Page 101 of Roguefinder

So where the fuck was Jesse?

I thought about screaming for him. Opened my mouth and everything. Then I closed it. I had no idea who would answer that call, and right now the options looked grim.

I scooted on my butt to the nearest wall and leaned against it.

My skin lit up like I’d pressed my back to a stove. I jerked away with a hiss and stared at the concrete.

The silver was in the walls. Somehow, some way, Carlo had built silver into a dungeon, and I was sitting in the middle of it like a rotisserie chicken.

Pyotr Zarins’s dead, unseeing eyes surfaced in my head.

I’d killed him. He’d landed a lucky punch on Jesse, and I’d snapped his neck. So fast and easy. Like it was nothing except it wasn’t. It didn’t matter that he’d probably killed that woman from the cab. The scratches on his hands hadn’t gotten there by accident, but my brain didn’t care about any of that. It just kept serving up his eyes, open and empty, and the sharp crack of his vertebrae echoing off the river.

I drew my knees to my chest and rested my chin on them. How the fuck had he worn Ulfrik’s skin? What kind of Frankenstein shit was Carlo running down here? Because Pyotr hadn’t been a werewolf. He’d been human all the way through, sweaty and drunk and pathetic. But I’d watched him ripple like hot asphalt and turn into a dead Viking.

I pressed my forehead to my knees and breathed in my own stale sweat. A second later, I lifted my head.

Jesse wouldn’t just sit around. He’d use his senses, the same way he told me to listen for the absence of heartbeats in the theater.

I closed my eyes and cast my senses outward, feeling for scents and sounds beyond the cell.

Nothing. The silver had wrung me out. My nose might as well have been decorative. I squeezed my shins as a lump formed in my throat. The last time I’d ended up in a prison cell, I’d left with Jesse. The next time I saw him, I was going to tell him we really had to stop meeting like this. And he’d smile that slow smile that started in his eyes before it curved his mouth.

The lump tightened. Tears burned my eyes.

I scrubbed them away before they could fall. Because I wasn’t helpless. The last time somebody threw me in a cell, I hadn’t known anything about magic. Now I had a lot of it—rare shit that made every supernatural creature I encountered comment on it.

I looked at the wall.

I had to be relaxed for my gift to work. Receptive, not pushy, just like Jesse and I had practiced.

Fuck Carlo Gesualdo. I was going to see whatever there was to see, and then I was going to save my man.

I scooted closer to the wall and took deep breaths, my brain carrying me back to the time Coach Gannon hired a yoga instructor to work with the team. We’d screwed around for the first twenty minutes, making asses of ourselves until Coach screamed at us to stop being dicks and pay attention. Nobody took it seriously until the instructor kicked up into a handstand on her forearms and held it, core tight as an oil drum, and shut up sixty football players for good.

I drew on that training now, sitting criss-cross applesauce just like the yoga instructor had demonstrated. Letting my eyes drift shut, I pushed air from my lungs and pictured my worry flowing out with it.

Then I pressed my palm to the wall.

Pain sliced into my skull.

Darkness.

An ice pick buried itself between my eyes. Every instinct screamed at me to yank my hand back.

I clenched my jaw and pressed harder.

Weakness spread through me, sinking into every atom like I was a washcloth someone had wrung out and left on the side of the sink.

But it wasn’t mine. Because my body wasn’t mine. Now that I’d fallen into Jesse’s skin I knew the difference. The pain didn’t belong to me, but I sat in it, caged in someone else’s bones.

But why couldn’t I see?

I dragged in a breath, and scents came with it—human, but faint. Thready heartbeats moved somewhere nearby. Pets. They were close, moving toward the body I squatted in.

I smoothed my hands down my legs, my fingers bumping over ridged, crusted skin. I’d earned enough scabs on the football field to know what they felt like.

The pain was familiar, too. The blackness. The bone-deep ache of silver. I’d felt it before, precisely like this, when I touched the mirror in the foyer and the service door that led to the alley. It had been dark then, too.