Captivate Me (Book One: The Captivated Series) (24 page)

I glanced at Piper, the world spinning
as my head turned. She had her tiny hand pressed against her
forehead. “You all right?” Colton asked her, but I could tell he
wasn’t feeling well, either. He looked green.

Gabe piped up. “No, really, man…
what’s in this? Did you screw up and put one of Iris’ elixirs in
here?”

My legs went numb, then my hands. I
watched as my mug dropped to the ground and rolled, splattering its
contents. Confused, I looked back up to Iris, and a slow smile
spread across her face. I tried to blink away the dark fog that was
creeping into my peripheral vision.

I think I saw Piper flop to the
ground, but the numbness had taken hold of me to the point that I
couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

Iris’ voice wafted through like a
faint breeze. “It wasn’t a screw-up.”

My world went black.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

___________________

Deep Shit

Iris’ faraway voice coaxed me from my
drug-induced sleep, but my head hung heavy; I couldn’t will it to
move or my eyes to open. Numbness had a firm grip on me. Nothing
but numbness. Everywhere. “Good. Now make an incision
here.”

“Here?” Kai’s voice sounded hollow.
Unsure.

“You can do this, Kai. You have to or
it won’t work. I can’t do it for you.”

“I know,” he said, a little more
confident. “I’ve just never done this before. I don’t want to screw
this up. Not after all this time.”

“Breathe, baby.”

He steeled himself with a breath.
Silence.

“Good. Just like that,” she
instructed. “Cut long and deep, though. We have to be able to get
it out in one piece.”

More silence.

My foggy mind attempted to piece their
words together – incision, long and deep… one piece. If I could
have felt my heart, I ‘m sure it would have jumped. They were
cutting something out. Were they cutting into me? I couldn’t have
felt it if they were. No… their voices sounded too far away. And
why would they – oh, God. The word “heart” pulsated inside my head
as a burning reminder. Were they witches? No way. I refused to
believe it.

Coldness seeped into my bones – I was
regaining my sense of touch, my nerves awakening.

“Good,” Iris praised. “That wasn’t so
bad, huh? They don’t even know it’s happening. At least we’re being
humane about it.”

Oh no.
Tears prickled my eyes. Who’d they just mangled? Just killed?
Their footsteps crunched across the ground, about five or so paces,
closer to me. I struggled to move, and that’s when the numbness
ebbed and I felt a tight, rough coil around my shoulders, stomach
and thighs, my hands bound inside the rope at my waist. Pieces of
jagged bark were digging into my back. They had tied me to a tree
naked, except for my underwear.

Bile rose in my
throat.
No… no, no, no.
This had to be another dream.
Wake up, Kat. Wake up!

My head bobbed as it struggled to
rise.

“Not as hard as I thought,” Kai said.
“Let’s get this over with so we can get back to your sister. Who’s
next?”

“You have to go clockwise. So that
would be Gabriel.”

Gabe!
My head slammed against the tree; I had used all the energy I
could muster to lift it the rest of the way. Now for my
eyes.

“Same for him,” Iris continued,
steadfast. “We have to drain his blood first. Make the incision
along his forearm.”

Don’t you touch
him!
My thoughts screamed, but couldn’t
find their way to my mouth. They were lost in the fog, lost in a
confused stupor, stumbling around. Warm, wet tears rolled along my
cheeks, dripping onto my bare chest.

Their footsteps made their way back
five paces, but slightly to the right. “Good,” she said. “Just like
that.”

I dragged in a lungful of air,
straining against the rope, every part of my being fighting against
the drugs and the haze. “No!” I cried. The word came out muffled,
my voice almost unrecognizable. Tape - they’d taped my
mouth.

Iris gasped, footsteps crunching their
way to me.

My eyes fluttered open and there stood
Kai in front of me, bloody dagger in hand, his eyes wild,
determined. He desperately wanted something from me, from all of us
– our blood and hearts so they could be immortal.

If I weren’t already fighting so hard
against my heavy eyelids, I would have had the courage to look past
these monsters to figure out who they’d murdered, but it was all I
could do to keep them open. As far as I could tell, the others had
also been tied to trees around the clearing.

His once-warm eyes stayed glued to me,
but he spoke to Iris as if I weren’t even there at all. As if I
weren’t nearly naked, tied to this tree, exposed and helplessly
waiting to be drained and gutted like a cadaver being prepared for
a funeral. “I thought you said they wouldn’t wake.”

“They
shouldn’t
have,” she replied,
turning in a circle and appraising the others.

“Then give her more.”

“That was all I had, Kai. Some burn
off the medicine faster than others, and she’s the lucky winner.
Hit her over the head or something if you can’t stand doing it
while she’s awake.”

I balked at how coldly she spoke about
it – like I was nothing. Nobody.

“Fine,” he replied, a hopeful smile
tugging on his lips, and he held up the butt of the dagger to
bludgeon me.

My wide eyes zeroed in on the wooden
handle, and before I could process what I was doing, the dagger
ripped from his hand and tumbled through the air into the dark
woods. Who knew how far it had gone. They stared in the direction
it had launched, dumbfounded. I slumped against the trunk with
relief. Despite my tied-up hands, my telekinesis had come through –
thanks to my brief lesson from Ms. Douglas the other
day.

“Did you do that, Kai?” Iris
asked.

He looked at his hands. “No,
I...”

She spit the word, her eyes cutting
back to me. “Telekinesis.”

I couldn’t help but smirk
from behind the tape.
Forgot, didn’t
you?

She gripped my chin, squeezing as hard
as she could. The pain shot down my throat like bolts of lightning
and I whined, squirming. “You think you’re clever, don’t you, you
little bitch?” Her bird squawked in agreement from a branch above
me, and she pulled away. “You want to be awake that bad, Kathrin?
Fine… you can watch as Gabriel dies.”

Anger swelled at the thought of them
cutting him, touching him again in any kind of way. “Screw you!” I
yelled, the muffled words losing their bite because of the tape.
“Screw both of you!”

With pressed lips, she ripped the tape
from my mouth. I flinched and let out a yelp. “What was that,
dear?” she asked, as fake and sugary as she could.

“Screw you,” I snarled.

“No thanks,” she countered. “Kai? Get
the knife. We need to finish this and get back to Rose.”

“Don’t you touch him,” I
said, and damn if my voice didn’t crack. Why was this happening? I
didn’t want to die here, for any of us to die here. Not like this –
at the hand of two people we trusted. People the others had loved
for years, people
I
had been naively growing to love. We all deserved
better.

“I’m afraid we have to,” she said
coldly and turned her attention to the woods. “Find it,
Kai?”

“Still looking!”

Her hands balled into fists. “That’s
the one we have to use. Keep looking!” Her bird squawked
again.

An icy pain pounded into me now,
throbbing through my limbs in rhythm with my heartbeat – the ropes
were too tight, the air too cold, and the numbing effects of the
drug had almost completely faded. I finally had the energy to sweep
my eyes over the clearing. Perfect, straight lines of white powder
had been used to draw a giant star on the ground with Colton
tied-up by his wrists and ankles dead center. Each of us were tied
to a tree at each of the points. Piper and Aubrey were tied up on
either side of me, Gabriel next to Piper and… my gaze found the
body with streaks of red – Raymond. Kai had carved a hole in his
chest, blood dribbling down his stomach and legs and coloring the
point of the chalky star at his feet deep crimson. He was gone. The
cold, black arms of death had laid him to his final rest, and grief
took hold of me, squeezing my heart. “No,” I choked out.

“Yesss,” she hissed back, indifferent
to my mourning, “you have no idea what these sacrifices mean to
me.”

I wept, ignoring her as I thought how
just last night Raymond was alive and singing with Gabriel by the
campfire. I didn’t give a flying fuck what our deaths meant to
her.

“You guys stumble into your
immortality,” she continued. “You’re born with it, blithely unaware
of what a precious gift you have.” She stepped closer, her voice
low and filled with disdain. “And what makes it even more
infuriating, is that when you’re told about it, some of you see it
as a curse. A curse!” She straightened her shoulders, trying to
maintain her composure. “Those of us who see what a blessing it is
to live forever are the ones who deserve this gift, not you
sniveling little idiots.”

I finally decided to acknowledge her
psycho-babble. “And what makes a monster like you
worthy?”

“Oh, I’m already immortal, dear. I
performed this ritual years ago in my thirties. You six are for
Kai.”

I wanted to tell her to screw off
again, but as soon as the words situated themselves on the tip of
my tongue, movement in the woods caught my eye. It wasn’t Kai; this
came from the direction of the school.

“Kai?” Iris yelled again, growing
impatient. When she yelled, the movement in the direction of the
school paused. Was it a person? Had they heard her? Wait… how could
they have heard her? Were we not behind a veil? Oh, right… I
removed the spell when I had arrived earlier. Iris didn’t
know.

“Not yet!” he replied.

“Jesus, Kai! They’ll all be awake soon
if you don’t hurry!”

I spared a glance at our
silent visitor – long hair, slender body. A girl, but I didn’t know
who. She was too far away to see features. Whoever she was, she
darted behind a tree.
God, please,
I prayed.
Let whoever it
is see what’s going on and send for help.

Distract
her
, I told myself.
Keep Iris distracted so she doesn’t see her.
“Why us six?” I asked.

She sighed as if irritated
by my question. “Six, Kathrin, because that’s how many we need for
the ritual. And
you
six because that’s how many we’ve been able to find in ten
years. You half-breeds are hard to come by… and even harder to
convince to live with us willingly.”

While you feed and groom
us like rats for your ritual.

“But you were one of the easiest to
convince.” She cut her eyes to Gabriel with a wicked grin. “Thanks
to lover-boy.”

I dug my fingernails into
the bark and swallowed the string of profanities working their way
out.
Keep her distracted.
“Before you found me, you
had
six.” And that’s when I realized
one of us was missing.
Brad.

“Oh, I didn’t only need six. I needed
twelve – six for Kai, six for Rose, my sister. She’s been waiting
for this a long time.” Her eyes hardened. “That’s why we need to
get this over with and get going.” She took an impatient step
toward the woods. “KAI!”

Her sister.
She’d been doing all of this to save her dying
sister – hiring the help of an aura-reader to find us half-breeds.
She must have fallen in love with him in the process and decided to
accumulate six more than she’d needed so she could also live
forever with her Jamaican lover.
How
sweet
,
I thought bitterly. “Where are the other six?”

“Got it!” Kai answered, his voice a
stir of echoes. I must have tossed it pretty far, but not far
enough. We needed more time, and Gabe was next. I pressed my eyes
tight to keep from bawling again. I needed to stay focused, keep
Iris engaged.

Iris threw her hands in the air.
“About time!”

While Iris was looking in
Kai’s direction, I spared another long glance toward the school to
find the mystery visitor. Nothing. Where did she go? A flicker of
red hair a few yards away caught my attention.
Anna?
What was she doing out
here?
The note,
I
thought. I’d told her I would be back soon, and judging by the
setting sun, I’d been gone for hours. She must have seen me going
into the woods earlier and had bravely come to check on
me.

Anna slid her eye from behind the
trunk, and our eyes met. She looked horrified. Frightened. I
wondered how much she’d heard Iris say, but even if she’d heard
nothing, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out we were in deep
shit. “Get help,” I mouthed. She nodded, chin quivering, and
disappeared again.