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Holden seemed to be considering my question because he was staring at the two wolves with a consternated expression.
“Holden.” I held the door open, and Desmond ducked under my arm, keeping his weapon raised. “They’ll be fine, trust me. We’ll deal with them once we’ve found my grandmere. They aren’t going anywhere.” It wasn’t like him to show anxiety over many things, but I think he might have had unresolved issues with werewolves.
We’d once been held captive by a pack of wild werewolves in Louisiana called the Loups Garou, and they’d kept us in a pit where we both nearly perished from exposure. We escaped, sure, but I think he had some werewolf-related problems after the fact.
Together, Holden and I had walked away from quite a few near-death situations. I could honestly say, after all this time, the adage what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger was total bullshit. There were plenty of things that could nestle inside you like a sickness and dismantle you piece by piece, even if people still thought you were alive. Fear was a disease I’d caught while in captivity, and I wondered what Holden had come away with.
“Come on,” I urged.
He gave them one last look and followed us into the barn, where I slid the door firmly shut behind us, keeping the wolves on the other side of the barrier. They might find a way in, or they might lie in wait for us outside. Either way we hadn’t seen the end of them yet.
Inside, the barn was enormous.
It had looked plenty big on the outside, but even the façade didn’t give me a good grasp on how large the interior space would be. Along one wall was a series of stalls with straw covering the floor in patches and metal gates with latch locks. The manure smell was strongest there, which led me to conclude the pigs must have lived in those pens.
The size and layout wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe it would be from various magazine stories and documentaries I’d seen snippets of on TV. Buck Syler’s pigs lived a pretty luxurious life by comparison. Until they had to cross the barn, that is.
Buck, it seemed, preferred to slaughter his pigs the good old-fashioned way. A metal slab platform was set in the middle of the floor, and on either side were two slop drains. Overhead, a long hose hung from the ceiling, rigged to a series of other tubes. There was a holding cage next to the slab, and off to the side a dozen meat hooks hung behind a plastic curtain.
Then a sick thought seized me. This setup wasn’t for the pigs. The whole layout was designed specifically for him to make it easier to kill women. The ghosts came then, though not the way I expected them to. It wasn’t really ghosts I was seeing, but rather the macabre living truth of the space. Spectral versions of the past overlaid the present, and I could see the bodies of women—some still wriggling with life—dangling from the metal hooks. I could see a woman laid out on the table, her skin peeled back from the muscles of her legs and arms, but only in small patches, as if she were a living version of the gameboard in Operation. Inside the holding cage another woman—naked and shivering—watched in horror and waited without hope of escape.
I gagged and shut my eyes, grinding the heels of my palms into the sockets, willing myself to go blind rather than continue to see these things. This was the first time I’d had a flashback to something that wasn’t out of my own experience. Yet seeing the gruesome fates of these women brought up my memories, so when I opened my eyes again, it wasn’t Buck Syler operating on the woman, it was The Doctor.
He looked up at me and grinned, his smile unnaturally wide as though his cheeks had split open, and suddenly I could see all of his teeth at once. I wanted to get the hell out of this place.
“Ten…nine…eight…” I breathed deeply, keeping my counting quiet. Not that whispers mattered much, since both Desmond and Holden were accustomed to this panic routine by now. “Seven…six…five…”
The ghostly images began to fade, and one by one the hooks were just hooks, the table was just a table, and the cage was once again empty. These weren’t real ghosts. They were the ghosts of ghosts.
“Four…three…two…” The room returned to its former bleak self, and I let my breath out with a shuddery, “One.”
“You okay?” Desmond asked.
“Yeah. Just…saw some things. That’s all.”
“Ready to keep looking?” Holden gave my shoulder a squeeze, but the smile he offered me didn’t quite reach his eyes. Had he seen it too? “I’d like to get out of here quickly, if we can.”
“That makes three of us,” Des answered. “She was looking down from a loft upstairs, but the chances of her sticking around there are slim to none. You think she made a break for the main house?”
“I didn’t hear the other door open,” I said.
Holden glanced around the main room. “When I was out front, I noticed a broken window. She could have climbed through there, but we still would have heard some of the glass breaking.” He edged away from the pigpens, evidently put off by the smell. “I can’
t get a read on your grandmother, but the scent in here is pretty repugnant. If she’s hidden somewhere, I might not be able to tell.”
So there was a method to this madness after all. I could call my mother many things—crazy, fucked-up, horrible, murderous, worst woman on earth—but I couldn’t call her stupid. She’d thought this through, beyond just a simple kidnap and kill. Sending Grandmere the warning, that had only been the first step. Mercy had to have planned this for months, knowing exactly what location to use, one that stank of death and was set apart from any other people. She hadn’t missed a move.
Her level of preparedness made me exceptionally nervous. This wasn’t revenge on a whim. She knew what she was doing, and that put me at a decided disadvantage because I was the unprepared one.
I was a lot less sure of our chances here than I had been crossing the creek. Things could get bad really fast, and we were in the thick of it. There was no backing out.
Though I would have died here and now if it meant saving Grandmere’s life.
I had a choice to make.
We could continue to comb the barn and the whole Syler property for signs of Mercy and her men, and likely stumble into any number of traps or treats they’d laid out for us. Or…
“Mercy.” I clanged my sword against the rusty steel surface of the butcher’s table, making an awful clanging echo through the barn. “You dumb bitch. You want me dead? Come and get me. Such a big, brave queen, isn’t that how you sold yourself to your idiot henchmen? What kind of queen cowers when her enemy comes around, huh? If you’re so tough, show me your ugly goddamn face.” I spit on the floor for good measure. In for a dramatic penny, in for a pound, right?
