The door to the back room swung open, and I lifted my attention over Tom to see two men wrestling with a frantic, tied woman. My gaze darted to the knives and the bowl, then to her bandaged wrists and the blood on the floor holding me. Shit.

She was scared, fighting them though her ankles and wrists were bound with duct tape and she wore a gag. “Who is that?” I demanded, struggling to hide my fear. Oh, my God. She is the goat.

“The woman you requested.” Tom shifted in his sneakers to look at her. “We had to go out of the city to find her. Again, my apologies for the delay.”

Her bare arms were brown from the sun, and her long red hair was bleached by it. Shit on toast, she looked like me, but younger, her limbs lacking the definition of my martial arts practice. Her fear redoubled as she saw me, and she shrieked, starting to fight in earnest.

“Don’t hurt her!” I demanded, then shifted my expression to one I hoped looked lascivious enough. “I like untouched skin.”

Tom flushed. “Ah, we couldn’t find a virgin.”

The woman’s eyes glistened with tears, but I saw the hint of fury in her. I quite honestly thought that Al wouldn’t care if she was a virgin or not. “Don’t hurt her,” I said again, and the two men wrestling her out dropped her on the floor, standing with their arms crossed above her.

She looked like me. What Al had been going to do with her was sickening. Please let her be the first one…. “Let me out,” I said, standing at the arc of ever-after. “Now.”

The acolytes shifted with an excited tension. They wouldn’t know what hit them.

“Let me out!” I demanded, not caring whether I sounded like a demon. Hell, maybe I was one. My head hurt, but I didn’t touch it. Let this be a mistake. Let this all be a big mistake.

Tom looked at the woman, and the first hints of remorse at what he was going to allow to happen to her flickered in his eyes. But he turned away, greed pushing the guilt out. “Do you vow to show us how to successfully perform the spell we want and leave us unharmed, exacting your toll on that woman instead of those who called you?”

I vow you’ll never see the outside of a cell again. “Oh, yeah,” I lied. “Anything you say.”

The idiots behind him smiled and congratulated each other.

“Then be free,” Tom said with laughable showmanship, and with the six of them clapping once in unison to indicate their agreement, their collective circle fell.

I shuddered as the prickling vanished, realizing how much it had bothered me to be helpless like that. It hadn’t been anything like being in Trent’s cage.