I held Ava tightly in my arms. Water dripped onto my head from the ceiling.
“Oh my gods,” Kallie whispered.
Everyone just stood there for several seconds, taking it all in. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know what they were seeing. Water splattered on my head again, and I reached up to wipe it out of my hair— but my fingers came away sticky. I reached toward the ceiling to figure out where it was coming from. My stomach bottomed out when my hand sank into something soft and squishy. Chains clinked, and I gasped when I realized what it was.
A body.
Wet innards spilled from the corpse suspended above me. Ava and I screamed as we jumped backward. The guts landed with a loudsplaton the floor. I gagged, and Ava whimpered.
“What the hell is this place?” I demanded.
Kallie stepped past me and entered the room. Oberi followed her, sniffing the air. “The Warden has set up metal tables, like those you’d find in a morgue,” Kallie told me. “There are blood stains on the floor and broken crystals everywhere.”
“This is where they experimented on them,” Ava said with certainty. “This is where he tried to uncover their demigod powers.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
She swallowed audibly. “A pretty damn strong feeling.”
“Do you think he could’ve experimented on Eddie?” I wondered.
“I don’t think he had time,” Ava replied. “Apart from this corpse, I don’t see any fresh blood.”
“This corpse is still fresh, though,” Marcus said thoughtfully. He stepped around me to inspect the room with Kallie. “I’ll bet anything this guy died earlier today.”
My guts twisted so tightly that I could barely get the question out. “Is it anyone we know?”
Marcus swallowed audibly. “It’s Tony. His body is hanging off hooks.”
The Dangerous Dragon. I should’ve been sick to know what the Warden had done to him, but truth be told, I didn’t care that Tony was dead. He’d hit Ava last semester, and I’d nearly killed him for it. At least he couldn’t hurt her anymore.
“The Warden must’ve kept him prisoner for a long time,” Ava said in a hollow tone.
“His test results showed he was part Elf,” I reminded her. “I’m sure the Warden bled every bit of magic he could out of him.”
“The Warden’s experiments are failing,” Kallie said from across the room. “These crystal bits are useless. I can’t feel a thing within them.”
“Maybe—” Marcus started, but he cut off when Oberi started to whine. “Hold on.”
“You found something?” I asked, hoping it might lead us to the Elves.
There’s something under this table,Oberi said.
Marcus gasped, and I heard something jingle. “It’s from my coven,” he rasped.
“What’d you find?” I questioned.
Marcus placed something into my hand. I ran my fingers over it to see it was a small star pendant attached to a chain.
“The five-pointed star represents the five types of witches in the Miriamic Coven,” Marcus explained. “Alice wore a necklace like this during the Games.”
“So shewasdown here,” Ava said, sounding horrified.
Nausea slammed into me. We were right. The Warden had never sent Alice and her team home when they won the Darke Games. It was all a ruse to identify the strongest inmates and run experiments on them. I had been holding on to the last shred of hope we had that we’d been wrong, but this confirmed it. Guilt ate away at me with the confirmation, and my fingers curled into a fist around the necklace.
“This should’ve been us,” I said in a hollow tone. “We gave up our win for Alice and her team. We should’ve been the ones to win and been experimented on down here. I thought we were saving them.”
“We all did,” Kallie said gently. I could hear the guilt in her tone. We all felt awful. This was our fault.
