So the fine boys in blue of the Ashland Police Department did what most of them had probably been dreaming about for a long time now—they carted my ass off to jail.

10

More and more cops surrounded me, creating an unbreakable ring, before the two officers still holding on to me shoved me forward.

I looked over my shoulder. Silvio, Bria, Xavier, and Sophia surged forward, but Dobson dropped his hand to his gun, a clear warning that he would start shooting if they tried to interfere or help me in any way. So my friends were forced to pull up short. Even if they’d gotten past Dobson, there was no way they could have fought their way through the rest of the cops flanking me.

“Gin! Gin!” Bria started yelling, standing on her tiptoes to see through the crowd that separated us.

“It’s okay!” I yelled back. “I’ll be all right!”

Her panicked gaze met mine for a split-second before the cops pushed me through an archway set into the back wall, and she disappeared from sight.

*  *  *

The archway opened up into a long hallway, with more wooden benches lining the walls, and rooms and jail cells branching off either side. But instead of stopping, opening one of the cells, and shoving me inside, the two cops tightened their hold on me and marched me to the far end of the hallway and through another archway.

Deeper and deeper we went into the station, twisting and turning through one corridor after another, with more and more members of the po-po coming out from their posts to join my parade. They didn’t want to risk my making a break for it. Hence all the muscle. Couldn’t blame them for that, since that’s exactly what I was thinking about. Slamming my fist into the face of one of my handlers, grabbing somebody’s gun, and shooting, fighting, and magicking my way out of here.

But it wouldn’t work. There were too many cops with too many guns and far too many itchy trigger fingers. No, right now, I needed to bide my time and see exactly what sort of game this was. Because I had a sneaking suspicion that Madeline wasn’t through playing with me yet. Otherwise, Dobson would have shot me in the middle of the station right after I’d tripped him, not ordered his men to cart me off to places unknown. So I would be patient and endure whatever torture was coming until I could figure out a way to turn the tables on Dobson and the rest of the cops.

Finally, we reached the end of this particular hallway, where a steel door was set into the wall. One of the officers plucked an old-fashioned skeleton key off a ring of them clipped to his belt, inserted it into the lock, and opened the door. The two officers pushed me forward, and I was forced through to the other side, where a short hallway opened up into a large room with one singular, striking feature—an enormous jail cell.

The cell itself was about twenty-five feet square, far larger than all the others we’d passed. Two long wooden benches squatted inside it, pushed up against the bars, while two dirty, grimy toilets were set into the back wall, jutting out from the gray marble. The rest of the room was completely bare and empty, except for dozens of wooden chairs that had been arranged outside the bars. Stairs led up to a second-floor balcony that wrapped around and overlooked the cell, almost as if it were a stage. But the most telling thing was that there were no security cameras anywhere. The cops didn’t want anyone to see what went on in here.

Even though I’d never before been here, I knew exactly where I was.

The bull pen—a place that prisoners went into and never came out of again.

But all I could do was stand there and wait while the officer used that same skeleton key to open the cell door. The second guy patted me down, but I’d left my knives, jewelry, and cell phone in Silvio’s car, so there was nothing for him to take away from me. When that was done, hands pressed on my back, shoving me forward into the middle of the empty space.

I righted myself and turned around. The officer quickly swung the cell door shut and locked it again, lest I try to make a break for it. Once I was secure, some of the tension eased, and the cops looked through the bars and smirked at me, as if I were a tiger caged in a zoo. But I wasn’t the animal here—they were, for what they did in this place.

“I wonder how long she’ll last.”

“The bitch is supposed to be tough.”

“We’ll see just how tough when she goes against the group that Dobson picked out.”

“Who’s got the book on it?”

“Osborne, I think . . .”

I tuned out their sly murmurs, instead studying their faces, and memorizing as many of their twisted smiles as I could. I wasn’t dead yet, and if I lived through this, well, they were going to wish they hadn’t.

I thought whatever cruel thing they had planned might start immediately, but after making sure that the cell door was locked, the cops trickled out of the room and shut the main door behind them, probably off to report to Dobson that I was all squared away. I wondered if the captain would come back here to gloat, or if Madeline herself would show up, now that I was finally, exactly, where she wanted me. I didn’t know, but I had more important matters to think about right now.

Like escaping.

So I did what anyone stuck in a cell would do—I started trying to figure out how to get out of it.

But the thick, solid bars were all made of silverstone, and I couldn’t so much as rattle them. I might be a powerful elemental, but even I didn’t have enough juice to get through that much of the metal, and the bars would simply absorb any magic I threw at them. The floor was useless as well, since it was a solid slab of gray marble. Plus, we were on the ground level. Even if I cracked open the floor with my Stone magic, I had nowhere to go but down into the dirt. So I moved on to the back of the cell and splayed my hand across the cool wall.

The marble hummed with low notes of despair and desperation, the emotions of everyone who’d been locked in this cell. But mixed in with the somber chorus of doom were also high-pitched shrieks, the sharp, piercing, agonized cries of everyone who’d been forced in this cage before me and had left a bloody, tattered, broken mess.

If they’d been lucky enough to leave at all.

I shut the sound of the stone’s cries out of my mind and examined it more closely. The marble was at least a foot thick, with silver flecks sparkling like diamond chips in the smooth, glossy surface. It was definitely a wall designed to keep people in, even elementals like me. Oh, I could blast through the marble, but it would take too long, make too much noise, and use up far too much of my magic. It wouldn’t do me any good to bust out of the police station only to get shot in the parking lot because I didn’t have enough energy left to run.