Wrong Side of Hell (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 1)

by Sonya Bateman

  CHAPTER 36

  The walk through the subtunnels toward Milus Dei was tense and uncomfortably quiet, but we found our way to the Ninth Avenue station without much trouble.

  That was the easy part.

  The plan wasn’t complicated. Grygg and Murdoch had already headed for the surface. They were the tanks—they’d crash the party in the shipping room, kill everyone, and hope the distraction was big enough to draw out Reun and most of the armed thugs. Meanwhile, the rest of us would go in through sublevel five, where Denei and Zoba would stay to stand guard. Their job was to lead anyone we rescued back to the subtunnels and point them to an abandoned substation we’d passed about half a mile out from the warehouse, where everyone would hopefully gather when it was over.

  Taeral, Sadie and I would take the elevator to sublevel one and secure the control room. Then we’d start freeing prisoners, floor by floor, all the way down to sublevel six and Daoin—watching along the way for anything that resembled a train-car-sized, incapacitating super machine. And we’d kill anyone who even thought about pointing a weapon at us.

  Simple. Easy to remember. And probably doomed to excruciating failure.

  The subtunnel leading into Milus Dei was a crumbling, dripping shell of disuse. The walls were little more than bare earth, and thick exposed roof beams ran the length of the ceiling. At the end was a haphazard barricade of plywood and random, mismatched boards. Taeral and I brought it down just by pulling on it. We stepped through, one by one, into the back end of a closet lined with shelves on either side. Boxes, bottles, and folded stacks of sheets and towels cluttered the shelves. It almost looked like a hospital supply room.

  That was, if you could ignore the fact that these bastards were the cause of the injuries they treated with this stuff.

  Taeral stopped by the door and tried the knob slowly. It didn’t move. “Locked,” he whispered.

  “I can pick it,” Denei said.

  “Not necessary. It’s simple enough to open, but we’ll wait for the right time.” He tapped his throat mike. “Is this…thing working?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re all on open frequency. When one of us says something, everyone can hear it.”

  “Like right now, I can hear you all jawing when we should be moving.” Murdoch’s voice came through the earpiece. “You in position yet? I’m starving up here.”

  “We are ready,” Grygg rumbled.

  “All right.” Taeral closed his eyes briefly. “Go now.”

  “Oh, yeah. Delicious Seelie noble, here I come,” Murdoch said.

  For a minute or so, there was nothing. Then a loud crash—Grygg breaking down the side door around the back. Another moment of silence as they moved down the hall.

  And Murdoch said, “Damn it, who here’s scared of clowns? I hate doing that one. It’s such a cliché.”

  It wasn’t long before gunfire broke out.

  “Let’s move,” Denei hissed.

  Taeral gave her a pointed glare. “We wait. Let them draw as much fire as possible.”

  “If anything happens to my kin—”

  “Blast it, we wait!”

  Denei settled back with a furious expression.

  The gunfire coming through the radio was already slowing. There was a big blast, an angry roar from Grygg, and someone screamed horribly. “Oh, that’s gonna leave a mark, little brother. Sorry…big brother,” Murdoch said. “By the way, you lot, they’re packing up in here. Looks like they were getting ready to move shop.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Why would they relocate?

  And if they were in the process…had they already taken the Others somewhere else?

  Five minutes passed at an agonizing slow pace. At last, Murdoch announced grimly, “Here come the cavalry. You lot better get a move on, because this looks like most of them.”

  “Do you see Reun?” Taeral said.

  “Not yet. I—”

  The sharp, rattling spray of an automatic gun exploded over the radio.

  “We’ll have to chance it,” Taeral muttered angrily. He turned the knob, and this time it moved. “Be vigilant,” he said. “If you should find Reun, do not engage him. Any of you. He’s far too dangerous.”

  He pushed the door open and plunged through.

  The supply closet opened in the middle of a long, straight hallway with a few closed doors scattered on either side. The hall was completely empty, and silent as a tomb.

  “What in hell’s fire…?” Denei walked a few slow paces, gritting her teeth. “This smells all kinds of wrong.”

  “Yes. But we keep to the plan,” Taeral said. “You and your brother remain here. We’ll return shortly.”

  Zoba made a noise that managed to communicate go fuck yourself—or maybe I was just starting to understand his unique language, if you could call it that. Not exactly a pleasant thought. But they stayed put.

  Taeral, Sadie and I headed down the hall to the right, and turned left at the end into another deserted, silent corridor. “I’m getting almost no scent here,” Sadie said. “Not hearing anything either. Maybe they don’t use this floor much.”

  “Perhaps,” Taeral said. “There is the elevator.”

  By the time we got into the elevator car and pushed the S1 button, the commotion in the earpiece had dwindled once again to occasional bursts. “We’re fine up here. Thanks for asking,” Murdoch said. “Twenty, twenty-five down. No sign of the Seelie.”

  “Search the ground floor,” Taeral said.

  “Fine. But I’m telling you, there’s nothing here. These sons of bitches vacated the premises.”

  “Just look.”

  “You got it, boss,” he said sarcastically. The earpiece fell silent.

  I frowned. “Taeral, what if they moved everyone? I mean, you have to admit something’s not right here.”

  “We proceed as planned,” he said.

  “All right.” Sadie and I exchanged a look. I shrugged, and she shook her head.

  Sublevel one was quiet. The door to the control room was open, and the room itself was unoccupied. Sadie went inside first and sat down in front of a big panel loaded with buttons and sliders and keyboards and digital readouts. “There might be a master control here, something to unlock all the doors at once,” she said. “Save us time.”

  “Right.” I stared at a bank of monitors to the left, while Taeral stood an unnecessary guard at the door. Hardly anything moved on them. Once I saw Murdoch pass in front of a camera, with Grygg lumbering by a moment later. On another screen, a pair of men in black strolled down a corridor—so there were still a few, at least. A third briefly showed a woman in a long white coat spattered with blood, emerging from a door and rushing away.

  There were views of the front entrance, the back loading doors, and the shipping room littered with bodies and not much else. Most of the equipment I’d seen the first time I came here was gone.

  The lack of activity chilled me. This felt like a trap.

  “Okay. I think I got it.” Sadie did something on the control board. Nothing seemed to happen, but I thought I heard a few faint clicks from somewhere down the hall. “I have no idea if that worked, but we’ve got those cards if it didn’t.”

  “Ground level’s clear,” Murdoch cut in over the radio. “We’re coming down.”

  I expected Taeral to protest, but he didn’t say anything. He was still standing in the doorway, staring at the elevator across the hall.

  Just as Sadie and I left the control room, the elevator doors opened, and Murdoch and Grygg stepped out. The front of Grygg’s tattered shirt had been blasted away by something that left a huge black scorch mark on his chest. Murdoch appeared unharmed, and angry. “What the hell happened here?” he said.

  Taeral shook himself and straightened. “They must have believed this location compromised,” he said. “They’ve had hours since the raid on the Hive, and—”

  “The little ones ain’t here.” Denei’s voice in the earpiece was frantic and furious. “W
e checked most of this miserable place.”

  “You were supposed to stay at the tunnel,” Taeral spat.

  “Well, honey, you’d better be glad we didn’t,” she drawled. “Because we’re on sublevel three right now, and this place is wired to the gills.”

  I swallowed. “With what?”

  “Plastic explosives,” she said. “Twenty-one minutes on the timer, and then we all goin’ up like the Fourth of July.”

  CHAPTER 37

  “Great,” I said, glancing at my phone to confirm the time. 1:03 a.m. We had to be back in that tunnel by 1:23, because who knew how many seconds we had past twenty-one minutes. “Anyone here know how to defuse a bomb? No? Didn’t think so.”

  “The place isn’t empty.” Sadie gestured back at the control room. “They still have prisoners here. I don’t know where or how many, but there was a map on the board with green and red dots on the rooms. I’m pretty sure they meant occupied and not.”

  “Okay.” A half-formed plan started swimming through my mind. It’d have to be good enough. “Were there stairs on the map?”

  She nodded. “Right from the elevators, and then left. Door at the end.”

  “Everybody get that?” I said. “I hope so, because we’re using them. Everyone takes a floor. Sadie, you’re one, Murdoch two, Denei three, Zoba four, Grygg five. Open all the cells and get anybody you find, and bring them to five. Right now, me, Taeral and Grygg will take the elevator, drop Grygg off at five, and then we’ll hit six. Anyone not clear on this?”

  No one said anything, but everyone around me stared.

  “Move fast, damn it! Clock’s ticking here,” I said.

  After a brief pause, Sadie and Murdoch took off down the hall, and Grygg shuffled back into the elevator. Taeral followed, and I ducked in last and hit the buttons for S5 and S6. The doors whooshed shut.

  “They’ve killed him,” Taeral said woodenly as the elevator started down. “They must have. If they’d planned to already, they’d not have moved him.”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe they figured he’d die in the explosion.”

  He shook his head. “Even an explosion would not kill a Fae.”

  “Look, the fat lady hasn’t sung yet,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  I sighed. “Never mind. Just shut up until we’ve looked, okay?”

  “Fine.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  The elevator stopped on sublevel five and the doors opened. “Here’s your stop, Grygg,” I said. “Put you here because you’re…well, a little slower. I figured you should be closest to the tunnel and not have to take any stairs.”

  He looked vaguely surprised, sort of. The golem didn’t have much in the way of facial expression. “Thank you, DeathSpeaker,” he said, and stepped into the hall.

  “Call me Gideon.”

  Before he could get around to responding again, the doors closed.

  I checked my phone. 1:06 when the elevator stopped on sublevel six. Seventeen minutes left. To the left, the hallway ended in a blank wall, so I took off running to the right. At least Taeral kept up with me.

  This floor didn’t seem to have any dungeon cells. There were some bathrooms on the outside walls, and a huge laboratory in the center, with at least two doors in each hallway leading into it. Nothing that looked like a vault.

  When we made the third turn, I spotted a huge, gray metal door about halfway down on the outside and ran to it. Good news, it was definitely the vault.

  Bad news, the door was seamless and completely blank. There was no way to open it.

  Taeral screamed something in his language and pounded both fists on the door. His metal hand made a loud, bonging sound against it. “I cannot leave until I know,” he snarled. “Blast it, how does this open!”

  Movement off to the side caught my attention. “Er. Maybe she knows,” I said, and nodded down the hall.

  The woman in the bloody lab coat, the one I’d seen on the monitors, stood there pointing something at us. It looked like a flamethrower. She clicked a button and flipped a switch.

  Yeah, it was definitely a flamethrower.

  As fire streamed from the nozzle, she let out a wordless scream and ran at us. Taeral was faster than me. He’d drawn his gun and fired before I could even put a hand to mine. The shot spun her halfway around and slammed her into the wall, where she sank slowly to the floor with the flamethrower off to one side, sputtering streams of fire.

  She was still alive.

  Taeral ran over, kicked the flamethrower away and hauled the woman up. “How does this door open?” he growled, bashing her against the wall. “Tell me!”

  Feeling strangely calm, I walked over and pulled the gun out while he was still shouting. “We don’t have time for this,” I said.

  And then I shot her in the head.

  CHAPTER 38

  Fury flooded Taeral’s face. “Why did you do that?” he shouted. “I must know how to open that door!”

  “Yeah, I know.” The calm I’d felt before evaporated instantly. I was shaking like crazy, and I almost dropped the gun while I tried to put it away. Couldn’t believe I’d done that—but I had a reason. “And now that she’s dead, I can ask her,” I said.

  “Oh…yes. I’d forgotten.” He let go of her, and the body slumped obscenely.

  “I didn’t.” Unfortunately, I added to myself. That one really felt like a murder. But I didn’t have time to berate myself right now, so I crouched beside the corpse and laid a hand on her.

  It didn’t take long to feel her surprise. And then the pain of her struggle.

  “How does the vault door open?” I said.

  Panel…on the right…slides up. Handprint scanner.

  “Great.” My gut twisted and flipped. “Will your hand open it?”

  Yesss…

  “Thanks,” I said. “Sorry for killing you.”

  I let go of her, not wanting to hear the response to that. Suppressing a fresh shudder, I pulled out the knife Taeral had given me, grabbed her right arm and stretched it out. I laid the serrated blade at her wrist—and froze.

  Christ. I couldn’t do it.

  “Taeral, we need her hand.” I dropped the arm and offered him the knife.

  With something like sympathy, he took it. He didn’t say anything when I turned away and tried not to listen to the gruesome sounds of him sawing through her wrist.

  “I have it,” he said.

  “Good.” Still not looking, I went back to the door, found the panel and slid it up. Inside was an angled plasma screen, backlit with blue light. “It’s a handprint scanner,” I said. “Just press it on.”

  I assumed he did, because there was a loud double clank as bolts were thrown back, and the door began to rise. I happened to be in front of it—so I was the first to be hit with a blast of nausea that wouldn’t abate.

  “He’s in there,” I croaked. “Oh, Jesus…”

  Taeral rushed beside me and stopped cold.

  I barely recognized the Daoin from Murdoch’s fear-vision in the figure that hung upside-down in the center of the room, chained by his ankles with arms bound behind his back. Only a torn pair of shorts covered him. He was almost skeletal, his skin the sickly and near-transparent white of a waterlogged corpse where it wasn’t bruised or burned. Greasy tangles of black hair hung limply toward the floor, and a glimpse of pointed ears said he wasn’t wearing any glamour. His eyes were half-open and rolled up in his head.

  Then I saw where the blood on the woman’s lab coat had come from. There was a needle in his arm, attached to tubing with a steady drizzle of blood pouring from the open end, into the massive maroon pool on the floor beneath him. She’d left him to drain dry like a slab of meat.

  Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad about killing her.

  Taeral took a few halting steps toward the figure. “Father…”

  “Cut him loose,” I said, with another quick glance at my phone. Ten minutes left. “We have to move. I’ll try to find something that gets him
down.”

  For a second I thought he’d just stand there. But he shuddered, gripped the blade that was still coated with the woman’s blood, and strode toward Daoin.

  Halfway there, he stumbled and slowed, then sank to his knees with a gasp. “Cold iron,” he moaned. “I feel it…everywhere.”

  Shit. Maybe that was why I felt so nauseous—still did. It wasn’t just the sight of Daoin. I looked around, and finally noticed that the interior of the room was a uniform dull gray, the walls slightly rough in texture. I moved to one and put a hand on it.

  It felt hot. Just like the cuffs.

  “The walls!” I said. “They’re cold iron, all of them. Just get out of here, and I’ll—”

  “No.” Jaw clenched, Taeral pushed to his feet and lurched toward the suspended figure. He nearly slipped in the blood, but he managed to steady himself and grab Daoin’s arm. He pulled the needle free and started slicing through the ropes binding his wrists.

  There wasn’t much else in the room, but I spotted a lever on the back wall. It was connected to a pulley system wound with chains. I started feeling desperately sick as I approached it. “Can you hold him?” I said, fighting bile with every word. “Think I found the release. Don’t want to…drop him on the floor.”

  Taeral slid an arm under his shoulders and lifted slightly, then positioned the other behind his legs. “Ready.”

  I nodded and pushed the lever down.

  The chains started pulling him higher.

  “Shit. Hold on,” I muttered, and yanked the lever up. This time the chains moved down. “What the hell? Somebody didn’t read the installation instructions on their torture devices.”

  Once Taeral held the still figure slack in his arms, I turned the pulley off and approached them with wavering steps. Much longer in this room and I’d pass out in my own puke. I didn’t know how Taeral was withstanding this at all. “How are the chains attached to him?” I gasped. “Can we…”

  Frowning, Taeral shifted his normal arm beneath the legs and grabbed something near Daoin’s ankles—a heavy padlock. His shoulders trembled with effort. “Oscaihl,” he said in a shaken whisper. The padlock clicked. Apparently it wasn’t made of cold iron, at least.