My hand closed around the bar handle of the door on the left. A thunderous explosion from above shook the walls and trembled the ground beneath my feet. Dust drifted down. I sneezed and looked up, as if I could see up through the floor at what had happened.
“I hope that was the desk blowing up,” I said, wishing they could hear me. The barrier was beyond my powers or ability to detect, even through the Break. It didn’t matter, though, because Tovin had to know we were inside.
I pushed down on the bar. The door opened without resistance or noise. I slipped through into what, at first, looked like a high school science lab, or something out of a hokey television horror movie. Long metal tables covered with laboratory equipment straight from
The smell nearly felled me—a fetid mixture of waste and blood and rot, made sour by chemicals and lemon- scented cleaner. Fluorescent bar lights gave the entire room a sickly yellow cast. While my brain caught up to the stink, I scanned the perimeter of the room. The right wall was all open shelves and locked cabinets, fully stocked with supplies I couldn’t identify. The left and rear walls looked like dog kennels, each section four feet wide and the height of a man, partitioned by cement blocks. Iron bars more suited to a prison cell-block made up the fronts.
Something growled inside one of those kennels. A chill wormed its way up my spine. The hounds. They were artificially created hybrids, the source of which was right here and had been for quite a while, given the intricacy of the lab and its contents.
I made my way to the nearest cage, curiosity edging out common sense. The kennels weren’t lit, leaving the interiors cast in shadow. I remained at arm’s length and squinted through the iron bars. Matted, moldy straw covered the floor, which extended less than six feet to the rear.
Huddled in the corner was a creature the size of a five-year-old child. If it had ever been human, it had long ago ceased being so. Oily black skin glinted in the dim light. Short, connected spikes, like the dorsal fin of a pickerel, ran down its spine. I saw no face, no hands, only the backside of it.
The kennel had no label or designation, only the letter A painted above it. Each kennel was similarly lettered, all the way to N. Fourteen kennels, fourteen potential experiments. I forced myself to the next one. In the center, nestled in soiled straw, was a teenaged boy. Half of a teenaged boy. The entire left side of his body was stone, fixed in place and anchoring him to the ground. He blinked at me with one brilliant blue eye, an image of perfect despair.
“Holy shit.”
I backed away, unable to bring myself to look into the rest of them. I didn’t want to see the abominations created by mad scientists—or more precisely, a mad elf—for reasons I could never hope to understand.
Something squealed. My head snapped up and right, to the very last kennel. The door had swung open. I slipped sideways, putting the rows of lab tables between me and it, fixed on the shadowed interior. The occupant snuffled. Straw shifted—a dry and wheezy sound. My knife hand twitched.
The thing that finally showed itself shouldn’t have been able to move. It shouldn’t have even been alive. The size of a house cat, sans fur or distinctive markings or muscle mass of any kind, it had twin incisors at least four inches long. Like the living skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger kitten, it trotted out of its cage and leapt onto the nearest lab table.
Claws clicked on the metal surface. I watched it sniff a petri dish. It hissed—a horrible sound like steam escaping. One step at a time, I backed toward the door. It continued its forage along the table, paying me no heed. Only a few feet to go and I would escape the waking nightmare. My heart pounded so loudly I was sure the thing could hear it.
I closed my hand around the door handle and pushed down. The gentle clack was all it took. Skele-kitty raised its head, sunken eyes looking right at me. It yowled, and the screech made my teeth ache. It raced toward me, faster than it had any right to move. I pushed against the door, went through, and shoved it closed again. The critter hit with a thump. Unless it knew how to open doors, it was trapped.
“Okay, let’s try door number two.”
With perfect silence in the stairwell and lobby above, I pushed through the second door and into another stairwell. The basement had a basement. Interesting. It also had no light of any kind. After a moment fiddling with the door and finding no way to prop it open, I gave up and let darkness envelop me.
The stairs were steeper, wood instead of cement, and still held a hint of pine fragrance. They were new enough that I doubted they were part of the original floor plans. I dragged my fingertips along the rough, packed- dirt walls, each step taking me farther into the gloom.
My foot finally landed on something harder than wood. I scraped the toe of my sneaker around. Cement floor. I’d hit bottom. I fumbled until my eyes adjusted enough to make out a thin line of light on the floor, roughly the width of a door. The metal frame was embedded in the dirt walls and within it was another steel fire door. Another handle. Another room.
I pressed my palm against the smooth metal. It hummed beneath me like a living thing. The short hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I was there, on the precipice of solving my entire three-day ordeal. Facing Tovin, and getting what few answers he might reveal before I cut his black heart out with my knife. But standing there, so close to what I wanted, I hesitated.
Wyatt was supposed to be by my side for this. We should have been facing Tovin together. A pang of loneliness loosed a flood of power through my body. I had to maintain control. The last thing I needed was to teleport out in the middle of killing the bad guy. I inhaled deeply, blew out through my mouth, and pushed down on the door handle.
Showtime.
Chapter 29
I felt like I’d stepped out on the other side of the world. The walls were dug roughly from the earth. Roots protruded from both walls and ceiling, and the air was heavy with the odor of fresh dirt and incense. Sage, maybe, or some similar herb. It was about thirty feet in diameter, a perfect half-circle with the door at the top of the arch. In front of me, all along the straight wall, were dozens and dozens of lit candles, perched in the notched earth.
Six metal crates, the type people carry large-breed dogs in, stood along the wall, beneath the candles. The crates were half covered in dark cloths and vibrated with movement—scratching, growling, living beasts wanting to get out. After what I’d seen upstairs, the possibilities of what were in those crates chilled me.
In the center of the dugout space was a brick-lined circle the size of a hula hoop. Still, black water filled it— the same as the pool at the base of First Break’s waterfall—dark and mysterious, and seeming infinitely deep. Energy crackled and snapped in the air, and standing a few feet inside, I felt as close to true power as I’d ever come.
I stepped closer to the pool, drawn by its convergence of energy and uncertain why. Was water somehow part of the equation? It made sense, given what I knew and what I’d seen both in the mountains and the city. The majority of the Dregs were concentrated in the downtown area—a peninsula of land with a river on two sides and the mountains directly north. Location was just as important an ingredient in magic as emotion, it seemed.
I gazed into the onyx pool, at my tangled hair and bloodstained face and wide, searching eyes. Searching for someone seemingly not in the room.
The door slammed shut, its report echoing loud enough to set my ears ringing. I pivoted on one ankle, hand immediately on the grip of Kismet’s gun, and my heart nearly stopped. Tovin stood inside the room, as unconcerned by events around him as he’d seemed earlier on the balcony. In front of me, three paces away, he seemed unimpressive. But physical stature meant little. I had seen his power at work.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” he said, commanding and firm. I hadn’t expected a forceful voice from such a small, unassuming body.
I arched an eyebrow. “What I’ve done? Those aren’t my science projects upstairs, pal. Even I’m not that sick.”
“Unfortunate mistakes that I’ve grown rather fond of. I doubt you’ve ever had a pet in your short,
