Free Flint Lock (Witches of Karma #10) by Elizabeth A. Reeves Page A

Flint.
    Instead, I was sitting in a dark room.
    The only illumination, through an impression of inky darkness, came from a bare bulb hanging above me. The light from it was weak, barely making a dent in the heavy blackness that surrounded me. It swayed slightly, though I could feel no breeze.
    The room was bitterly cold and damp, with an underlying stench of rot. I gagged a little and tried to breathe through my mouth. The stink permeated the air. No wonder the ancients had believed disease came from miasma—bad air.
    There was no furniture in the room. It was completely bare. The floor was made of dirt, and it was from here that the stench came. In the little light I had, the dirt appeared oily and dank.
    I ran my fingers along the rough cinder-block walls of the room, trying to find an exit. I made three circuits around the room before I accepted that there were no doors leading in or out.
    There was a single window, though it was far above where I could ever reach. I could just make it out in the light of that bare bulb. It was little more than a heavy grate in the ceiling. It dripped with rust and moisture. Oddly, despite the damp, it reminded strongly me of the kind of grate that my family used to use for barbecues.
    As if to solidify that impression, the sky, or whatever it might be, beyond the grate was tinted with that strange color that clouds over fires reflect. It was murky, with flashes of reds and oranges. The colors moved and receded in a definitively flame-like way.
    I shivered and tucked my hands under my armpits for warmth. If the world outside of the window was made of flame, I would have thought that it would be warmer within my cell.
    Instead, the room seemed to suck any warmth from my bones. My teeth were already starting to rattle.
    I dug the toe of my boot into the dirt below me. It was heavy and drenched in some kind of liquid. Not water, I was sure. Perhaps oil… or blood.
    Blood would explain the stench. It did remind me of the cloying scent of decay and slaughter.
    “You could have saved me,” a hoarse whisper croaked from the darkness.
    I started and pressed myself against the wall at my back in an instinctive motion. It took a moment to realize that what I heard was, indeed, a voice. I’d been so sure that I was alone.
    How could I have missed another person in a cell that was no more than ten feet by ten feet? Even as my brain sought to deny the possibility, my eyes picked out the huddled form on the floor.
    Long, fair hair spilled over the awkwardly bunched-up body, soaked with the same damp that filled the entire room. It hung in tendrils, hiding the pale face of whatever being might sit there. The hanks of hair looked almost like tentacles in the dim, swaying light above us.
    I was sure that it was only in my imagination that they moved.
    It could have been a child, but I knew at once that this was no adolescent creature. There was something about her—and I knew, also instinctively, that it was female.
    It was a young woman. She wore a long t-shirt over the scrawny awkward bones of her twisted body, the kind of t-shirt that passed as a nightshirt. I didn’t need to see the logo printed on it, because I knew exactly what it would say.
    My heart galloped. At once, I wanted to know, but wanted also to deny whom it was that sat in front of me.
    The girl raised her face. Her hair hung in front of it, but I could still make out her features.
    After all, they were features that had haunted me for the past fifteen years.
    Her face was pale, except for where it had been darkened by broken blood vessels. Those patches were dark grey in the deeper gloom of the room. Her eyes were wide, no longer a soft blue, but a glittering, malicious black. They were hooded and deep set, surrounded by dark bruise-like circles.
    I could see hate in those eyes.
    And I deserved that hatred.
    She had been beautiful once, though that beauty had been robbed by death, as it robs all of us, sooner or later. The narrow