Page 7 of Caution to the Wind

After all of that, I’d found her.

And immediately, it was clear…

I was too late.

MEI

The roomI’d fallen into was designed to look like a dungeon.

Wallpaper made the walls look like stone, and a single window with iron bars was high enough to make it look like we were mostly below ground. Torture equipment hung from racks—axes, spears, huge shears, and multitudes of knives.

But some of it, I thought, was already in use.

Because Kate Axelsen, a woman who had been like a mother to me for most of my life, hung suspended from iron chains in the middle of the room. A prone form just behind her lay crumpled, and I’d realize later that it was the actress who had been paid to play the role someone had forced Kate into in real life.

She swayed like some macabre ornament, her face a mask of horror as she laid eyes on me in the dim light.

“Mei, no––” She started to moan, but the words cut off with a whimper as men appeared around the room, stepping in from hidden doors that swung out of the walls.

The seven men were dressed like anyone else at the carnival, Stetsons in an array of colours, cowboy boots, and denim. The shadows obscured their faces, but then my gaze was distracted by the long, curved blades each of them held in one hand.

“No, no,” Kate begged, sobbing so hoarsely she gagged. “Please, not here. My daughter is out there. A-and not in front of a child. Please!”

They didn’t seem to hear her.

One of them detached from the circle and stalked over to me, boots clicking. I tried to stand, only to realize that something bad had happened to my right foot, and it wouldn’t hold my weight. I collapsed to the ground, but didn’t let that stop me from getting to Kate. As if somehow, I could disarm those men and save her. I rolled to my knees and crawled with one hand along the packed earth floor toward her even though my body screamed in agony.

When the armed man reached me, his booted foot swiftly reared back and kicked me right in the face. The force snapped my head back, spit and blood flying, pain so bright I almost didn’t feel it explode through my skull.

My vision shifted in and out, but I was vaguely aware the man looming over me pinned me to the ground with the tip of the blade digging between my shoulder blades and his other foot pressing my hand to the ground. My broken finger throbbed, my foot ached, my brain wheeled madly, and the bone shooting out of my arm dug excruciatingly into the dirty floor.

But none of that mattered as I struggled to stay conscious.

Because the men had started to move in a strange kind of dance.

First one slid across the ground, almost weightless he was so graceful, and arched the blade through the air at a sobbing Kate. He struck her so quickly, I couldn’t map where the blow landed until a red line opened up across her torso, cutting through her blouse into her chest. It was shallow, but long and deep enough to bleed.

Then a second man did the same.

Each time they struck her, she cried out with less force.

A scream, a shout, a sob, a whimper.

And finally, when the fifth man sliced her open from stem to stern, only a faint, fragilehiss.

It was that sound that urged me to gather the last of my strength. I didn’t waste it fighting off any of the men who were certainly older and stronger than me.

I used it to scream.

Louder than Kate had.

More fiercely than I had ever done anything in my life, I gathered air into my lungs, tensed my belly, andbellowedfor help.

It didn’t last long.

After three seconds of shock, the man above me delivered a swift kick to my temple, and I passed into cold, dark relief.

When I opened my eyes again, panic already surged through me. I scrambled to my knees, already crawling toward Kate again before I was conscious I was doing it. Tears dripped from my eyes, and my body howled with pain, but all I could think wasKate, Kate, Kate.