Pritchard stopped under a speaker embedded in the ceiling and cleared his throat like he’d been rehearsing in his head. ‘Officer Pritchard escorting Inspector Stacy Wise of the Connection, plus security escort.’
I had to bite back a smile.Plus security escort.Pritchard had made it sound like my fiancé was a standard-issue prison guard, not the marauding king of the ogres.
A pause, then a soft beep.
‘Proceed.’
The first door hissed as it unlocked, and then it clanged open with a sound that vibrated through my teeth. Cold air rushed out from the next wing, smelling faintly of bleach and old stone and something metallic. Blood.
Now that we were in the prison proper, the walls vibrated with magic. It set my teeth on edge. Wraithmore had been built to hold monsters, and it took a whole lot of magic and effort to keep them here.
Jingo would hate it here, I thought – if Broadlake was to be believed, and from Robbie’s humming, he was.
I’ll see Jingo locked up here,I promised viciously.
We stepped through and the door slammed shut behind us with finality. Not a normal slam. Aseal. Like a vault.
Pritchard glanced back, his smile strained. He was breaking the rules, and he knew it. Hated it. Something I would normally have appreciated. ‘Isolation is … this way.’
‘Lead on, Officer,’ I ordered.
We moved deeper. The corridor narrowed, the ceiling lowering uncomfortably, no doubt by design. It was an old prison, repurposed and reinforced. The bones of the Victorian building wore modern magical armour, but it still had an ancient, dangerous feel to it. People died here, I was sure of it, and none of them had passed due to old age.
The second door demanded more than a keycard. Pritchard pressed his thumb to a scanner, then leaned forward into a black glass plate.
‘Wraithmore secure access,’ he enunciated. ‘Pritchard. Interview escort.’
A red light blinked.
‘Voice confirmed,’ the speaker said. ‘Now present escort identification.’
Pritchard looked at me nervously.
I rolled my eyes and stepped forward, presenting my palm. A slim beam of light scanned the lines of my skin, crawling up my wrist too. My palm print was on the Connection database, and it was time to see if Thackeray was as good as his word. He hadn’t permitted me to go, but he hadn’t set up anything to stop me.
‘Inspector Wise,’ I said calmly. ‘Connection, Major Incidents Team.’
No alarms sounded. After a pause, the light shifted to green.
‘Access granted.’
Robbie moved last. ‘Robert Krieg,’ he said. ‘Consort to the Inspector.’
‘Consort,’ I murmured under my breath. ‘Who even says that?’
His mouth twitched.
The door opened, and light assaulted my eyeballs. It was like stepping into the sun. There wasn’t a shadow as far as I could see.
Wards compressed over me, adding a low hum under my skin and a pressure at the base of my skull, and I sensed invisible threads stretched tight across the walls.
‘Anti-faze net,’ Robbie murmured, eyes flicking up to the ceiling corners.
This washeavyvampyr-grade security. The kind you didn’t bother with unless you expected creatures that could melt into shadow and reappear behind your spine, ready to rip you into pieces. Who the hell did they hold here?Dracula?
‘Right,’ I whispered. ‘So they’re not taking chances.’
Pritchard nodded far too enthusiastically. ‘No chances, sir. We’re prepared for all supernaturals here. Besides the runes on the walls, we’ve got’—he pointed at the ceiling from where the eye-watering light source beamed down at us—‘the anti-shadow lattice, and the saltline in the paint, and the silver mesh in the—’
