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My nostrils flared as though someone had put smelling salts underneath them. A rancid stench drifted in on swarming shadows, creeping through my semi-conscious confusion. The gut-churning reek of rotting fish—and not just slightly on the turn, but fully festering, eye-watering decomposition—like opening a can of fermented sardines that were ten years past their sell-by date. Beneath the smell, I could make out the earthy decay of moldering wood and the sharper tang of rust.

Is this one of Leviathan’s dreams?I had no idea where I was, or how I’d gotten here. My eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the gloom. But both the darkness and the claustrophobic sensation in my chest were definitely his MO. I didn’t think he smelled this overwhelmingly foul, but then I’d never encountered his true, physical self without a pane of glass between us. I blinked frantically, as if that would help my vision clear, and I waited for his familiar voice to speak and let me know this wasn’t real.

After a few moments had passed and Leviathan still hadn’t made himself known, and my eyes were still struggling to acclimate, I resorted to one of my other senses: touch. My hands were bound behind my back and I seemed to have been chucked onto the ground, which explained the dull throb in my shoulders, wrenched backward to keep my hands together. I unfurled my hands and reached out gingerly with my fingers, skimming across a cool, hard floor, and retched as a viscous jelly slid wetly over my skin. Gelatinous and cold and stinking.

Where am I? Leviathan was a master for detail, but this no longer felt like his handiwork—he wouldn’t have used restraints. I tried to wipe the slime away, but only ended up smearing more of it over my hands. A spark of hope came to me, only to sputter out when I remembered I hadn’t brought my phone on my jogging expedition, so it wasn’t as though I could call for help.

“H-hello?” I called into the murk. Not my brightest idea, but now I understood why victims in horror movies always said that when they entered a dark, creepy house. It was human instinct, desperation to hear someone’s voice call back and say that everything was okay. But no one answered.

I scrunched up my eyes and thought back to the last thing I could remember. There was the lookout point and the low, terrifying growl. A set of burning red eyes. A strange heat. And then I woke up here. Could it be a djinn? Most of them were living a happy, independent existence in Erebus’s former otherworld, Tartarus. But Raffe and Kadar knew of some who’d broken away from that realm and returned to our world to find a different sort of freedom. Maybe this was one of them? But why would they have targeted me? Did they have an axe to grind with Raffe and Kadar, and planned to use me as leverage? It didn’t make a lot of sense since Raffe and Santana had their own children who would’ve made for better targets, but perhaps the Levi-Catemaco kids had been harder to snatch.

Opening my eyes again, I began to make out vague shapes in my surroundings as I adjusted to the darkness. Slices of faint light shone through broken slats on the far side of wherever I was, revealing looming shapes that could’ve been mechanical… or could’ve been human. Fear gripped my throat in an icy hand as I waited for the shadows to move, for something horror-movie-esque to happen. The steady drip drip of water splashing onto the slimy floor. The wet, cold, awful feeling of this place. I guessed I was in a warehouse of some kind. An old one, probably a fishery that had been abandoned a long time ago, if the stench was anything to go by. This kind of location was used for one reason, and one reason alone—to make people disappear.

“Hello?” I shouted again, trying to smother my terror. Maybe it would bring help.

Or maybe it would bring my abductor back.

I tried to shuffle my hands underneath me so they weren’t trapped behind my back, but my stiff limbs wouldn’t allow it. It was only then that I felt a familiar sensation: a faint bristle like an electric shock, tickling up my arms. I’d felt the same thing when Victoria’s hunters had clapped me in Atomic Cuffs.

A djinn wouldn’t use these on me… I wasn’t even sure a djinn could use them. And if they knew who I was, then they would’ve known that Atomic Cuffs were useless on me. I had no abilities to inhibit, aside from Purging. And I wasn’t sure if they’d be able to stop a Purge.

The pixies! With my head all foggy, I’d forgotten they’d been with me at the lookout point. “Boudicca?” I whispered. “Cynane, Spartacus? Are you here?”

None of their squeaks or chirps echoed back. Only that persistent drip drip and the faint clang of metal somewhere in the near distance. Wherever I was, and whoever had taken me, they’d left the pixies behind. A rock of dread sank in my stomach. The pixies were my best line of defense. Without them, I was completely at the mercy of my abductor. Even Leviathan didn’t seem to be showing up to give me a telepathic hand, though I was pretty sure this counted as heightened emotion. Perhaps he was choosing to ignore me because I’d thought this was his trickery, or maybe his last visit inside my box dream memory really had taken a lot out of him.

“Are you a djinn?” I yelled, my voice bouncing back. I wanted to be sure, in case I was wrong about the cuff thing. According to Marcel, in a fight for your life, it was best to get the upper hand as quickly as possible. “If you are, you’ve got the wrong person! But I know you like deals—we can strike one, if you show yourself!”

I froze at the sound of footsteps. The acoustics made it impossible to tell which direction they were coming from. Any moving shadow could have belonged to my attacker. I shuffled backward, trying to make myself as small as possible, even though it went against everything Hosseini had taught us during hunting classes. The trick was to make yourself as big and intimidating as possible, but right now my instinct was to hide, no matter how futile the attempt might be.

A bitter laugh cut through the fishy air. “A djinn, eh?”

Hmm… The voice was deep and masculine, with a distinct Irish accent. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a djinn; I could be dealing with a Kadar-Raffe-esque shared body scenario.

“Are you cursed?” I battled to keep my words steady. “I can’t undo any djinn curses, so if you’re thinking I can help you, you’re wrong. Only the djinn can undo djinn curses.” A curse was all I could think of to explain the red eyes, the heat, the petrifying growl. It fell cleanly into djinn territory, and my mental monster compendium couldn’t come up with anything else. Unless he was another kind of monster entirely.

I heard a switch flick, and an anemic lightbulb blinked into existence. Stepping precisely into his sickly spotlight, my kidnapper finally revealed himself. He was standing much closer than I’d expected him to be, not more than two yards away, and dressed all in black. Towering well over six feet, he had the broad V-shape of a swimmer, all wide shoulders, toned arms, and lean waist. He probably hadn’t even broken a sweat when he’d carried me away. My abductor was a young man in his early twenties, I guessed, with a full head of tousled black curls and hard, dark eyes that glared at me. The rest of his face was obscured by a bandana that covered his nose and mouth.

“Why do ye keep harpin’ on about these djinn? Do I look like a djinn te ye?” His glare intensified.

I gulped. “I saw r-red eyes.”

“Aye, well I ain’t no djinn,” he spat the words and strode forward. I wriggled backward to try and escape. He could crush my skull in his large hands if he wanted to, and I had no idea what abilities he might be hiding. “But ye seem te know an awful lot about curses, and yer goin’ te tell me who put this one on me.”

I paused in my helpless getaway. “So… you are cursed?”

“As if ye don’t already know.” He knelt down, getting in my face. “I know yer sort. Ye have te know who did this te me. All ye witches, yer all know each other, so don’t even pretend ye don’t.”

“W-witches?” I stammered, my mind a blur of terror and confusion. In the magical world, “witch” was a derogatory term. The same went for “warlock” and “wizard.” Even “sorcerer” and “sorceress” were considered archaic.

His eyes narrowed to reptilian slits. “Yer goin’ te pretend ye don’t know what they are now, are ye? Yer goin’ te barefaced lie te me, when I know yer one of them?” He lifted his hand to my face as if he was going to punch me. I flinched, my eyes snapping shut. But the blow didn’t come. Instead, I felt something soft being draped around my shoulders. Startled, I opened my eyes to find that he’d covered me in a woolen blanket. “Don’t look at me like that, witch. I don’t want ye dyin’ of hypothermia before I’ve got this curse lifted.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” I blurted out, confused by the thoughtful gesture.

“What?” he barked.

“Witch.”

He pulled back, snorting under the bandana. “‘Cause that’s what yer are.”

He’s not a magical… Understanding dawned. No magical would call another by that term. I’d thought he was trying to insult me before, but now I could tell he didn’t know any better. He thought that was the right word. But if he wasn’t a magical, then how the heck had he known that magicals even existed? Or gotten hold of Atomic Cuffs? And why had he chosen me to help him with his curse? He clearly didn’t know as much as he thought.

“Where did you get these Cuffs?” I asked him outright, trying to turn my fear into courage.

He snickered. “Ain’t no business o’ yours. I’m the one askin’ the questions. So, start squawking—who put this curse on me, and how are ye goin’ te remove it?”

“I don’t know what curse you’re talking about!” I shot back, hoping it didn’t get me a smack in the face or worse.

“I think ye do, since this all started with ye.” The man grabbed my hoodie drawstrings and pulled, jolting me forward. “I didn’t have no problems before ye arrived at that secret witch place. I’ve been watchin’ it for a while as part of me duties, then—bam!—I’m turning into a growling, smoky beast like I’m a were-something, only it don’t give a damn whether there’s a full moon or not.”

Panic jangled in my veins. “You know about our… hideaway?” I didn’t want to call it the Institute in case I gave something valuable away, but if he’d been watching us, then it stood to reason that he already had a decent idea what it was.

“Yer Institute, aye.” He pulled harder on the drawstrings, puckering the hood. Given the flicker of pure rage in his eyes, the action proved as menacing as a hand around my throat. “My people wouldn’t let me get te the root of this curse thing, but here I am, showing I can handle it, despite what me da might have te say.”

There were too many missing pieces for me to properly keep up. This guy clearly had some father issues, but there was more to the picture. He’d mentioned duties and dealing with an unknown curse, and he definitely knew a fair bit about the Institute. How much had he seen of what went on there?

“Who are your people? Who do you work for?” I mustered some bravery, trying to ignore his searing eyes and harsh tone.

“That ain’t none of your business, either,” he retorted sharply. “Though it’s kinda funny how ye all think yer so high and mighty, but ye don’t even know when yer bein’ watched. But that ain’t the point. I were assigned te watch ye, then I started turning into that… thing as soon as ye came to the Institute. So, who did it, eh? Who did this te me? Seems like it were ye, since it all began with ye.”

“You were assigned to watch me?” The words hissed between my teeth. If he’d been observing me from afar, did this have something to do with my lineage? Did the people he worked for want to harm me in some way because I was a Merlin? If a handful of humans had found out about the existence of magicals, my surname would’ve come up as a big hitter on the list of power players. They’d just missed out on the fact that I was the family dud.

His eyes widened, as though he hadn’t meant to tell me that. “Stop trying te distract me, ‘cause it won’t work.” He let go of the drawstrings of my hoodie and picked up a fairly blunt-looking knife, which he’d taken off a plate of food just within my reach. I didn’t know if the food was his or if he’d left it there for me, but I imagined he could do a lot of damage with that bit of cutlery, blunt or not. If he tried to stab me, I had no way of defending myself. He turned the blade over in his palm and peered at me intently. “Give me intel, now, or ye’ll regret it. How do I break this curse, eh? If ye did this te me, ye’ll know how to stop it.”

“How can I know that?” I watched the blade closely, hoping I could duck out of the way if he lunged. Maybe, if he threw himself off balance, I could ram into him and try to stagger to my escape. But how far could I really get with my legs in a dead state of numbness and my arms bound behind my back? “For one, I didn’t do anything to you. I don’t even know who you are. Secondly, you haven’t even said what the curse is.”

He tapped the blade to his concealed chin. “Yer the witch, ye should know what it is. It turns me into some monster-thing, with them red eyes. Someone called me a ‘fear dog’ once but I don’t know if it means aught. Anyway, it gets folks all riled up with fear that makes them lose their minds, and it’s got te stop, ‘cause it’s makin’ other people sick. My people.” His forehead furrowed, and a glint of sadness overwhelmed the anger in his eyes. It was becoming clear that this guy had kidnapped me out of sheer desperation, and perhaps that was an angle I could work. I just had to calm him down a bit.

“Do you mean a ‘Fear Dearg’?” I had heard of those, though they hadn’t come into my dreams for a decade or so. The memory of the creatures stirred vaguely in my mind—the flaming red eyes, smoky bodies of black and red mist, snarling jaws. Even being a few feet away from a Fear Dearg plunged a person into an immobilizing grip of despair and terror, like the dream had done to childhood me.

He raised an eyebrow. “Aye, maybe that were it. Fear Dearg.”

“And you say you keep turning into one?”

“Are yer ears bunged up or somethin’? Aye, that’s what I’ve been sayin’ over and over!” he snapped, sounding exasperated. “I’m not goin’ te let it hurt my people. I didn’t ask for this, and one of your lot slapped it on me. So, yer going te fix it or I’m goin’ te do te ye what we used te do te witches back in the day!” He slipped a hand in his pocket and took out a lighter, sending my nerves into panicked overdrive. He clearly intended to burn me at the stake, and I had no idea how I was going to get myself out of this mess. I couldn’t fix it for him. If he’d wanted a powerful Merlin to help him, he’d gone for the worst possible choice.

You really needed to do more research, whoever you are. But I sensed he wouldn’t listen to a word I said if I tried to tell him that I was a magical dud. He wanted this curse off him, and he was willing to do anything to get the antidote for whatever it was doing to his people. Whoever his people were.

He clicked the lighter and the flame erupted, the yellow glow reflected in his dark eyes. The second he found out I was of no use to him, I’d be toast. And this rotting, abandoned fishery would be the last thing I saw before he made me disappear.