Excerpt:
I remembered the pain of transformation, if only as a haze of red and tearing muscle. I remembered the awful rasp of my canines being filed blunt and the burn of silver being placed over the stumps to keep my true nature at bay. I had gone through hell so that girls like this wouldn’t have to, and now I was failing her.
Isolde walked into my field of vision, blocking my view of the tortured girl and breaking me out of my spiral of self-pity; I folded up the memories and tucked them away with the others, shifting my focus to the present. Isolde’s arms were crossed, the tip of one boot tapping against the flagstones.
“This is very impressive. Look more impressed,” she demanded.
“Can I look horrified instead?”
Isolde huffed, childlike and thwarted.
“I suppose that will do,” she said. “You know, I was really counting on you to be more entertaining than George. Do they surgically remove your personalities when they pump you full of wolf’s blood?”
“I don’t know. Do they surgically remove your morals when you sign the Mage Registry?”
“Ha! I’ll have you know that several of my colleagues are terrible sticks in the mud and would take great offence at the suggestion. I’m quite certain they will stay within the bounds of safe magic use and never go even a little bit mad.”
“And you?” I ventured. “Have you gone a little bit mad?”
“Of course you would see brilliance and call it madness. If I do go mad, it’s because I have no one but a zombie to talk to. And George, I suppose.”
She smiled, just a little quirk of her mouth at one side as if the two of us were sharing a joke. I had never imagined that I would be gently needled by a target. I did not like it.
I would not say that I sulked. I had simply elected to end the conversation. It was in Isolde’s interest to keep me talking, I reminded myself: if I was talking, I was not thinking, was not planning. I needed to do both if I wanted to get myself and the girl to safety. I could come back for Isolde later. Or someone else could.
The problem was that, devoid of entertainment, Isolde had taken to scratching the bottom of a glass beaker with a scalpel. Her work was precise, careful, but the sound of sharp metal against glass scraped at my ears, interrupting all attempts at thought. I glared at her.
This was a mistake.
“I’m sure you must be wondering what I’m doing,” said Isolde, without looking up.
“Not particularly.”
“I’m engraving the soul-binding runes into the base of this bottle.” She paused. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
“No.”
She was going to tell me anyway.
“I am engraving the soul-binding runes into the base of this bottle,” Isolde repeated, her voice heavy and her words overenunciated as if my disinterest was an obstacle she could overcome by sheer force. “So that I can recapture the soul, should the experiment fail.”
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