“We don’t want you inhaling whatever’s released when he breaks through the wall,” Clive said.
There was a cracking sound, but it wasn’t nearly as loud as I’d been expecting.
“Just a cheap board,” Vlad said. “Leaning on it would have brought it down.”
We came back around the corner to see Vlad holding a thin piece of wood in front of him to break through a century of cobwebs.
“Thank you for doing that,” Clive said. “Sam hates spiders.”
I wanted to refute it, but my badassery couldn’t stand up to spiders. I’d never particularly liked them, though I appreciated their place in the natural world. After that incident in Meg’s church when a demon sent a swarm of spiders at me, I was far more jumpy around them.
I angled the flashlight up, so I could make sure they weren’t up there waiting to drop on me. It looked like I was safe enough for the time being.
Clive went to the door and tried the handle. It was locked. Making a fist, he gave the door a short jab right above the knob. It popped open. He stepped in and looked around, Vlad on his heels. Their night vision was better than my own.
I stepped over the threshold and then Clive was there, blocking me. His expression said it all. It was bad. He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed.
When Vlad cursed, I steeled myself and stepped back from Clive, shining my light around the room. It was large, more of an exam room than a bedroom. A metal table stood in the center, covered in dried blood, fur, and the grime of more than a hundred years.
To the right was a table and chair. On the wall, papers were tacked up, charts and reports I couldn’t read. What was crystal clear, though, were the diagrams of a girl and a wolf with lines indicating where she had been cut open and examined in both forms.
Stomach clenching, white noise filled my mind. I knew my voice was too loud, but I had to hear myself over the turbines in my head. “Am I reading this right? She was ten years old?” I pointed at the diagram.
Clive rubbed a hand up and down my back. “Yes.”
Her name, Aliz Csonka, was at the top of the page. I opened the camera on my phone and began taking pictures of every sheet of paper tacked to the wall.
“What are you doing?” Clive asked.
“I want it translated. I want to know what they did to her.”
I hadn’t realized I was crying until Clive wiped my face and laid a kiss on my forehead.
“We will.”
I moved the flashlight, looking for a bed of some kind and instead found a cage. I couldn’t stop my feet until I touched the bars. Crouching, I studied the child-sized skeleton. Around her neck bones, there was a heavy band that was chained to the wall. The cage was made of sturdy metal, the chain barely long enough for her to lie down.
There were no fibers under her. “They didn’t give her a blanket or clothes,” I said.
“The better to study her from that little table and fill out their charts,” Vlad spat.
Cold metal. They’d chained up a naked child, caged her, and did experiments. I couldn’t keep the growl from my throat.
“I suppose we should be thankful it was a quick death,” Vlad sneered. “I worried that slow heartbeat I’d been hearing and ignoring was from a starving wolf walled into the basement of an asylum.”
I looked up at him. “How do you know it was quick?”
He pointed at the girl’s skull.
I stood and moved to his side of the cage. There I could see the hole in what would have been her forehead. “It was like putting down a cow for them, wasn’t it?” I knew it was too late, but I would have given anything to tear them all apart. Slowly.
“We can’t leave her here,” I said. “She needs a proper burial.”
Vlad yanked open a cabinet, studied its contents, and threw it across the room. Metal implements spilled out and I turned away.
“There are grave markers near the woods in the back of the Guild,” Vlad said.
Shaking my head, I swallowed, my throat tightened. “No. Not here. Not on these grounds. She needs a real cemetery, not a dump site where they discarded all the others who didn’t survive this place.”
