The Silver Cage Read online

  Iris tried not to seem too excited, tried to remain cool. But here she was standing in her kitchen and she was about to kiss Alfie. With no guilt. With no fear of rejection. Matthew had been dispatched on a trip to try to hunt down some more black and white film and they were alone. It was going to be as pure and clear and real as she had always dreamed kissing Alfie would be. She thought that right up until the moment when their lips met.

  And then everything shifted.

  Kissing Alfie was far, far more than any fantasy of kissing Alfie could have been. Once she had felt his lips – sort of firm and warm – against hers, along with his big hand on her shoulder and his other hand on the back of her head, she knew she was lost.

  The fantasy version of kissing Alfie she had been able to resist – just. Now she knew what the reality was like, she was lost to him. Swept away forever.

  They tumbled into bed. As she stared at Alfie’s long-imagined naked body, big and firm and strangely comforting, her stomach flipped and her limbs dissolved. When she touched her tongue to one of his tight brown nipples, electricity seemed to shoot through her. His mouth tasted like home, and later his cock tasted like heaven.

  The first time she let her lips slide over it, Alfie groaned, rolling his head back against the pillows. The second time, he reached down, grabbed her with a firm hand under each arm and pulled her back up on to the pillows.

  ‘Don’t you like that?’ Iris said as he tumbled her on to her back and climbed to straddle her naked body.

  ‘God, I do. But too much. I don’t want to come yet, Iris. I want this to last forever.’

  Iris sighed.

  ‘Our first time. Never have this again. Never want it to end.’ He dropped pecks of kisses over her face, down her jaw.

  ‘Oh, God,’ moaned Iris. ‘There. Do it again right there.’

  Alfie had just kissed her right on the corner of her jawline. He did it again. She moaned even more loudly.

  ‘You like that.’

  Iris gasped. ‘Apparently.’

  Alfie chuckled, dark and deep, and then opened his mouth and gently bit the sensitive spot.

  Iris levitated.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Alfie, taking his mouth from Iris’s skin and looking up at her. ‘That’s hot. Doing that to you is so fucking hot. I used to . . . I’ve always, uh, thought about you.’

  ‘Thought about me how?’ Iris said, although she had a pretty good idea.

  ‘You know, in that way?’

  ‘In a dirty way?’ Iris grinned at the way Alfie was blushing. ‘In a dirty rhythmic sort of way?’

  ‘Yeah. If you like. Yeah.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘And when I did, you know, I always kind of got off on the idea of controlling you. There’s something wild about you, Iris. Something savage. I want to fight you.’

  Iris laughed, pulling herself up on her elbows so she could look at his bulky body. ‘Fight me? I’d totally lose.’

  ‘Maybe. It’s kind of hot, though. Hot to think about.’

  Iris leant forwards and drew one finger down Alfie’s hot smooth chest. God, but he was beautiful. ‘Maybe. But right now I’d rather you just fucked me.’

  ‘Yes. I knew you were smart, Iris. That’s a great idea.’

  Alfie lined himself up as Iris lay back down. He slid inside so easily. She was wet, but, even so, his cock was big enough to make her catch her breath. Alfie moved inside her. ‘Oh, God, Iris. I’ve always wanted . . . Never knew . . . I’m in fucking love with you, Iris. It’s the wrong time to say it, I know. Too soon, while fucking. Double wrong. But, oh, God, it’s true. I just want this to be it. I just want forever. Uh. Oh, God. Never want this to end.’

  Iris clenched her muscles, hugging his cock. The waves of how he moved inside her were ripples of pleasure.

  Alfie moaned as she moved. ‘Oh, God. That feels amazing.’ He thrust a little harder then, making her moan in turn as he found spots inside her that made her see stars.

  ‘That’s like . . . explosions,’ Iris moaned, not caring whether or not she made real sense.

  In return, she gripped Alfie’s cock and twisted on it, overwhelming him with sensation, taking charge of him, of every part of him. He moaned, mouth open, head shaking as he began to come.

  Iris whispered, ‘You’re not the only one who has fantasies about control.’

  8

  ‘ALFIE?’

  But Alfie wasn’t there. Iris was dreaming, but awake – delirious and confused. She was still dangling in the manacles in the underground cavern, every muscle in her arms screaming, feeling like they were being wrenched out of their sockets. At first it seemed like everything was the same. Almost the same. The table and chairs, Alfie’s collar lying abandoned on the floor, the six dead werewolves, but there was something else. Something flitted across the doorway.

  Iris craned forwards in the chains. Her mouth felt bone dry and she was nauseous and dizzy. She wouldn’t be in the any state to fight. And if she was going to have to fight for her life then the chains were going to be a problem.

  When he stepped out of the shadows and grinned at her, she felt her heart flip over. White coat, red fatigues, hair like a flock of crows were circling his head.

  Blake took a couple of steps forwards. ‘So, Iris,’ he said, grinning, ‘you dying of dehydration, chained up in an underground cavern – or are you just pleased to see me?’

  9

  Wednesday, 20 February 2008

  IRIS HAD NO idea where she was or how long she’d been there.

  Often she thought she was still in the cavern. Her shoulders still screamed. But then, each time she opened her eyes, she was in a clean quiet room, diffused sunlight coming through the big grease-streaked windows, distant traffic noise, a cool clean fresh smell in the air. A warm soft bed. There was a building site near by, or something like it. She could hear the shouts of workmen, machines and the crash-smash of those workmen and machines not quite in perfect harmony. Sometimes, she half opened her eyes and through the window she could see sky and a dark-blue crane moving lazily, back lit by spring sunshine.

  Matthew – her twin brother’s ghost – appeared sometimes, sitting on her bed, but he was smiling, unspeaking and he usually vanished again in moments.

  Iris felt strangely content. More than once she thought she might be in heaven.

  She drifted. She didn’t really want to come back to reality.

  But then there was a time when she opened her eyes and a tall tightly put together woman with neat grey hair was staring down at her.

  ‘Hello, Iris,’ the woman said, her voice low and pleasant.

  Iris didn’t sit up – didn’t feel like it – but she kept her eyes open. ‘Am I in hospital?’

  ‘Sort of. I’m Erin Cobalt. This is Cobalt. Have you heard of us?’

  Iris shifted her head on the pillows in a sort of nod. ‘Um, yeah. Yes, of course. Blake told me, I think . . . You’re part of the government. The Home Office. You hunt vampires. You’re like us. Like the Institute, but with vampires.’

  ‘Well,’ said Erin, ‘you’re almost right. First of all we regulate vampires, rather than hunt them. We simply ensure that they abide by the various co-operation treaties. The other difference – the very big difference between us and you – is that we’re official. We have a permanent status. Vampires are classified as non-mythical. Werewolves aren’t.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Werewolves are mythical,’ said Iris dryly. ‘You are talking to someone who has killed over a hundred werewolves.’

  ‘Oh.’ Erin picked up a glass of water and took a sharp sip. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Miss Fox, I am fully aware that werewolves exist. I am simply saying they have mythical classification. That’s why when we set up the Institute we had to –’

  ‘What?’ said Iris, a little of her mistiness dispersing. ‘When you what? You didn’t set up the Institute . . . What are you talking about? Dr Tobias. Malcolm Tobias, he . . .’

  Erin shook her head and smiled. ‘Well,
yes, I know that Tobias had some kind of small set-up going. Working out of his basement, weren’t you? Mixing your own magical covers? Tobias came to us for funding and, after he convinced us that what you were doing was valuable, we decided to fund you so you could actually do something. We’d been talking for years about expanding into lycans. The deal was we’d fund the operation for a year before officially bringing it under the Cobalt umbrella.’

  ‘Right, I – I think. The Cobalt umbrella?’ Iris looked away from Erin and up at the distant ceiling. Her head spun. ‘Where’s Blake?’

  Erin made a sad, almost pitying face. ‘I was getting to that. Mr Tabernacle did a rather wonderful job rescuing you. He quite definitely saved your life –’

  ‘I’ve saved his life plenty of times,’ Iris snapped. They didn’t count debts like that. That was a rule.

  But Erin talked right over her. ‘He did, however, use some rather unorthodox methods. I am not sure if his plan was to spirit you away somewhere . . . In fact, it may be that he didn’t have a plan at all. But, clearly, when he found you, you were in a bad condition. So, he made what I can see to be the only really sensible choice: he brought you to us.’

  ‘What? He left me here! Where is he now?’ Iris started trying to sit up. Erin took a step towards her and placed two strong firm hands on her shoulders, pinning Iris down on the bed.

  ‘Don’t,’ Erin said, ‘don’t sit up.’

  ‘Where is he? I want to see him right now.’ It was then that Iris felt them, the firm, yet mostly unobtrusive medical restraints on her wrists, holding her down to the bed. ‘Listen, Mrs Cobalt . . .’

  ‘Dr Cobalt.’

  ‘Dr Cobalt, you can’t do this. What’s going on? I’m confused. I need to see Blake.’

  ‘I know you are, Iris. You nearly died down there.’

  ‘How long was I . . .?’

  ‘Four days. Then Blake finally figured it out. And you’ve been here ever since.’

  ‘What? How long have I been here? How long since Blake rescued me?’

  ‘Just over three weeks.’

  Iris gasped out loud. ‘Then he’s been gone for . . .’ She wasn’t sure, as her voice trailed off, if she was talking about Blake or Alfie.

  Iris squinted. Her brain felt all soft and mushy, so treacly it might start running out of her ears. ‘Did he trace the chip?’ She looked over at her right bicep where she had gracelessly forced the chip from her coms set into her arm. There was a neat row of stitches there. They’d taken it out.

  Erin saw her looking. ‘Not a bad idea that. Shame Mr Tabernacle didn’t tell us about it or we could have found you sooner. Of course, when we looked at that wound – it was horribly infected – we realised what you had done. You were about twenty-four hours away from death, we think.’

  ‘He probably thought I was safe with Alfie,’ she said softly, weakly.

  ‘Who’s Alfie?’

  Iris was about to say something, but she paused, suddenly wondering if she should tell this government-sanctioned paranormal regulation agency that she had a werewolf for a boyfriend.

  And, as her sentence died on her lips, Erin said, ‘You don’t mean Alfred Friday?’

  Iris frowned, but nodded her head very gently.

  ‘We’ve been going through the paperwork. Mr Tabernacle and Dr Tobias both had extensive files on Mr Friday. I haven’t found very much paperwork written by you at all, actually.’

  ‘Oh, I, uh, well, I was always mostly field work.’

  Erin nodded blankly, flipping a little wisp of hair out of her eyes. ‘Yes, I see. We understand that Alfred Friday was an unstable werewolf. Close to the skin. We have been examining the possibility of capturing such a creature for a while.’

  ‘But Cobalt deal with vampires.’

  ‘Minor scuffles aside, the vampire threat is mostly contained. Oh there’s still Darius Cole making a few angry noises now and then, but he got married recently and that has kept him quiet. But we’re going to push for a change in the status of lycans, an upgrade from mythical to non-mythical.’

  ‘Lycans are going to be made non-mythical? When is this going to happen.’

  ‘Well, strictly speaking it’s not fully processed yet. We used to think that, whatever the lycans were using to cover up their presence, it was clearly so good that we didn’t need to intervene. No one believed in them, and that meant it was wasteful to spend money protecting humans from them. But we knew that things might change, that’s why we took so much interest in your Oxford project. What Dr Tobias was doing was of enough interest for us to fund it.’

  ‘You do know that Dr Tobias turned out to be a lycan himself?’

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s all in Tabernacle’s files. That kind of thing is more common than you might think. We receive most of our funding, in fact, from the Vampire Clan Council themselves. Most paranormals like a quiet life. They often fund humans to keep control of their fringier elements without having to get their own spooky hands dirty. Tabernacle did tell us he’d killed Tobias. But we’ve seen the reports now. Clearly, that was just showboating. It was you, I believe, the warrior wolf. And our unstable Mr Friday is your ex-boyfriend.’

  ‘Er, yes, my ex.’ Somehow it seemed very clear to Iris that not telling Erin any more than she already knew about Alfie was for the best.

  ‘So where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We know he has some kind of tracking device embedded in him too. Tabernacle was kind enough to have written up a report on the whole thing. But that signal seems to be being jammed or damped somehow. We need you on this. Your experience. We need to find Alfie Friday. Can you imagine how powerful he must be? He ascended to the level of Ancient Beast, didn’t he? You killed the rest of the Silver Crown. He’s the only one. And he’s thralled to the Divine Wolf . . .’

  Iris shuddered. ‘But you still haven’t told me what happened to Blake. Uh, Mr Tabernacle. You said he’d brought me here. Where’s Blake now?’

  10

  BLAKE WAS SITTING on a bench in the Botanical Gardens. He’d been on the run from Cobalt for weeks. This was the first time he’d dared come back to Oxford.

  Finding witches was never an easy task, but he figured that this might be his best bet. The Silver Crown had been destroyed, and witches were bound to be interested in how that panned out, even if they weren’t planning to do anything to actually help.

  He waited. He wasn’t exactly sure how much time Lilith spent here, but one of her covens did meet here. And the Oxford Botanical Gardens had a reputation for being a place where the normal and the paranormal intersected. He didn’t know if it was true. But he’d been sitting here for an hour and there was no sign of Lilith, and he shouldn’t stay. He was on the run – not good to stay still for too long.

  That was when he saw someone else. A tall elegant redhead emerged out of nowhere – or, rather more succinctly, emerged from what was clearly a cloaking spell. Blake jumped up and chased Cate down the crunching gravel.

  Lilith and Blake might have had a little history. But Cate was the witch Blake knew the best. Cate had worked for the Institute of Paraphysiology as magical interfacing officer since . . . well, technically she still did.

  He caught her shoulder and she turned and smiled. ‘Oh, there you are, Blake.’

  Blake frowned. As if a witch would ever have trouble finding someone they were looking for. Witches were always doing stuff like this, pretending they weren’t unimaginably powerful – and then getting it weirdly kind of wrong, slightly off. ‘You were looking for me?’ he asked, not sure whether he wanted to play witch games or not.

  ‘Yes. Well. I was just wondering what was going on. The Institute is locked up.’

  ‘Yes. It’s been empty and locked up for almost a month. Iris and Pepper are at Cobalt. And, Cate, I can get into that place without a key so I seriously doubt that you would have any trouble if you really wanted to get inside.’

  Cate stopped Blake with a look that told him he was way off the
point. ‘Are they OK?’

  ‘Iris and Pepper? I don’t know. But things are serious. Cobalt want . . . They want Alfie. Unstable werewolf. Oh, God, this could go wrong so many ways. Um, I’m not sure if Pepper and Iris are prisoners, exactly.’

  ‘OK. Right,’ said Cate vaguely.

  ‘Yeah. Sure. OK. Shady government organisation want to get their hands on powerful supernatural creature. Not news. However, the real question is where is Alfie Friday? Iris was pretty delirious when I found her, but, if what she was muttering in the back of the truck is right, the Divine Wolf took him. The mother of them all. And she had him thralled tight enough that he left his beloved Iris to die down there. And, if that’s the case, well, I’m more than happy for Cobalt to find him. I’d rather they had him than she did.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cate in that cool-mouthed way that witches sometimes spoke when they were trying to speed things along by subtly conveying that they already knew simply everything, without making the person they were talking to feel the fabric of reality wobble. It never worked. Blake swallowed. Eurgh, gross, witches. ‘I want to see Lilith,’ he said. ‘I need . . . We all need her help. She has to intervene. Help Iris find Alfie.’

  Cate’s pale face lost a little more colour. ‘Inter – Uh . . . Are you sure? You’re going to ask . . .? You know that Lilith is, well, rather powerful, and, you’re a . . . OK, I’d never call Lilith a man hater, but she isn’t the best man tolerater around. She tries, but –’

  Blake made a sharp laughing noise, sarcastic and resigned. ‘Oh don’t worry,’ he said, ‘Lilith and I have a little understanding.’

  11

  ALFIE HAD BEEN chained up in the cage for weeks now. Divine came in twice a day to feed him and help him wash himself. Often he thought being kept like this was worth it for her touch and ministrations. Other times not.

  Thrall was a funny thing. It stretched and twisted. He could see the patterns it made in the way he felt about Divine and the way Leon felt about him.

  He hadn’t come in all that time. His cock was so sensitive breezes seemed to rouse it. His balls ached all the time. Often, after Divine had given him his first meal of the day, she took time washing him. It was almost a ritual, a sacred thing. She whispered to him about how he would be her consort. She would tease his cock to the edge of orgasm over and over. It was torment, pure torture. And yet, somehow, just the touch of her hand was better than nothing. Better than the time when he had been chained in the cage with no way of touching himself, permanently hard, permanently needy.