“What do you feel?” I asked.
“There are a lot of bodies, buried about six feet deep,” Charlie said. “But under that…”
Charlie cut off mid-sentence and pressed his hand deeper into the dirt. “There’s some sort of structure underneath all the graves, about twenty feet down. It’s huge… a kind of compound. My Earth magic didn’t notice it before, because it just stopped looking once it got to the bodies. I didn’t suspect there was anything else under them.”
Victory rattled in my chest. “Let’s get inside,” I said.
I strode forward confidently. Oberi put his nose to the ground and sniffed as Rishi jumped from headstone to headstone. I took Charlie’s hand and did my best to lead him around all the different graves.
We stopped in front of the mausoleum in the middle of the cemetery’s property. It was a small, private building, built to house the resting place of one person. Two stone doors were chained up at the front of the monument, underneath a very grim and eerie looking gargoyle.
Hmm. Do you think the entrance could be in the big, scary, ominous and yet entirely obnoxious mausoleum? Oberi said sarcastically.
We approached the monument. It was old, at least a couple hundred years or so, but despite the moss and thorns that covered the mausoleum, it was still standing tall. I approached the doors and ran my hand over the lock holding them together.
“These chains are new,” I murmured. They’d been put on recently. They hadn’t even had enough time to rust in Darke Island’s rainy weather.
Kallie approached a plaque attached to the side of the mausoleum. She brushed off the dirt and read aloud, “Here lies Vincenzo Fillipo. Doctor, Scholar, Friend.”
“Ooh, I heard about him,” Marcus blurted. “He was the crazy doctor who built the original asylum ages ago, then experimented on the patients. When he got caught, there was supposed to be a trial for his crimes, but he died before he could be brought to justice.”
“Maybe he didn’t die,” Charlie said ominously. “Maybe he just faked his death as a way to continue his experiments.”
“Only one way to find out.” I put my hand to the chains, and they melted off. I struggled to push open the massive concrete doors of the mausoleum. Charlie and Marcus ran forward to help me. The boys opened the doors, which led to a darkened room. Oberi shifted into a husky, so he could follow us in.
I ignited my Fire and held it up to see. The mausoleum was bare, save for a plain stone coffin in the center of the room.
Marcus and Charlie went forward to move the coffin’s stone slab off the top. Kallie rushed to help them. With her shifter strength, they budged the slab off the coffin, and it slid aside. Inside the coffin was not a body, but stairs that led downward.
“There it is,” I whispered. The Infernal Underground… we’d found it.
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
CHARLIE
Ishivered as we descended the long staircase. Ava held my hand, and she shuddered as the area around us grew cold. I held my breath and listened closely for the sound of screams— for anything, really. I heard nothing but the soft pad of our own footsteps. It was eerie, and I feared we were already too late.
We reached the bottom of the stairs unharmed. The chilly air expanded into a long hallway, but the silence was deafening. The slight scent of something rotten touched my nose, but I couldn’t be sure of what it was.
“That was too easy,” I whispered. “Where are the wards? The spells?”
“Maybe the Warden doesn’t need them,” Ava replied. “He’s arrogant enough to think he’s concealed this place well enough.”
“He needs the guards to do his dirty work,” Kallie pointed out. “If he placed a ward around this place, they couldn’t come and go.”
Ava’s hand shook in mine. “I can’t see a thing.”
“I’ll use my witch light—” Marcus started, but he cut off with a gasp. He jumped backward and knocked straight into me. He hit me so hard that my hand slipped out of Ava’s. I stumbled, and Rishi screeched when I stepped on his tail. His cry echoed down the long hall.
I caught myself on a ledge cut into the wall. Something tumbled from the ledge and landed with a loudclunkon the ground. My fingers grazed something long and hard. I picked it up and ran my hands over it, trying to make sense of it. My heart leapt to my throat when I realized what it was. I instantly dropped it and scurried a few steps back.
Bones.
My foot landed on top of the bones that had fallen from the wall. A sickeningcrunchsounded beneath my heel, and I knew instantly that I’d just crushed a skull.
My voice wavered. “Wh-what is this?”
Ava grabbed my shirt and pulled me farther away from the wall. She curled into me. “It’s a crypt,” she said in a shaky tone. “There’s a long hallway, with endless doorways and holes in the walls between them.”
