JJ’s stomach drops. “Ez,wait?—!”
Unperturbed, Obie swats Ez’s arm away. “There are easier ways to get information, Ez,” he says, and he narrows his eyes at Chester. “Do you even know where Cass is?”
The ghost of a smirk flickers across Chester’s lips. “Yes. But good luck beating that out of me. I can guarantee I’ve had worse.”
“I was hoping you’d say that. JJ, cover his mouth again,” Obie orders, and JJ barely has time to comply before Obie fastens his hand over Chester’s forehead, presses his thumb and middle finger against Chester’s temples, and squeezes.
Instantly, Chester’s face drains of all color. He lets out a strangled scream against JJ’s hand, trying to thrash out of Obie’s grip, trying to escape?—
All at once, JJ realizes what Obie is doing.
He’s digging through Chester’s memories against his will. Since when can he even do that? Cass has mentioned on multiple occasions that Obie needs permission to muck around in people’s heads, and Obie has never once contradicted him.
How powerfulishe?
Seconds scrape by like nails on a chalkboard until Obie pulls his hand away. “I know where he is,” he says, gesturing back towards the break room. “Seventh hallway, third door on the left. Let’s go.”
Chester’s nose is bleeding and there’s a burst capillary in his left eye. However Obie yanked that information out of Chester’s head, it clearly hurt. “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” he rasps, staring at Obie with undisguised horror. “You shouldn’t be able to do that unless—unless?—”
Before Chester can finish his sentence, Obie slams his head against the wall. Chester crumples to the floor, motionless.
“Obie!”JJ hisses, aghast.
“He’s just concussed,” Obie says dismissively, and he nods at the interrogation table in the center of the room. “For now, just hide him behind there. They’re apparently expecting a jailbreak, so we need to move. Hopefully, we’ll be out of here before they find him.”
“Good enough for me,” Ez says, and she unceremoniously grabs under Chester’s arms and starts dragging him across the floor.
JJ swallows down the bile threatening to rise in his throat. Roma’s betrayal still feels like a fresh wound, but right now, he would give anything to get her, Chester, and Bryant out of this place.
Looks like that’s not in the cards for today, though. “Yeah, okay,” he agrees reluctantly, and he strides over to grab Chester’s legs and help Ez move him.
Obie only waits until Chester’s limp body is out of sight before nodding towards the door. “Let’s go,” he says, and he leads the way across the prison.
42
Jackson is our best option,” the blond spellcaster says, crossing his arms over his chest. “Sure, we have other dissidents on the chopping block, but Jackson is the most recent—and, frankly, the most expendable. No one will miss him.”
“Not sure if you’ve noticed this,” the brunette spellcaster argues, “but we don’t currentlyhaveJackson. We can’t just wait around for an attempted jailbreak that may or may not happen.”
“Oh, it’s going to happen,” Blondie says. “The only question is when.”
Privately, Cass agrees. He’s not about to say that out loud, though. Partly because he doesn’t want the prison to tighten its security even more, and partly because, well?—
Partly because he’s trying not to draw attention to himself at this point. There’s no sense of time in here, but Cass knows Nasir gave Nostrand an hour to interrogate him, and he thinks he’s been with the spellcasters for roughly the same length of time.
Nostrand spared no expense in flaying skin from bone. He also had more than one backhanded comment about JJ that made Cass seered,and the fact that Nostrand had JJ under his knife last month makes Cass want to cry and commit a felony in approximately equal measures.
The spellcasters’ “testing” was almost worse. He had no idea what to expect when Blondie and Brownie first sauntered into his interrogation room, but their tag-team spellcasting—already a rarity in a world of predominantly solo spellcasters—was like nothing Cass had ever seen. Human magic might be different from demon magic, but their dual incantations were astoundingly unfamiliar, incorporating esoteric bits of spell work that he doesn’t even think Ez would know.
He didn’t have much time to critically analyze them, though, because the sheer level anddepthof agony from the spells drove out every coherent thought in his head. And this wasn’t the physical pain inflicted by an interrogator—no, this was something that reacheddeepinside of Cass, down to a part of him he’s barely noticed since he was summoned from Tamaros, down to the most private and sacred foundation of his being.
They did something to his soul. Something that makes his bones feel chalky and his blood feel sticky and his entire body feelunstable,like the slightest wrong move could make him shatter into a thousand pieces.
Soul magic is dangerous at best and suicidal at worst, but these spellcasters drove their spikes into Cass with a ruthless precision that says they’ve done it many times before. He doesn’t even want to think about the implications for all the demons they’ve held in this prison over the decades.
Now, though, Cass is just exhausted. He’s exhausted and threadbare and desperately needs a friendly face. He needs to see Ez, to see Obie?—
To see JJ and Desi.
