Enslaved by the Others by Jess Haines Page A

have throttled Gideon for messing with my head and complicating this mess. Even if he was my best shot at finding a way out, who was to say he wasn’t doing it to find a way to have me under his thumb himself?
    “Look, Iana, I’m sorry it scares you. Gideon saved my best friend’s life. He hinted he wants to get us out of here. He’s not a good guy—okay, he really is a bad guy—but I’m not sure his motives for being here are evil.”
    She gave me a look that told me clearer than words she thought I was being hopelessly naïve.
    Okay. Maybe I was. I sometimes had a hard time believing the worst about people, and never mind that I was a private investigator who regularly saw the ugly underbelly of “polite” society. Gideon had already proven more than once that he was two-faced. He was good at sneaking under defenses and manipulating people. He’d managed to get close enough to Sara to nearly kill her, sucking her energy or her soul or who knew what out through the blood runes carved into her arm by the long-dead sorcerer, David Borowsky. We’d trusted Gideon to keep his word when he promised to get rid of the runes. I wondered what he’d really done. They weren’t visible on her skin anymore, but if what he’d said was true, he might have done something to key the runes to himself instead of leaving her open to any mage who wanted to steal a bit of her.
    If Sara’s mage boyfriend, Arnold, ever found out, he’d probably kill Gideon with his bare hands.
    I wondered if Arnold had any idea we were in trouble. He hadn’t answered my last message, left when I was still with the White Hats—humans who fancied themselves vigilante supernatural hunters—in Los Angeles. Maybe he’d team up with Royce and ride in to save the day once they figured out where we were.
    And maybe I’d win the lottery, too.
    Iana stared at me, intent, like she was peeling away the layers of whatever she saw on my face to read the truths hiding in the dark corners of my mind. Maybe she was assessing whatever Gideon had done to me in some way I couldn’t see or understand. Either way, the two of them gave me the heebie-jeebies.
    “You do realize how foolish that makes you sound, do you not? You should be afraid of it. Necromancers are things of darkness and corruption. Everything they come into contact with dies, quick or slow.”
    I snorted. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
    That probably wasn’t the right thing to say, judging by the murderous look she gave me. I held my hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. Sorry. I know he isn’t all sweetness and light, and he’s definitely got something up his sleeve, but right now nothing scares me more than Max and what he might do to my friend Sara. They have her. He’s using her to make me do what he wants.”
    “That doesn’t mean you need to play along. It’s probably using your feelings for her to goad you into doing what it wants. That’s how their tricks work.”
    “No kidding. You think I don’t know that?” Scowling, I folded my arms. “I wish you wouldn’t call him an it. He might not be human, but I don’t think he merits an ‘it.’”
    The glimmer in her eye took on a sardonic sheen when she cocked a brow at me. “You’re changing the subject. Whatever the gender, it is irrelevant. That thing isn’t here to help you. It’s here to help itself. You’re just letting yourself be used, and in a far more insidious way than Max Carlyle ever intended.”
    “I can’t watch them hurt her. I just can’t. I have to get out of here, and if that means letting a necromancer help me, so be it.”
    Iana shook her head and turned away, the curl of her lip telling me she was still disgusted with my life choices. Neither of us was ever going to get out if she wasn’t open to using whatever options were available to us, no matter how distasteful they might be.
    Gideon might have thought Sara and I were both pawns to be shuffled around at his whim, a means to who knew