. Then again, if I don’t get out of here, I’ll never know.

It’s that thought that has me pulling harder, twisting back and forth with more determination than ever. My wrists hurt now—big surprise—the rubbing back and forth against the ropes chafing them raw. Since I can’t do anything about the pain, I ignore it and twist faster even as I strain to hear any sound that might indicate Lia is coming back.

For now I don’t hear anything but the rasp of my wrists against the ropes, but who knows how long that will last.