Page 91 of Tethered to the World
Thankfully, the hall was empty.
She would’ve breathed a sigh of relief if she had any breath left. She cuddled Edgar to her chest, his worried chatter frantic as he crawled up her shoulder and curled around her neck. She cuddled him for a few seconds, needing the connection, then pulled her hair out of her ponytail to hide his presence, and studied her surroundings.
The hall was dark and narrow, possibly an abandoned building if the crumbling drywall was any indication. There were only two other doors besides the one she left, the passage disappearing around the corner and into darkness.
Annora headed down the hall, but only made it a few feet before she halted.
She couldn’t leave.
Innocent kids were being held there against their will, murdered to create a recreational drug for a tyrant who wanted to rule them all. The smart thing to do would be to get help, but instinct warned that she would never get out alive on her own.
Annora turned on her heel and backtracked, pausing by the first door, her hand hovering over the knob. Edgar hissed, curling tighter around her, and her hair lifted on the back of her neck. She slowly pulled away, curling her fingers into a fist and carefully eased down the hall.
As she neared the next door, the feeling faded.
She carefully wrapped her fingers around the doorknob, the cold metal biting into her skin as she eased open the door. Inside was a large room, the ceiling a black, gaping maw. The walls were torn down to studs, the place reeking of urine and excrement. There were about a dozen cots set up around the room, white netting dropping down from the ceiling, cocooning the beds.
She stood frozen, unable to make herself investigate what lay underneath the netting.
A cluttered desk stood by the door, vials, papers and books haphazardly covering the surface. One name popped out at her—Stanley Barnes—her uncle. She lunged forward, snatching up the pages, quickly scanning the document.
Which happened to be a contract.
He had been selling an elixir to the wolves for the past eight months for a tidy sum of twenty-five thousand dollars a vial. Hands shaking, she dropped the letter and scurried around the desk, a deep pit opening up in her stomach.
She stopped short when she saw the small fridge. Her skin began to prickle, her mouth dry, as she reached for the handle, afraid she already knew what she would find.
And she was right.
Inside the fridge were four familiar vials—each containing her blood—a reminder of her time with her uncle and his bi-weekly blood draw that left her weak and depleted for days.
She snatched them up, then smashed them against the floor, taking pleasure in the way they shattered. She quickly flipped through the desk, halting abruptly when her hand burned when it came into contact with an old sheet of paper tucked away from the rest.
The page was thick and crumbling along the edges, the sheet obviously hundreds of years old. The writing contained more images than words, but the longer she stared at the page, the more her stomach pitched.
She wasn’t sure how, but she knew what she held was a dangerous spell that would wreak havoc in the supernatural community—and beyond, if it got into the wrong hands. She folded the page, unwilling to leave it behind, and shoved it in her back pocket.
She straightened slowly, then turned toward the beds, her bones aching with the knowledge of what she was likely to find. She shuffled forward, then flung open the dingy white netting to see a near-desiccated body lying on a thin mattress, his wrists and ankles shackled to the bedframe. The corpse was practically naked but for a loincloth, the rest of its body covered with butterflies from the afterworld, the powdery, bioluminescent blue color nearly saturating their black wings.
Edgar peered out behind the curtain of her hair to observe the body, then curled up to go back to sleep, as if he’d seen the disturbing sight many times before.
The corpse wheezed with each breath, his chest creaking as he moved. His skin looked raw, half-rotten flesh showing where the parasites repeatedly bit into him. A putrid smell rose from the remains, mixed with the almost-too-sweet scent of flowers that came from the butterflies, the combination nauseating, and she realized the smell was a paralytic.
Watching their soul being consumed in the afterworld was one thing, but witnessing the flesh being literally devoured chilled her to the bone. She called the darkness, waving her hand over the butterflies, watching them vanish in a cloud of dust particles.
A groan tore from the corpse, his eyes cracked open, and she nearly stumbled away in horror. “Are you strong enough to heal?” She fiddled with the clamps holding him down, glancing around the rest of the beds, sickened to realize that at least a dozen or so more were suffering a similar fate. “The others…”
“Go…” It was a rasp, barely above a whisper.
The clamp clicked open, and she swallowed hard as the near-skeletal hand began to move, his skin seeming to sag off his body. She backed away, shaking herself free of the horror and headed for the next bed. It would be sooner rather than later before they found her missing and came looking.
The bodies were not so far gone in the next eight beds, the shifters conscious of the horrors happening to them, able to feel their flesh slowly disintegrate but helpless to do anything. A few of them were wolves, but the remaining were a series of other species.
Two of the bodies were dead, the butterflies fully formed, their wings slowly flapping as if in a food coma.
There were three more beds left when she flung open the next curtain and almost recoiled when she saw Vicki’s prone body. She looked in worse shape than the others, her body beaten and abused, her deterioration faster.
And she realized it was because Vicki wasn’t as strong as the others, the drugs she loved so much having already weakened her system.
