Blu chirped back and flew off, leaving them alone to trudge down the nearly empty street looking for the correct location.
They left the main street and waded through a gigantic muddy puddle stretching down a deserted passage between two buildings.
The passage spiderwebbed into a series of smaller passages, all clearly dead ends but holding several rusty metal doors.
“It has to be one of these, right?” Teddy asked, and Wren pulled his phone out to check the location again, keeping his phone turned so they could both look at it.
The little pin was pointing to a light gray door just under a rickety fire escape.
“Had to be the worst one,” Teddy said.
“I’ve been in worse places.” Wren shrugged, and Teddy glared at the door as if personally offended.
“Do not remind me,” he growled, and heard the sharp intake of Wren’s breath.
“I always liked that voice,” Wren said before walking off toward the door, leaving Teddy to try and get his heartbeat under control.
If they held any hope of walking into the place stealthily, it was shot down by the awful, metallic screeching the door produced when Wren pulled it open. It could have alerted everyone on the planet that they were walking in.
It gave Teddy pause, but Wren seemed to take it as a challenge, as he charged through the dark, humid hallway and into a barely lit room, leaving Teddy to stumble after him.
They came face-to-face with a bald man covered in shitty tattoos, who was scrambling to push a struggling ferret into a tiny crate clearly made for a smaller animal, while several other creatures screeched from their own crates.
The scent in the air made Teddy’s eyes water. Urine and feces and decay. The walls were falling apart around them, chunks of concrete and plaster missing in places. There was a single lightbulb hanging from a wire in one of the corners, and the rest of the room was pitch black.
Teddy felt himself getting angry at the condition in which the animals were being held, but it was nothing compared to Wren.
His fists clenched and his chin jutted out, that glowing eye of his shining in the darkness. He charged at the man like an avenging angel, swinging his fist into the man’s face and knocking him out cold.
The man crumpled to the floor, releasing the ferret, who clambered up Wren’s leg and pushed his way into the front pocket of his hoodie, trembling.
Wren crouched and curled into a protective ball around the animal.
“Shhh,” Teddy heard him whisper. “I’ve got you. You’re safe now. I won’t let anything bad happen to you anymore.”
He looked up and caught Teddy’s eye, rage blazing on his face as he rocked the ferret back and forth.
“How many?” he asked and Teddy turned around, walking a bit farther into the room to count the animals.
“Five that I can see,” Teddy said.
“Can you tell what they are?” Wren asked, shushing the animal in his hands.
“Another ferret,” Teddy said. “A parrot, a tarantula, a lizard of some sort. And then a snake in that terrarium over there.”
He walked over to where Wren was still crouched on the floor and nudged the man sprawled on the ground next to him with the toe of his boot.
“We won’t be getting much out of him like this,” Teddy said, and Wren scowled.
“Fucker deserved it,” he hissed, rearing up like he’d stomp the man to death while he had him at his feet.
“I am not disagreeing at all,” Teddy said when those blazing eyes turned to him, filled with righteous fury. “But we do need answers.”
“He’ll come to soon enough.” Wren deemed the poor ferret calm enough for him to stand up and look around the room. “Gives me time to do damage control here.”
Between one breath and the next he had all of the animals settled and calm, out of their cages and piled on top of him like he was their king.
The snake hung around his neck, the parrot was on his shoulder, the other ferret had joined the first one inside the pocket, and he held the lizard and the tarantula in gentle hands, cooing at them quietly.
