A Shifter's Tale

Voice

~46~

In some ways, I was grateful for my capture in the sense that it gave me time to rest. Within an hour I was asleep, and I knew not how long I dozed for. I was awoken by a loud rapping on the other side of my cell door and my guard was peering in through the window with a condescending gaze.

“I have a drink for you,” he said as my eyes focused on him.

“I want nothing you offer me,” I replied, my voice rasping from lack of liquid. As thirsty as I was, I was not prepared to risk the possibility of witchcraft potions or other crafts that could render me either unconscious or dead.

“You have my word, it’s clean,” he prompted.

“Why should I take any word of yours to be truth?”

“You need to drink,” was all he said, and showed me a stone goblet through the small window. I stared at it for a while, battling my thirst with logic, before I pushed myself onto my feet and walked to him, taking the goblet and examining the clear liquid in the poor light. It appeared and smelt clean enough, but my knowledge of witchcraft was lacking. The guard turned his back on me and I wandered back to my corner, staring at the water for a long while.

My throat burning with thirst, I sipped at the drink and held the water in my mouth for a short time while I examined the taste. I could find no fault and gulped down the rest of the goblet’s contents.

I dozed for the next half an hour or so, but I could sense no side effects from the water, and so presumed the guard had been telling the truth and the water had been completely clean. If anything, the water offered a new lease of energy that, along with my rest, allowed me to become more alert and aware of what was happening around me.

Having nothing else to do, I focused on my hearing.

As I strained my ears past my own, steady breathing, I listened to the guard pacing in front of my cell door, his breathing steady but shallow. If I listened harder, I could hear the scurrying of mice or rats on the rock floor hidden between crevices in the rock walls of the cells. The mice scampered along the wall to the left a little way, and then came running back a few moments later. This pattern repeated for many minutes and showed no signs of letting up, and I wondered what they could have been doing that required such monotony.

Looking past the mice was difficult for my shifter ears, but I persisted and listened for any slight tremor on the air that I could perhaps pick up. For several moments I sat, brow furrowed, listening to the silence that lay beyond the mice’s feet. The further I listened, the deeper the silence became…Until a voice broke through the barrier and penetrated my consciousness.

The voice was incredibly faint and I could only decipher a few words from the string of sentences.

“…perhaps then you would…or if…if you don’t eat…will have to resort to force…”

The voice was threatening, perhaps another shifter that refused to comply with the requests of the Breeders. I could not imagine many of them being willing to mate through force or other means, but from the shifter women I had seen earlier, some of them were obeying through some form or other; unless the Breeders were forcing themselves on them and taking their chances on the child.

My heart stopped beating as a second voice joined the first, and this one I recognised.

“…tell me. The next… I have…shan’t mate with anyone I don’t wish to,” said Hunter, and my eyes snapped open. Struggling to keep my ears trained on the two arguing voices, my eyes tried to locate where they emanated from without drawing attention to my guard.