Finally, we reached the end of this particular hallway, where a steel door was set into the wall. One of the officers plucked an old-fashioned skeleton key off a ring of them clipped to his belt, inserted it into the lock, and opened the door. The two officers pushed me forward, and I was forced through to the other side, where a short hallway opened up into a large room with one singular, striking feature—an enormous jail cell.
The cell itself was about twenty-five feet square, far larger than all the others we’d passed. Two long wooden benches squatted inside it, pushed up against the bars, while two dirty, grimy toilets were set into the back wall, jutting out from the gray marble. The rest of the room was completely bare and empty, except for dozens of wooden chairs that had been arranged outside the bars. Stairs led up to a second-floor balcony that wrapped around and overlooked the cell, almost as if it were a stage. But the most telling thing was that there were no security cameras anywhere. The cops didn’t want anyone to see what went on in here.
Even though I’d never before been here, I knew exactly where I was.
The bull pen—a place that prisoners went into and never came out of again.
But all I could do was stand there and wait while the officer used that same skeleton key to open the cell door. The second guy patted me down, but I’d left my knives, jewelry, and cell phone in Silvio’s car, so there was nothing for him to take away from me. When that was done, hands pressed on my back, shoving me forward into the middle of the empty space.
I righted myself and turned around. The officer quickly swung the cell door shut and locked it again, lest I try to make a break for it. Once I was secure, some of the tension eased, and the cops looked through the bars and smirked at me, as if I were a tiger caged in a zoo. But I wasn’t the animal here—they were, for what they did in this place.
“I wonder how long she’ll last.”
“The bitch is supposed to be tough.”
“We’ll see just how tough when she goes against the group that Dobson picked out.”
“Who’s got the book on it?”
“Osborne, I think . . .”
I tuned out their sly murmurs, instead studying their faces, and memorizing as many of their twisted smiles as I could. I wasn’t dead yet, and if I lived through this, well, they were going to wish they hadn’t.
I thought whatever cruel thing they had planned might start immediately, but after making sure that the cell door was locked, the cops trickled out of the room and shut the main door behind them, probably off to report to Dobson that I was all squared away. I wondered if the captain would come back here to gloat, or if Madeline herself would show up, now that I was finally, exactly, where she wanted me. I didn’t know, but I had more important matters to think about right now.
Like escaping.
So I did what anyone stuck in a cell would do—I started trying to figure out how to get out of it.
But the thick, solid bars were all made of silverstone, and I couldn’t so much as rattle them. I might be a powerful elemental, but even I didn’t have enough juice to get through that much of the metal, and the bars would simply absorb any magic I threw at them. The floor was useless as well, since it was a solid slab of gray marble. Plus, we were on the ground level. Even if I cracked open the floor with my Stone magic, I had nowhere to go but down into the dirt. So I moved on to the back of the cell and splayed my hand across the cool wall.
The marble hummed with low notes of despair and desperation, the emotions of everyone who’d been locked in this cell. But mixed in with the somber chorus of doom were also high-pitched shrieks, the sharp, piercing, agonized cries of everyone who’d been forced in this cage before me and had left a bloody, tattered, broken mess.
If they’d been lucky enough to leave at all.
I shut the sound of the stone’s cries out of my mind and examined it more closely. The marble was at least a foot thick, with silver flecks sparkling like diamond chips in the smooth, glossy surface. It was definitely a wall designed to keep people in, even elementals like me. Oh, I could blast through the marble, but it would take too long, make too much noise, and use up far too much of my magic. It wouldn’t do me any good to bust out of the police station only to get shot in the parking lot because I didn’t have enough energy left to run.
But it was an exterior wall and the only part of the cell not lined with silverstone bars, so I forced myself to look at it again. There had to be some way to get through it, even if there wasn’t a window, and the only things attached to it were the two toilets—
My gaze locked onto the toilets. At one time, they might have been clean white porcelain. Now they were so filthy that they were grayer than the floor and spattered with blood and other things I didn’t want to look at, much less smell. But I breathed in through my mouth to lessen the stench of vomit, urine, and blood, squatted down next to one of the toilets, and looked at how it was attached to the wall.
And I thought of something that might actually get me out of here.
It was a long shot, but it was the only chance I had. So I used the toe of my boot to flush the toilet, cocking my ear to the side and listening to the gurgle of water in the pipes. When I was satisfied, I did my lady business, flushed the toilet again, placed my hand on the cleanest spot of porcelain I could find, and reached for my magic. Elemental Ice crystals formed on my palm, then spread out, climbing up over the rim of the toilet and then down into the bowl of water below.
I kept my power at a low but steady level, feeding more and more Ice into the toilet, until I was satisfied that it would do what I wanted it to. When I finished, I waited three minutes, wondering if someone might have sensed me using my power and would storm into the room to check on me. But Dobson thought that he’d finally trapped me, and I didn’t hear the slightest sound of movement beyond the bull pen. So I felt safe enough to repeat the process on the second toilet.
Once I’d set my plan into motion, there was nothing to do but wait until Dobson or someone else came back here. Besides, I needed to rest to help replenish the magic I’d used. I might still be breathing, but this was just a temporary respite, and I’d need every scrap of power to survive what was coming.
So I curled up on one of the hard wooden benches, made myself as comfortable as possible, and drifted off to sleep.
* * *
I wasn’t really all that tired, since it was only about four in the afternoon, but the roller coaster of the day’s events and emotions had taken its toll on me, and I quickly dozed off, especially given the unnatural silence in this part of the station. But it wasn’t long before the blackness receded, and I started to dream of my past, the way that I had ever since Fletcher was murdered last year. . . .