“I can’t get a read on her now,” Reva said.
“She was here. But she’s… They’re… You know what? It’s areallylong story, guys.” I ran my hands along the wall surrounding the bars, looking for a keycard reader or access panel like the ones Fiona and I had found in the other chamber. “And I’ll be more than happy to fill you in later. Like, over shots. In another fucking town. At some sleazy bar where we’ll be singing karaoke and telling war stories about the time we iced a bunch of hunters and burned this whole place to the ground. But until then, we need to concentrate on getting the fuck out of here.”
“Agreed,” Haley said.
“Reva,” I said, “what can you tell me about this place and the people running the show?”
“The cave system itself is massive,” she said, “but the prison part is only about a mile long, and not that deep. There are a few big chambers like this, and cages, but mostly smaller cells where they keep different people and… other things.”
The memories of what she’d seen haunted her eyes. Poor fucking kid.
“There’s the medical lab,” she went on. “That’s where they do most of the experiments. A kitchen, a couple of rooms for the guards. That’s about it.”
“You said you’d been outside—do you know how they come in and out?”
She nodded. “There’s an old pier on the beach with a fish-and-chips place that looks like it closed down a million years ago. There’s no public beach access, so it’s pretty isolated. The hunters come in and out through a hidden entrance underneath the pier.”
“In the water?”
“Yeah, but it’s not really water. It’s just spelled to look that way.”
“Fae magic,” I said.
“Exactly.”
She continued to fill me in about what she’d seen on her travels, confirming a lot of what I’d already suspected. Jonathan had a rag-tag crew of hunters and a few supers—mostly mercenaries, just like Fiona had said. They’d been nabbing witches and supers, killing some of them, bringing the others here. Jonathan was trying to create hybrids, along with various magical and biological weapons.
And now he had help from the fae.
“Do you guys know anything about a fae prick named Orendiel?” I asked.
Reva shook her head.
“Doesn’t sound familiar,” Haley said, “but therehavebeen more fae around lately. I get the sense there’s some kind of power struggle going on.”
“How so?”
“At first, it was mostly just Jonathan and a few hunters. But they’ve been talking about someone they call ‘the old man,’ and I think that might be Jonathan’s father. Jonathan gets real twitchy any time someone mentions him.”
Snippets of the conversation I’d overheard between Shears and Smokey Joe echoed in my skull.
…the sooner the old man takes control, the better.
Kid’s a fuck-up, Shears. Always has been.
Don’t hold your breath waiting on the old man… He won’t make a move as long as Jonathan’s alive. Can’t risk the kid fucking things up with Orendiel…
This shit had coup written all over it. I didn’t know jack about the old man, but if it was true what they said about apples falling from trees, he was even more dangerous than his fucked-up son.
Probably smarter than him, too, given that he’d either implanted his own people into Jon’s operation, or gotten Jon’s people to flip.
“Anyone got any juice left in there?” I asked the witches.
“Just Reva,” Haley said. “Norah bound our active powers, and this whole place is locked tight with fae magic.”
“Norah Hanson?” I asked. I’d forgotten about her. “The coven leader?”
“She’s a fucking traitor,” one of the other witches said, coming to stand at the bars with Haley and Reva. She was a little older—maybe mid-forties, with a husky smoker’s voice and piercing yellow eyes. Her cheek was bandaged, her arms covered in bruises. “Turns out she was working with the hunters the whole time.”
