“You’re saying this is death row?” Charlie stopped.
“It is,” Kallie said. “The prisoners that were kept here were scheduled for execution.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat and wrapped my arms around my torso. “Can you imagine how many ghosts must be in here? This place has gotta be haunted as fuck.”
“Oh, they’re watching us,” Marcus promised. “I can feel it.”
“Well, maybe we should leave.” I frowned.
“Fuck that! I’m gonna go inside and punch those motherfucking ghosts out!” Marcus shook a fist, and from two rows up, I heard a cell door slam shut of its own accord.
Marcus let out a tiny whimper. “On second thought, maybe we should reconsider—”
“We can’t leave until we find Amalie’s clue,” Kallie said. “Come on. We’ve got all night in here.”
Don’t fucking remind me.I lit a small fire in my hand, and Kallie cast a glowing illusion to provide her own light. We began poking our heads into the cells, looking around for anything we could find.
“We should stick together,” Charlie said as he pushed my chair behind Kallie and Marcus. “If there are ghosts in here, they’re the spirits of the prisoners who were executed on death row, and we can bet they weren’t nice people.”
Stay close to me, Ava, Oberi beckoned, and he put his nose to the floor. We moved slowly, cell by cell. Each cell was identical, save for whatever was written on the walls, and I couldn’t help but wonder what Amalie wanted us to find down here.
I heard a wayward moan. “Do we know how these people died?”
“Some by hanging, a couple by electrocution,” Kallie informed me. “Although these were supernatural criminals, so a lot of the executions were carried out in group fashion, a fatal blow dealt by every race.”
“Professor Mazur told me something similar, a long time ago,” Charlie noted.
“She probably made it sound a lot better than it actually was. If every supernatural race had to take part in your death, they’d purposely keep you alive and draw it out so everyone could get a hit in.” Kallie shook her head. “I was looking into records… there was an inmate here who was scheduled for execution. Almost every race went to do their part to end the prisoner’s life, but when they got to the last executioner, he didn’t have the stomach to finish the job. So they threw the inmate back in a cell and left them there to suffer, fatal injuries and all, until they found someone who was willing to put a stop to it.”
“That’s just sick,” I spat. “It’s no way for anyone to die.”
“Death might’ve been better than how they were living here. They shoved three people into a cell at a time and made one of them sleep on the floor,” Kallie said. “Then the guards would shove food into the cell and make the inmates fight over it. You’d get an hour a day to shower and walk around in the highly guarded area of the prison yard meant for death row inmates—”
“Which is where the basketball court is now,” Marcus added.
“After that, you’d get shoved back in your cell with no room to move or breathe for the rest of the time. It was a brutal way to live,” Kallie informed us.
“Honestly, if you made it to your execution day, you were considered the baddest of the bad,” Marcus said. “A lot of the criminals that ended up on death row were stabbed to death or strangled by the other inmates in their own cell. Of course, that was with the weaker supernaturals. Stronger ones would just tear you apart, and let the guards take out your dismembered limbs.”
“How do you know all this?” Charlie asked.
“Kallie and I have been doing research on old areas of the prison since we started looking for the Infernal Underground,” Marcus replied. “There’s a lot of history to the Institute they don’t tell you about, but it’s all in the library, if you bother to look. Back then, we figured death row didn’t exist anymore, and why wouldn’t we assume that? The wards guarding the place kept it hidden well.”
“I can’t believe they caged people like this,” I said. “It’s way worse than they treat us.”
“It’s one of the reasons the prison was shut down and turned into a juvenile detention center.” Kallie stopped before a cell block and peered in. “I thought the Warden wanted to hide death row because he wanted to bury the history that’s concealed here, but truth be told, I think he knows there might be a key here and he doesn’t want anyone else to know.”
“Well, he already has the first clue to the merfolk key, so we have to beat him to this one,” I grumbled.
We continued searching cell after cell. I wasn’t able to navigate the balcony on the cell rows above us, because they were too small for my wheelchair, so Charlie, Oberi and I remained on the ground floor while Kallie and Marcus continued poking around above us.
“You can feel the bad energy in this place,” Charlie said, shaking his shoulders. “The whole atmosphere is just so… heavy.”
I agreed. The memories of the inmates who had suffered here permeated every pore and surface of the cell block. I just wanted to find our next clue, so we could shake it off and be rid of it.
“Can your Earth magic feel anything in the metal or stone?” I asked, glancing at Charlie.
He knelt to the floor and spread his hand across the concrete. There was a slight quake underneath me as the ground shifted at his power, and a bit of dust fell from the ceiling. Oberi sneezed when it fell on his head.
