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Perv.
And as a telepath, you've never listened in to other people's thoughts or conversations, he said dryly. It's all the same, Riley.
We'd neared the archway, so I didn't answer, just wrapped the shadows around me and moved with vamp speed to the far side of it. Then I shook off the shadows, glanced at him, and nodded.
Go, he said, and we moved as one into the next room.
Which was actually a cavern. It was small, dank, and the air was putrid with the aroma of blood, death, and rotting flesh. The torches that lined the walls and provided the flickering light had to be battery powered, because they certainly weren't real. Nor could I see any power outlets or electrical cords. But at least they provided enough light to see by, although deeper darkness still haunted the more distant corners. Without them, and with no natural light, even my infrared would have been useless.
A stone table sat in the middle of the cavern, its top stained a dark reddish-black and its side streaked with the same heavy color. I had no doubt that its source was blood-blood that must have been spilled over years and years rather than merely the few months they'd been here in Melbourne.
Black candles sat around the base of the table, each one marking the point of a pentagram that had been etched into the stone flooring.
Which meant this wasn't the hideaway of the sorcerers.
It was their place of deep magic.
Nice setup, Kye said. His gaze paused on the bloody table, then he looked at me. This where they raise the zombies?
It feels like the same sort of magic. I stopped at the end of the wide ramp, right on one of the pentagram points. There didn't seem to be any magic coming off it, so maybe it wasn't active, but the room itself still burned with energy. With death.
My gaze moved across the stone table to the rough-hewn wall on the far side. Hollows had been carved into the stone, and in each one sat several items. A little pile of hair and a football in one. A brush and a football sweater in another. A pair of Nikes and a hubcap in yet another. All things men would generally have owned, not women.
Had these things belonged to the men raised from the dead? Did part of the ritual require something that was precious to them?
My gaze went back to the table. All I knew about zombies came from fiction and Hollywood, and I had firsthand experience at just how wrong they could get it. But there was one thing that remained absolute, regardless of the truths and half-truths that might abound-and that was the fact that life required blood. Hell, even unlife required blood.
The question here was, whose blood was she using to reanimate her dead?
Kye walked past me, his clean musky scent like heaven against the foul stench of the room. Though he was careful to avoid the pentagram and candles, his attention seemed to be on the ground itself.
Which piqued my interest. What's wrong?
These, He squatted and pointed a finger toward the dust-covered stone.
I walked over and stopped beside him. What he was actually pointing at looked like two wheel marks.
It's probably tracks from Jessica's wheelchair, I said, dismissing it.
He glanced up at me. One of our sorcerers is paralyzed?
The zombie raiser is. That's why she was resting on her belly when she was in crow form at the warehouse.
At least it explains the ramp getting into this place. He rose and followed the tracks around the room. There's a lot of tracks going from the pentagram to these hollows in the wall.
Meaning this is her workplace, not Hanna's. I walked around the opposite way.
Maybe. His voice held an edge of doubt. Trouble is, the pentagram doesn't feel active.
And maybe we should be grateful for that. The stink of rotting flesh got stronger once I'd passed the ramp again, and I studied the shadows intently. I couldn't see anything resembling a body but, given the smell, it had to be here somewhere. Besides, given how careful these women tended to be, it wouldn't surprise me if they hid their victims in walled-up hollows and with magic.
I stepped closer to the cavern's wall, and felt the firefly press of magic against my skin. It was a magic that was slightly different from the other magic fouling the room, yet it was one I'd felt before.
I raised a hand and watched my fingers disappear into blackness. It was another wall like the one I'd encountered in that first warehouse-the one where Kye had rescued me from the hellhounds.
I followed my hand into that blackness, and once again the air had the consistency of glue. The blackness pulled at me, resisted me, making every step difficult and progress minuscule. As before, I pushed forward as hard as I could. This time it didn't take as long to get free of it. Maybe it simply wasn't as deep.
Beyond it were the bodies. Not just one, but several, all in various states of decay. Like the trophy items, most of these bodies each had their own little hollow, but none of them were stretched out comfortably. Some lay curled into a fetal position, while others simply looked as if they'd been stuffed into their holes any old way, leaving bones jutting out and body fluids staining the stone. And unlike the trophy holes, some of these spaces remained empty. Although nine cavities had been carved into the stone, only six had occupants. And there was one body still sprawled out on the floor.
