Page 49 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

An array of vials and chemicals were spread out across the shelves, but her hands wouldn’t stop trembling to make out what they said without giving her a headache.

As far as she knew, chemicals were used for cleaning and poisoning and, if one was a scientist like Jin’s parents, creating.

Then there were boxes filled with tubes that she first thought were pens before realizing they were stacks of dynamite.

Flick’s heart leaped to her throat. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but what did her mother need with explosives?

A thud echoed in the shadows of the storeroom. She held her breath, listening for movement, but could hear nothing over her pounding heart. Had she imagined it? She wasn’t going to wait to find out.

Flick rushed back into the hall, nearly slamming into a pair of men marching past. They gave her a strange look but didn’t stop, and she didn’t stop either, walking across the hall as though she belonged here.

The place was oddly built, sounds muffled, walls strangely thick. The ceilings were low, beams running every which way to hold everything in place. Flick didn’t think she’d ever been in a place like this.

The door at the end of the hall opened, flooding the space with sunlight. Daylight. Footsteps thudded down what seemed to be stairs.

That was her way out, once she finished her snooping.

If she lived, that was—footsteps were heading her way. Flick froze, pressing herself as flat against the new door as she could. Shadows sliced back into the hall, outlining a silhouette in the last of the light.

The Ram.

Flick held her breath, hoping the Ram had no need for the room behind her. Or was that a better option than the Ram walking back into Flick’s room and finding her gone? Flick held still, refusing to breathe, until the Ram passed her by.

Flick didn’t wait; she flung open the door and, for whatever reason, glanced back at the Ram. As if she could feel the eyes of the girl she had called daughter for the past eighteen years, she began to turn around.

Flick leaped inside the room, closing the door behind her with the quietest thud.

And immediately knew she wasn’t alone.

It wasn’t the eyes that she felt on the back of her head, or voices that made it clear she wasn’t alone, no. She felt the presence of others in an eerie, muffled sort of silence.

With a sinking feeling, Flick knew, before turning around, what she would find.

A sound lurched from her throat.

The kidnapped humans.

The space was as large as Flick had assumed from the ledger sketches, but there were no pill-shaped cylinders here. Only a cage, massive and dismal.

Full of girls and boys close to her age.

There were twelve, all alert, some rocking back and forth on the floor of the cage with their arms around their knees, others standing as straight as the cell bars. Their mouths were bound, but the room was blanketed, and Flick realized that it was to muffle any who might scream.

They stared with wary eyes, as though she wasn’t to be trusted. Of course you aren’t , she scolded herself. She was dressed as one of the Ram’s men. Flick pulled the covering from her face.

“I’m like you,” she whispered. “I was trapped in one of the other rooms.”

But I’m her daughter , she didn’t say. Because she wasn’t anymore.

One of the girls came forward. She was saying something, crying through the binding around her mouth.

Her hair was a chaotic cloud around her grimy face.

Tears were trickling down her chin. Flick rushed over and squeezed her hands between the bars, whimpering when the widest part of her hand struck the metal bar.

For a second, she saw stars, but she shook them away.

“You have to be quiet,” Flick said, and when the girl nodded with a quick glance at the door, Flick untied the rough strip of cloth.

“Thank you,” the girl croaked. “Thank you.”

“What happened to you?” Flick asked, wishing she had water, food, a way to free them. “How did you get here?”

“I—I don’t know,” the girl whispered. “I was walking home from school when a carriage stopped beside the road and men dressed like you grabbed me.”

Flick swept a glance across the others. Her heart was pounding in her ears, loud and impossible.

She could barely think, barely see, panic threatening to overtake her.

Another girl frantically gestured to her mouth, and Flick quickly undid her bindings too, her fingers faltering to the point where the first girl noticed and glanced at her sidelong.

At last, Flick ripped the binding free.

“She’s going to turn us on the night of the tribute,” the second girl cried. “Into vampires!”

Vampires? Flick took a step back, trying to understand. The others were crying, weeping through their bindings, panic spreading anew. One of the boys began thudding his head against the bars. They hadn’t known. The first girl was frozen, paler than the others.

Flick glanced at the door. She wanted to get them out of here. The exit wasn’t too far. A noise thudded from outside the door, reminding Flick that she was alone. She couldn’t free them, but she knew who could.

Jin and Arthie, when they returned.

“Get out!” the second girl shouted. “Get out before they put you in here too.”

They were trapped in a cage, hungry and parched, unable to speak, and they were looking out for her ? It only highlighted how terrible the Ram was.

Flick pulled the covering back over her face and nose. “I’ll return for you, I promise. We’ll get you out.”

She didn’t know if it was a promise she could keep, but it was one she would have wanted to hear regardless.

Several of them immediately perked, eyes widening. Heart in her throat, Flick tied the ropes back over the girls’ mouths, leaving them looser than she’d found them. She could give them that, at least. As much as Flick wanted to tear every last binding away and grant them that comfort, she didn’t.

The Ram was prepared to kill her daughter. She would kill a nuisance in a heartbeat. Flick had seen in it her cell, where she’d dropped two of her own men because of words Flick had said.

Though every part of her protested against leaving the girls and boys behind, Flick inched the door open and glanced down the hall.

“There you are.”

Flick froze.

“What were you doing?”

She stepped through and closed the door. It was the man who had stopped her by the calendar, and Flick didn’t think her luck would work a second time.

“I was checking on them,” Flick said, remembering to make her voice gruff at the last second. She didn’t know who he thought she was, or how many others there were for her to blend in with, but she decided to keep her words scarce.

“When did we ever check on ’em?” the man asked, and when Flick didn’t answer, his gaze narrowed, scrutinizing her.

“Maybe we should,” Flick said. “They’re hungry and thirsty. Can’t use them if they’re useless.”

He started to respond, but Flick didn’t hear him, for past his shoulder, she saw a terrible sight: the Ram. She was talking to someone in front of Flick’s door. Her shoulders were relaxed, her pose unbothered.

Flick forced a breath. She hadn’t discovered that Flick was missing just yet.

But she was about to: Flick saw the Ram pull a key out of her pocket, that gunmetal mask glinting gold in the light.

Flick didn’t wait. There wasn’t time to hunt for those pill-shaped objects now.

She needed to leave. She eased away from the man, picking up speed as she neared the exit.

Sweat trickled down her back. She ran her gloved thumb over the ridges of her brass knuckles to calm her racing heart. Pain shot through her arms instead.

“Oi, I asked you a question,” the man called after her, and Flick stumbled but didn’t stop.

Not until she reached the door. Then she looked back to find the Ram facing the commotion, eyes narrowed. Because Flick might have been covered from head to toe, but just as she’d instantly recognized her mother’s eyes through the mask she wore, her mother recognized Flick’s.

She saw it in the way the Ram stiffened. “Stop her!”

Flick shoved at the door, surprised by its weight, only to find it opened upward, not sideways, disorienting her as she hurried out.

The daylight blinded her, burning through her sun-starved eyes.

She struggled to see through sudden tears, and everything hit her at once—her hunger, her thirst, a gust of her pain.

Just a little farther , she pushed herself. The men shouted, the Ram’s voice snarling in the midst of the chaos. Flick ripped the cloth from her face and ran for the wrought iron gate, for freedom, her legs still weak, her head throbbing.

Until everything fell silent.

She paused and looked back. No one was chasing her anymore. Strange—was the Ram letting her go? Flick’s head hurt too much to wonder why.

Voices thrummed behind her—the Horned Guard.

There were platoons of them, patrolling the green.

Flick rushed to the cover of a tree and studied her surroundings.

Stately trees rose around her. Beneath her, neatly trimmed grass.

This was where she’d stood the night she’d been captured.

The coordinates she’d gleaned from the Ram’s sketches in the ledger were right.

She hadn’t seen the place because it was underground. A bunker. The door was set into concrete on the ground, tucked beside a short wall, dark and inconspicuous, hidden by the lush trees.

And when she turned, she saw what was on the other side of that short wall: the palace.

The very palace where the Ram was to hold her tribute to the fallen press in three days’ time. Above an underground den full of weapons, and men to do her bidding, and humans in a cage.