Page 81 of Caretaker

Angus was cuffed only at his wrists. The giant’s chains had been mainly to make him seem fiercer to the audience who’d watched him.

From the other side of the prison came distant sounds of continued fighting, but they were unimportant. At that moment, the only thing that mattered was standing right in front of me.

I stepped toward him, my hand up, as though he might be spooked and run. “Angus,” I said, again, more calmly. He didn’t move when I slid Silverlight through his cuffs, releasing his wrists.

Silverlight dimmed, and when I touched her tip to the sheath, she shrank obediently. I holstered her, because my left arm wasn’t working and I needed my right one to touch the bull.

He stood stiff and silent, his shadowed face all sharp hills and deep hollows, his eyes dark and somehow…different. “Trin?” he asked, finally. “Trin?” He shook his head, hard, as though to clear it.

“I’m here,” I murmured.

I was there, and he was free.

His eyes blazed suddenly and he leaned forward and grabbed me, snatched me into his arms, and I didn’t care that my arm screamed in agony or that my face was a mask of blood. I didn’t care that we would still have to fight our way off the island, that I had no idea where Al, Clayton, Rhys, or Amias were, that Angus might be taken once again.

All I cared about was at that moment, he was safe.

Free.

But I’d forgotten something.

“I thought you were dead,” Angus cried, his voice full of rust and horror. “I thought you were dead.”

“No,” I whispered, into his skin. “It was only a moment.”

“I was here,” he said, almost viciously. “I was here and you were dead and I couldn’t do a fucking thing about it.”

He was close to breaking. I could feel it as surely as I could feel his flesh. But close was as far as he’d let himself get.

I wrapped my good arm around his neck and buried my face against his heat, my blood mixing with his sweat, my lips pressed against the rapidly beating pulse in his throat. I inhaled, searching desperately for his familiar, irresistible scent.

And I found it, buried far beneath prison filth, brutality, and a change so extreme I wasn’t sure the old Angus was really there—but he was. He was. So I pressed my lips to his warmth, and I drew in that scent, as though I could rip it from beneath the tons of shit hiding it and make everything okay again.

But there was no time. I pulled away and he let me slide down his body. “We have to go,” I said. “We have to go right now.”

He shut his emotions down. He flung them into a metal box and slammed the lid shut and I could see it in his eyes, that sudden blank coldness.

The huge man with him shifted from foot to foot, his chains clanking with the movement. I drew Silverlight once more and advanced upon him, and even though he didn’t know—or trust—me, he trusted Angus. He knew Angus wouldn’t stand there and watch while a stranger gutted him.

Therefore he only flinched once as I whirled Silverlight through the air and cut him free. His neck was raw, he was covered with gashes from the whip, and just like Angus, he sported burn marks all over his muscled body. Neither man was clothed, except in blood.

“The mask,” Angus told me. “He can’t free his power with the mask. Can Silverlight break it?”

Yeah, she could. I knew she could. I felt her power inside me, traveling up my arm and into my shoulder.

The giant dropped to his knees so I could better reach the mask, and I rushed behind him, lifted all that power, and brought it down on the back of the awful iron mask.

Silverlight cut through the iron, and the seam of the metal glowed, flaring yellow and red, and with a groan of futile resistance, the mask cracked into pieces and fell to the ground.

His hair was plastered to his face in long, tangled strands, and when the mask fell away the first thing he did was curl his fingers into claws and almost viciously scratch his head, then scoop away handfuls of hair from his face.

I could only imagine how agonizing it must have been for him, trapped inside that metal for God knew how long.

Then he began digging into the base of his skull, growls of furious pain slipping free as he dug.

I looked at Angus, horrified as blood gushed from the giant’s self-inflicted wound, covering his big hand in a crimson wash.

“Angus,” I said.