Captive Soul by Anna Windsor

girl. It’s you I’m keeping up with.”
    If Camille had been surprised before, she was stunned now. She didn’t know how to respond, and Ona didn’t seem to have anything else to say, either.
    Chills broke out along Camille’s neck and shoulders as Ona kept staring at her, and she remembered having the same reaction to her when she’d seen her as a child. Ona’s gaze was more like probing than simple staring, like Ona was reaching inside her to pry out—what?
    And why?
    “Okay, well.” Camille tried to keep her composure as she ran her fingers through her hair to tug out some of the wind knots. “I guess I should go find my quad. We have to get back to the city for patrol tonight.”
    Ona’s expression shifted to something like sadness, but by the time she nodded, her scarred face had become unreadable again.
    Camille moved past Ona carefully and slowly, wondering what the hell had just happened. It wasn’t like Camille needed any more stress, complications, or weirdness in her life. She was trying to work with a fighting group with a lot of issues, she’d just had her nose rubbed in her losses and failures and weaknesses again , she was dealing with the world’s only water Sibyl—and oh, yeah, Bela, the mortar of her triad, had gotten married and kicked Camille out of the bigger bedroom she’d had on the ground floor of the brownstone where they all lived, consigning her to the basement. That was quite enough for now, thank you.
    As she reached the doorway separating the corridor from the main entryway, she heard the dull, distant thunder of conversations, lots of people moving, and rain beginning to fall on Connemara’s boggy land. She got hold of the door’s metal handle and gave it a pull, and from somewhere behind her Ona said, “I may see you soon.”
    Camille let go of the wooden edge of the door and whipped around to ask Ona what that meant, but Ona was gone, as if she’d never been in the hallway at all. A tiny patch of stone in the center of the corridor seemed to flicker and shimmer like a small pool of water in the moonlight, but when Camille blinked, the area was normal again, gray and solid.
    Okay, maybe all that time she’d spent hiding out in the lower reaches of Motherhouse Ireland to regain her sanity after Alisa and Bette died hadn’t worked after all. This was definitely crazy. Sibyls worked with the elements, like all supernatural practitioners. There was no such thing as “magic” in the mythical storybook sense—only enhanced abilities to control, channel, and shape the natural energies of the earth. Way back before Sibyls started writing everything down, people used to call their elemental abilities “magicks” or “old magicks”—but those were just words, not reality.
    Ona couldn’t have gotten out of sight that fast, and she couldn’t have disappeared.
    Right?
    “ ‘I may see you soon,’ ” Camille repeated, her heart beating faster as her words echoed into the empty hallway. “Was that an offer or a threat?”
    She waited. That sense of things changing came back to her, just like it had when she was little, the first time she met Ona.
    “Ona?” she called into the empty hallway.
    Then she waited a little longer, but she got no answer at all.

(  4  )
    September
    John Cole’s knees hit stone so hard his teeth slammed together.
    The growling in the back of his mind morphed into roaring, and he wished he could rip the sound out of his head. He’d had this body for a few months now, and he’d figured out a few things about how to put it to good use—but he hadn’t figured out how to unplug that godawful noise, especially when something was pissing him off.
    Four massive hands shoved down on his shoulders and neck.
    Yeah. That was pissing him off.
    John jerked against the weird iron cuffs locking his hands behind his back, surprised they could hold him. His new body was super-strong, more powerful than five men put together, but something in the cuffs