Page 29 of Hunted in the Shadows
I felt my heart give a very physical ache in my chest.Fuck, the hold she had on me. If we found that gemstone, I would never let her go.
Not human, screamed the voice in the back of my mind.She's not human.
But lately, it didn't seem to matter anymore. Not like it should've.
“Hey, pornstars. Take a break from being gross and check this out,” Cliff interrupted, approaching us with his arms full.
Sylvia scowled as we broke apart. If she weren’t so miserable and soaked, I had a feeling she would have doubled-down and closed the distance to me just to spite Cliff.
“Here, hold this.” He handed me a small, leatherbound book so that he could focus on inspecting the kerosene lamp in his other hand.
I wrinkled my nose, thumbing through the worn pages. “What is this?”
“Definitely bound in human skin and inked with blood,” Cliff said chipperly.
Gagging, I dropped the book to the floor and kicked it across the aisle—eliciting another booming laugh from Cliff.
“Looks like a circle of druids planted their flag in this place sometime ago,” Cliff said, sobering as he fiddled with his lighter. He glanced at the book, then nodded in Sylvia’s direction. “No wonder you’re feeling echoes or whatever. It’s like they had a checklist for making it freaky. Drawn full of cryptic symbols? Check. List of the impure? Double check.”
Sylvia’s fae light overhead dimmed to nothing, as though frightened away in sync with her grimace. “Fucking stars,” she muttered.
“And,” Cliff said, his voice low and laced with something conspiratorial, “you gotta see what I found at the back of the closet.” He paused for effect, letting the words linger in the air as a boyish excitement crept over his expression. “A secret room. Flashlight batteries are dying, so I couldn’t get a good look at it.”
I puffed out a coarse laugh. “What’re you hoping for more—treasure, or a sacrificial altar?”
“Fifty-fifty.” The lamp finally ignited, setting Cliff’s intrigued expression into eerie shadows as he backpedaled. “You coming, or what?”
With her wings finally dry enough to sustain flight, Sylvia took the air and led the way after the glow of Cliff’s lamp.
The moment I stepped through the closet door, I had half a mind to request another warm, glowing light from Sylvia.
A wide opening sat at the far end of the closet, and when I passed the threshold to descend a short flight of steps, I knew at once that this area had been tended to much more recently. The sleek handrails and solid stairs were nothing like the rustic architecture that druids favored.
This belonged to something entirely different, and the main attraction awaiting us at the bottom of the stairs was in ruins.
“What the fuck?” I muttered as I emerged into a basement.
The cages caught my eye first. Half melted criss-crossed bars lined the walls, looking eerily similar to how rabbits were enclosed in test labs.
Then, there were the scorch marks crawling along the warped walls. Apparently, this place had been reinforced enough to keep the fire from spreading, but the items within hadn’t been flameproof. Ashes were scattered along the ground, nearly everything burnt to a crisp.
“You think the fire was set on purpose to cover up whatever was going on here?” Cliff mused, kneeling to sift through a pile of ashes with his free hand.
“Maybe,” I said, frowning as I scanned every corner with my eyes. “Whatever equipment was in here, it looks expensive. I find it hard to believe they’d blow it up like that. Something must’ve gone wrong.”
A large metal workbench was the most discernible thing besides the cages, and even that was warped from the heat. Tools were melted to the surface, and portable chargers to power the equipment were completely busted—all of it unusable now.
There didn’t appear to be a corpse in sight—human or otherwise—which was somehow more unsettling than if therehadbeen one.
“Hey, look at this.” I delicately pulled a scrap of charred paper from a pile of ash under the workbench.
Cliff brought the lamp over. No more than a word or two could be read from the sheet, but a logo at the top was visible enough. A circular emblem in the vague shape of anE. The sight of it felt strangely corporate and out of place in a church this old. But it appeared perfectly at home in this ruined, high-tech basement.
“Am I crazy, or does this look like an invoice?” Cliff said, squinting at the ruined lines of text beneath. “Or an order form?”
“Beats me—it’s falling apart just from being moved.”
A small voice came from the entrance. “They’re iron.”
