Page 39 of Misfit Monsters (Pack of Outcasts #1)

Periwinkle

W e slip into the shadows before we enter the clearing. A tang of anxiety follows me from where we’ve left Jonah braced in the van.

Raze, Mirage, Hail, and I slink through the patches of darkness amid the grass and weeds. The trap door may be shut, but that doesn’t pose any problem to us. A thin shadow seeps between the door’s edge and the frame that holds it.

Raze’s voice sounds slightly muffled in our current state, but I can still make out a hint of a growl. “I’m going in first. If we need to take him down, I should be ready.”

A quiver of fear passes through me, but I don’t argue. It’s not as if I’d be much help if it comes to a fight.

Mirage’s buoyant presence sidles closer to me. “Are you all right, Rainbow? Not too many blasty feelings welling up? ”

Despite the fact that I’m about to come as close to my former captor as I have since I fled his basement, I feel strangely calm. Maybe because this time I’m prepared. I’m making the choice to approach him rather than being taken by surprise.

The new Periwinkle, girlboss version.

“I think I’ll be okay,” I say. “But if I start feeling overwhelmed, I’ll get away from all of you before I have an outburst.”

Hail lets out a cool chuckle. “Or you could point it all at the asshole. He’d deserve it.”

I guess he would. Still, the thought of purposefully battering my old captor with the full force of my powers when he’s technically minding his own business makes me queasy.

Before, I did it because I had to aim all that energy somewhere. I had to protect my friends. But I’ve hurt so many people in the past because of this man.

I want to be something different than the weapon he turned me into.

I helped get us to his secret lair. That means I contributed to the mission without needing to cause anyone pain, doesn’t it?

Raze darts into the tiny gap. The rest of us follow side by side.

We emerge into a garishly lit room that has me cringing in the sliver of darkness along the trap door.

The artificial illumination blazes from the walls on one side of the space, where searing lamps are pointed at dozens of barred cages.

The metal structures emit even more light from their floors and ceilings.

Within all that glare, knots of filmy darkness wriggle: shadowkind who’ve been captured and restrained, kept far from any shadows they might leap into if the sorcerer’s control fades.

My entire being winces. I jerk my attention away from that area to take in the rest of the room.

The other end appears to be David Blaver’s main workspace.

Three corkboards hang on the walls, one pinned with photographs and newspaper clippings, another with sketches and handwritten notes, and the third with a large map.

On the floor between them stands a desk.

A storage cabinet and a table holding a camp stove are set up in the middle, a folding cot propped nearby.

The sorcerer himself is nowhere to be seen.

In the corner of the room near the desk, there’s another trap door, larger than the one we came through. It’s open, showing mostly darkness below.

“The basement has a basement,” Mirage says in a singsong tone.

A rustling sound emerges from it, suggesting the sorcerer went down there. The only human-like thing in view is a headless, armless sewing dummy poised next to one of the corkboards for some purpose I can’t guess.

“What’s he got stuck all over the walls?” Raze mutters.

I can’t make out the details from here, but shadows dapple the wall behind the ladder below our perch and the floor beneath the furnishings on the side away from the cages. I nudge my companions. “Let’s go down and take a closer look.”

I flit through the narrow bands of darkness and into the larger splotches offered by the table and desk. Tucking myself in a shadow next to a pencil holder, I study the corkboards up close.

The photographs and articles seem to be clustered into groups, each around a specific person. Some have jagged words scrawled on them in marker, like brAINWASHING MENACE and RIGHTS GOUGER , whatever that’s supposed to mean.

I sense my companions’ presences gathering around me in the shadows.

“Those must be the people he’s targeting,” I say.

“He’s fixating on a whole crowd. There’d always be people he decided were making his life difficult on purpose, that he wanted the beings he was controlling to get rid of.

He didn’t use to say—or write—stuff like that, though. ”

Hail’s tone is disdainful. “It looks like conspiracy theory craziness. Humans make up all kinds of insanity even though they can’t handle the actual strangeness in the world.”

My former captor was a little unhinged to begin with. Has he spiraled even farther into vengeful delusion?

Please let Gracie have gotten away from him all right.

I shift my attention to the next board. The drawings tacked to it remind me of some of the warped creatures we’ve stumbled on—mismatched features, arrows that maybe show them shifting from one awkward form to another.

The erratic notes are difficult to read even from here, but the bits I can decipher record the writer’s observations of the creatures’ characteristics and behavior.

It looks like he was trying to figure them out too.

So he could make better use of them rather than so he could protect people from them, of course.

Some of them are dated. Raze grunts. “He’s been keeping track of them for almost a year now.”

“And keeping track of the rift too, I think,” Mirage pipes up, adjusting his position to peer toward the map.

As I study it alongside him, I decide he’s right. The map looks a lot like the image I’ve seen on Jonah’s phone when he stops to navigate, showing the area we’ve been driving around in. It’s marked with at least fifteen red push-pins—different locations the rift has galivanted to, maybe ?

I frown. “I don’t see any pattern. Maybe Rollick would be able to find one.”

Hail’s presence twitches. “If we can get it to him.”

He’s barely finished speaking when the stout, pasty man climbs out of the lower cellar into the room.

Even though I knew my former captor was down here, my essence clenches up at the sight of him so nearby. Closer up, it’s clear his skin has gone blotchy, his graying hair patchy, as if he isn’t eating all that well.

He’s obviously not preparing haute cuisine in this remote place. Is he even getting enough sunlight? I think he might be wilting like a plucked flower.

Possibly his mind as much as his body, because as he walks over to the corkboards with a stiff gait, he starts muttering. “It all stinks, Sam. Every one of them. We have to pelt them all with justice.”

It’s only when he pats the sewing dummy on its armless shoulder that I realize who he’s talking to. Or rather, what.

How does he think it’s listening to him when it doesn’t even have a head to put ears on?

There’s unhinged and then there’s whatever this is. All hinges have departed the area.

The sorcerer stares at the pictures I assume are his current targets, tapping his lips. Disgust and anger roll off him in a noxiously bitter sludge I can’t in good conscience call soup.

“What do you think, Sam?” he asks the dummy. “Stomp on him first? Or her, who’s always flinging her eyes around?”

Who’s doing what now?

I can’t help stating the obvious—at a murmur, as if there’s any chance of the sorcerer overhearing me. “He definitely doesn’t like those people.”

Hail snorts, similarly subdued. “No fucking kidding. Somehow I don’t think they’d like him either.”

While David Blaver glowers at his photographs and carries on his one-sided debate with the fabric torso who’s apparently his only friend, I slink away to the opening to the deeper cellar. At a peek into the dim space below, a flinch ripples through my essence. “Oh, no.”

The men shoot over to join me. Mirage’s voice roughens. “That’s not fair play.”

A vaguely human figure slumps against the wall beyond the opening. Vaguely because there’s little left but bones stuck with shreds of fabric and scraps of flesh. Intestines loop around the knobby spine in a gruesome belt.

A patch of face remains—a tuft of short white hair, an eyeless socket, a jutting nose. Enough for me to guess the victim was male.

Next to me, Raze’s presence shudders. “I think we found Ted McGaffery.”

He might be right. Did the sorcerer decide Ted was talking about his “monsters” too much and toss him down there as punishment? Was it a sick experiment to see what those monsters would do when egged on?

On second thought, I’ll skip the answers, thank you.

In the upper room, David Blaver is shuffling toward the side with the cages. I slip back beneath the table to watch.

He picks up a thin metal rod and slides it back and forth across his palm as he paces in front of the cages. After a few rounds, he stops by one. He says something in the sorcerous language and turns down a control on that cage to dim its lights.

A beast like a reptilian raccoon materializes from its cringing mass of shadow. It stares through the bars at its captor, jagged scales lifting and ruffling across its back.

The sorcerer thrusts the rod into the cage. With a flare of sparks, the creature jerks and spasms as if it’s being electrocuted. A thin shriek pierces the air.

A jolt of horror zaps through me in turn. Raze lets out a snarl, his presence twisting. Hail gives a hiss of revulsion, and Mirage simply whimpers.

I don’t know which of our reactions my former captor picks up on. Maybe it’s all of us at once. My only warning is a spurt of startled panic before he whirls around, already shouting out sorcerous orders.

This time, he doesn’t take any chances being tentative. This time, he hurls his magic at us with a punch of force that shakes the hold of Jonah’s command in my head.

I hurl myself away, as if I can flee his compulsion just by moving. My mind wobbles, grappling with the instruction to show myself. The sorcerous demand clashes with Jonah’s insistence that I refuse all other orders, but the hold of that earlier command is crumbling.

Mirage and Hail waver into physical form, their faces taut with anguish. Panic flashes across the sorcerer’s face as he shouts more commands at them.

One of his yells must hit Raze too, because the basilisk shifter jerks into the physical world with a rasp of breath. Every muscle in his sinewy body strains against his skin as if he’s fighting to escape his very body.

The sorcerer’s commands must be stopping him—stopping all of them—from using their powers. But whether because I’ve fought against his magic before or because my presence was the smallest and least noticeable of the bunch, I’m still holding on to some small shred of control, hidden in the dark.

That control is slipping through my grasp. Even if my former captor doesn’t hurl any more sorcery at me, in a matter of seconds I’ll be popping into view too.

Frustration and terror blare through my mind. The caustic flavor of those emotions surges into a rising wave.

No. This isn’t how I wanted this to go .

What if my power isn’t even enough? What if he catches deeper hold of me too quickly?

I just want everyone to be happy .

But even as that thought passes through my head, a more potent realization hits me, all the way down to the center of whatever soul I have.

I can’t always make everyone happy. Sometimes I can’t make anyone happy at all, and that’s just the way it is, because there’s already too much awfulness being spread around.

So maybe the best I can do in those moments is to stop the villain who’s stealing everyone else’s joy. Bring back the possibility of happiness, whatever it takes.

I can do that. I can shatter the crimes this awful man is committing and give all his captured creatures the chance they deserve.

With a swell of conviction, I propel the churning energy inside me toward the other side of the room as hard as I can.

The dark wave roars over my companions and my former captor, but that’s not where I was aiming the main force of the impact. The fiercest currents smack into all those burning lights inside and around the cages.

In an instant, every bit of illumination except the single lamp poised over the corkboards blinks out.

The imprisoned creatures spring through the bars in a whirl of energy. The sorcerer was already stumbling, skin scalded by my sudden flare. The onslaught of shadowkind hurtles into him, knocking him right off his feet.

Scrambling up, he teeters left and right. His hands catch hold of the bottom rungs of the ladder. He starts to haul himself upright—outside, to escape.

No. No. No . I’m not going to let this man deal out even more pain .

Another spurt of caustic energy flares in my chest, and I throw it at his hands.

His fingers spasm apart, and the flood of shadowkind flings him onward. With flashes of fangs and glints of spikes and spines, the deluge of hissing, screeching beasts in their muddle of ephemeral and physical form pummels him across the room.

“Sam!” he hollers, groping toward the dummy, apparently forgetting that his friend doesn’t have arms any more than it does ears.

The deluge of shadowy creatures heaves him again, and he topples right over the edge of the cellar door.

David Blaver tumbles through the opening headfirst. A crack reverberates from the concrete floor below, vivid enough to send an image of a skull cracked open like an eggshell flashing through my mind.

As the jumbled creatures whirl on around the room as if unsure of where to go next, I pull myself out of the shadows at the edge of the trap door. Peering down, I make out my former captor’s crumpled body.

His neck is twisted at an unnatural angle. A puddle of blood expands beneath his head like crimson yolk.

A breath rushes out of me, with a flutter of sickly relief I won’t feel guilty about.

Three figures draw up around me. Raze sets his hand on my back.

“He’s gone,” the basilisk shifter says gruffly.

The sorcerer’s commands died with him.

I grasp Raze’s arm and tuck myself into the embrace he offers.

Mirage spins around in a giddy circle. “And now everything he’s found is ours! We’ll make much better use of it. Thanks to our Periwinkle. ”

The fox shifter beams at me and dips his head to give me a quick peck.

When Mirage pulls away, Hail is watching the three of us with a bemused expression.

“Thank you, Cream Puff,” he says in a mild voice that makes the phrase sound more like a fond nickname than an insult. “Come on. Let’s tell our sorcerer how you saved the day.”