“Okay, the prison is clear,” Ronan said when the last vampire prisoner had been taken upstairs. “Time to move out.”
After securing everyone in the mausoleum, there were only a dozen of us left down here—Haley, me, and two other witches named Bex and Sasha from Verona’s group; Ronan and Ash; Darius; Jael: Sparkle; Elena and Detective Hobb in their wolf forms; and Emilio, who’d shifted back into human form. We fanned out down a long corridor that branched off from the prison chamber, creeping past dozens of abandoned offices, unoccupied cells with barred entries, and bare-bones sleeping chambers without them. Asher managed to find a couple of dead tablets and a cell phone, and Darius tracked down a file box containing four thumb drives, a few maps of Washington, two hand-written notebooks, unused shipping labels to an address in Blackmoon Bay, and a bunch of receipts, all of which we’d sort through later.
Other than that, we’d come up pretty empty on the intel front.
“Seems like they started clearing out days ago,” Emilio said. “The food wrappers in the trash cans are at least that old.”
“You’re right.” Darius sniffed the air. “No human or fae has been down here in atleastthat long, maybe longer. They’ve probably moved on to Blackmoon Bay.”
“And left their prisoners behind?” I shook my head. “No way. There has to be more to it than this.”
“The prisoners we’ve just liberated couldn’t possibly be of use to them anymore, Gray.” Darius said. “To the hunters and fae, transporting them probably seemed like a liability—look how long it took us just to get them aboveground. Perhaps they decided to cut their losses.”
“I might agree with that,” Emilio said, “but something isn’t adding up. Why leave so many guards behind just to deal with a couple dozen prisoners who don’t even have the strength to stand, let alone mount an escape or attack?”
“We need to keep looking,” I said, and Haley nodded. Our other sister was here somewhere, or at the very least, shehadbeen—and recently, too. My instincts were screaming at me loud and clear. I wouldn’t leave until we found her, or found some clue that would indicate her whereabouts.
We continued down the corridor, checking every single room, until we finally reached the T at the end. There was a large, locked door in the center of the T, made of heavy oak and carved with runes, bigger and stronger than any of the others. From there, the corridor branched out again in both directions.
We cleared the corridor first—just more of the same abandoned office spaces with a few rooms in between that looked like doctors’ exam rooms.
I tried not to linger too long in those—the dried blood smeared on the floor and exam tables was enough to make the bile rise in my throat.
The only additional pieces of intel we’d come up with were a couple of folders containing some kind of medical records, presumably for the prisoners.
None of them bore my sister’s name, or anything that sparked even a glimmer of recognition.
We finally converged again at the large door in the center of the T. Those of us who’d brought weapons drew them, Haley and I readying our magic as Emilio kicked in the door.
For such an imposing piece of wood, it splintered and swung open easily, the runes remaining as dead as everything else. Motion sensors triggered the lights, bathing the space before us in a warm, pleasant glow.
Leaving Elena, Sasha, and Detective Hobb to patrol the corridors, the rest of us headed into the office. Instead of the same basic setup we’d expected to find, this one was massive and ornate, with gleaming hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves stuffed with dusty old tomes and lore books, a wall of high-tech computer peripherals, a small conference table with six leather chairs, and a huge mahogany desk situated square in the middle—something you’d expect to find an in an executive suite in Manhattan rather than in an underground outpost.
“Whoever worked here was pretty high up the ladder,” Bex said, running her hand along the conference table. Like Sophie, Bex was able to pick up on the psychic imprints people left behind on objects, and now she let out a deep sigh. “A lot of people got fired in this room. Some of them were killed.”
Suppressing another shiver, I glanced at Haley, who had the same wide-eyed look on her face as I felt on my own.
“I’ve been here before,” I whispered, images of the place flickering through my mind’s eye.
“Me too,” Haley said. “It was the place we saw in our vision during the blood spell for Darius.”
She was right. I could almost see the woman again now, paging through the books spread out across her desk.
“She’s a vampire,” Darius said, his voice holding a note of surprise. He scented the air again, then slid open a recessed panel on the far wall, between two bookcases. The space he’d revealed lit up immediately.
“It’s a refrigerator,” he said, and I peered over his shoulder to peek inside.
Every shelf was lined with neat, unbroken rows of the same thing.
Blood. Bottles and bottles of blood.
“This is the expensive stuff,” he said, opening one up and sniffing it. I waited for him to take a sip, but he didn’t.
“From the blood bank?” I asked, though I had my doubts. In all my time delivering blood orders for Waldrich’s Imports, I’d never seen anything like that.
“I’m afraid not.” Darius capped it without drinking it, and set it back on the shelf. “This collection was bottled at the source, so to speak.”
My stomach churned. Humans. She’d been draining humans, bottling their blood for her own personal collection. Who knew whether she’d kept them alive; perhaps they were the people who Bex thought died here.
