Page 175 of Serpent and Shadow

He’d told them Arcturus got too close to him, and touched the collar on accident. He regretted his words immediately when the guard backhanded the kid across the face with an iron glove and snarled at him to keep his fucking dirty mongrel hands off the king’s heir.

Caelum hadn’t been locked to the wall that day, either.

He’d launched himself at the guard, and the fight immediately changed tenor as he proceeded to fight all three of them at once. Malefic had been indifferent when he’d come down later to find him bruised and bloodied, but the real repercussions weren’t from Malefic. The guards now knew he could fight, and it had become an unspoken challenge among them to try and take him down when they thought they could get away with it.

On the plus side of that, they hadn’t bothered Arcturus again.

It took him a long time to heal, though.

Caelum suspected Arcturus’s jawbone had been cracked from that blow. The metal glove also had a sharp edge that cut him across the face. The scar was faint now, thank the gods, but Caelum knew the kid had been lucky.

Arcturus told him over and over that it wasn’t his fault, that he’d had no choice but to say what he did, but since then, Caelum put himself between the guards and the kid whenever they ventured into his cell. Not that it was really necessary.

Caelum was a much more interesting target.

Wankers.

“Fuck,” he muttered, gripping the metal ring in his hands.

“What’s wrong?”

Caelum looked over to find the kid frowning at him. He’d thought Arcturus was asleep. Maybe he had been, and he’d just woken him up. The thought made his jaw hurt as it occurred to him it had to be night out there still, although he had absolutely no idea how late.

He struggled with an answer, then only shook his head.

His magic went back to compulsively toying with the collar.

“Something’s going on.” Arcturus glanced across the dark space to the iron bars on their cell’s only door. He tilted his head, as if listening. His eyes shone with visible frustration, which made him look strangely young, like a kid left out of a game he wanted to join.

“Do you see something?” Caelum asked.

“No.”

“Do you hear something?” Caelum pressed.

“I don’t see or hear anything, okay?” Hesitating, he blurted, “I can feel something, but you hate it when I tell you about those, because I can never explain it the way you want me to.” Arcturus sat up, resting his elbows on the rug to hold up his upper body. “It’s faint, okay? It’s like this really faint, vibrating, tapping feeling, like a tingling. Like electricity, maybe. I see a dark cloud, like I see around you sometimes, but this one’s a lot bigger.”

“You’re right,” Caelum said flatly. “That’s bloody useless.”

Arcturus’s voice grew defensive. “It’s not coming from upstairs. I don’t think it’s coming from here at all. It’s more like a fire that’s burning very far away, and it’s slowly being fed so that it’s getting bigger and bigger. That black cloud is getting bigger, too.”

Caelum’s jaw ticked involuntarily.

Another bunch of vague, indecipherable, Obeah hoodoo.

“What is wrong with you?” he asked finally. “Why the fuck would you tell me that?”

“Because you would be more mad if I didn’t,” Arcturus countered.

The kid wasn’t wrong.

He also wasn’t wrong about Caelum’s tendency to get irritated with these kinds of fuzzy, useless descriptions of things that made no sense. Maybe if he didn’t feel these things might be life or death, it wouldn’t bother him so much.

He’d like to think so, anyway.

As it was, trying to figure out whether his wife and closest friends might be alive from riddles, vague descriptions of tactile sensations, and nonsensical talk of clouds, was its own kind of torture. How was it that the only person in the cell with functioning magic was a half-trained, half-Magical teenager?

He knew he wasn’t being fair. The distance was mucking up the kid’s signal. When it was something near, the kid has a sunbeam-like precision, at least about certain things, but the further away it got, the more hoodoo vagueness crept in.