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“Sounded like the entry doors,” Luce answered.
I silently agreed, but there wasn’t anyone or anything there.
“Great. It’s haunted,” Cameron sarcastically remarked.
“Not haunted, but a little girl watching us from the end of the hall,” Annie stated in a quiet tone.
She was already pulling her shotgun from the restraint beneath the acolyte robe.
What? I turned back around, shining a beam of light ahead of us. Oh, come thee fuck on. I thought the second I saw a kid with what looked like a goddamn machete in her hand.
A baby deer mask covered her face, which I assumed meant she was one of these ‘Stags’ since there were tiny antlers on the front of it.
“The blood on her blade is fresh,” Luce pointed out.
“Hell to the no, no,” Cameron sang beneath his breath, making Luce and Butcher chuckle.
“Um, hi?” I called to the little girl, unsure what else to say. I’d never been great with small kids.
“What are you doing? Don’t talk to it,” Butcher whispered.
“What are you doing in here?” I asked, ignoring him and slowly inching forward.
I had to be cautious; I knew being a child didn’t make her any less dangerous than I was. Dad taught me how to bleed people out nice and slow when I was ten, which was considered late by most standards.
She giggled, like a tiny possessed demon, pointed to the left hall, and then proceeded to dart up the stairs, disappearing into the dark.
“Did you guys notice her lack of flashlight? Kinda feel like a giant pussy now,” Cameron joked.
Annie scoffed at him and surged ahead of us. I stayed right behind her, slowing when she held a hand up for me to wait.
She checked right, and then looked left. “It’s nothing,” she said after a minute, dropping her arm.
“So they’re here still.” I started moving forward again. “Where do you think they’re keeping…?” I trailed off when I finally saw what the little girl had been pointing at.
“That’s what you consider nothing?” I asked Annie, gesturing to the body strung up above a door labeled Gymnasium.
She shrugged, “This isn’t anything special.”
“There’s your fresh kill,” Butcher said to Nyx after they rounded the corner behind me.
I shined my light over the man’s body, or what remained of it. Both his hands had been severed clean off, leaving bloody stumps in their place.
A rusted chain held him up by his broken legs; both had shiny white bone piercing through his skin.
If none of that killed him, his death would surely have been caused by the removal of his head, which was nowhere in sight. A thick pool of darkening blood was on the floor beneath him, no sign of the appendage.
There wasn’t any particular smell that came from killing like this, mainly just the metallic scent from all the blood being spilled.
“There is no way that kid did all this on her own,” Luce said.
“I’m honestly more concerned with where his head is because that gremlin didn’t have it,” Cameron replied.
“She isn’t alone,” I began.
“Nope—and whoever is in here with her more than likely has who we’re looking for, and they know we’re here now,” Luce finished.
“We need to split up and cover more ground. Annie and I can follow the kid; you guys decide who goes left and right.”
