Veiled Spirits - Page 70
IZZY
Bishop is frozen in the doorway, so I can’t see what he’s looking at. I push lightly on his back to get him to move. My touch seems to break through whatever’s going on in his mind. He turns back to me. “You don’t need to see this, Izzy.”
I raise my brows at him. “You don’t get to decide that, St. James. I’m not yours right now. I’m just another mage on a mission with you.” No one outside of my family and my mates should be listening in right now, but I’m careful not to say mate just in case anyone is.
While I get that he wants to protect me, I’m sick of everyone thinking I’m fragile. I don’t need or want to be protected. All I want is to be respected as an equal.
He chuckles humorlessly. “You never stop being mine, sweetheart.” Bishop scrubs a hand over his face before blowing out a breath. “Fine. Have a look. I don’t think this is what we came for, though.”
After Bishop steps farther inside the room, I’m able to get a good look at what he didn’t want me to see. I gasp.
The room is more like a small warehouse than a room, complete with a concrete floor, bare rafters, and no windows. It’s probably around a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. The part that stops me in my tracks are the cages lining the walls of the huge space. There have to be hundreds of cages filled with unconscious people.
All of the people are dressed in only hospital gowns. Their minimal clothing highlights the bruising, cuts, and dried blood covering them from head to toe. I’m not even sure some of them are still alive, with the amount of blood in their cages.
“What the fuck is this?” I whisper to no one in particular. Though the eyeball earlier wasn’t close to the worst thing I’ve seen on missions, this definitely is.
I wander closer to the cage directly to my left. I’m not sure whether it’s a good or bad thing that I can see the faint rise and fall of the woman’s chest. It would probably be a kinder fate to be dead, honestly. Along with the cuts and bruises, she also has a broken arm, that’s twisted the wrong way, and shattered fingers.
I clench my hands into fists, so I don’t reach in there and heal her. Whoever is doing this to them would probably notice if her arm and fingers miraculously healed. That’d just mean more pain for her in the long run.
“I don’t know, Izzy. Jesus fucking Christ. I knew the council was bad, but this is a whole other level of fucked up.”
Bishop can fucking say that again.
“We have to leave them behind, don’t we?” My voice is barely audible, but both Levi and Bishop hear it.
“Yeah, we do.” Bishop stares at me like he’s worried I’m going to lose control.
He’s not wrong to be concerned. Pure fury at the council burns like acid through my veins as I take in yet another reminder of their corruption and depravity.
Losing control won’t help anything, though. It’d be satisfying to storm into the council chambers and take out as many of them as I can. But that won’t help these people or affect real change on the council.
Squeezing my eyes tightly for a moment, I try to gather myself. But the anger burning brightly in my chest isn’t soothed. I open my eyes in defeat and slowly walk down the length of the left side.
As I walk, I memorize the faces of everyone I pass. I burn them into my memory, so they aren’t forgotten. We may have to leave them, but I won’t forget them. I vow to get them out as soon as I can.
On my walk through, I also realize why Bishop doesn’t think this is what we’re looking for. Most of the people in the cages aren’t young mages. There are some kids in the cages, but I’m not sure they’re even mages. Some of the people in the cages are too bulky, too pale, or have too pointed of ears to be mages.
How in the hell did they collect other races to experiment on?
When I reach the end of this side, I walk along the back wall and down the opposite side, doing the exact same thing. After I complete my walk through, I spend who knows how long staring sightlessly at the boy in the last cage.
“Say the word, and I’ll get all of them out. Fuck the consequences. Just tell me what you need me to do.” I turn around to see Levi standing right behind me. He’s staring down at me with concern shining in his crimson eyes. I’ve only seen his eyes completely red a few times before, so this horror show must be fucking with his head too.
“We can’t.” My voice breaks. “Saving all of them means we won’t ever figure out what’s going on here or with the mage development program. We can’t afford to tip them off right now.”
Levi clenches his jaw before pulling me into a hard hug. He squeezes me tight, and I inhale his smoky scent. “What can I do to help?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble into his dress-shirt-covered chest. “I just want whoever’s doing this to pay.” What I’m not saying is that I want to kill whoever it is. Painfully. I want them to feel every ounce of agony they’ve caused others.
“They will, little raven. Trust me, even death won’t offer an escape. I swear it.” He sounds absolutely convinced of that, even though there’s no way to know what happens to people after they die.
I pull back to look at him. “You can’t promise that.”
“I can, and I will.”
“How?”