5
THE THREE OF US FILED RELUCTANTLY INTO THE ROOM.
“I guess these are the ‘donors,’” I said bitterly.
The room stretched away before us, three times the length of the lab, and the remaining two doors that emptied into the hall were visible farther down along the wall.
The rest of the room was filled with cages. The cages were stacked floor to ceiling, and each one had a person inside it. A dead person.
“He treated them like lab monkeys,” Jude said, and I could hear the undercurrent of fury in his voice.
I walked slowly down the aisle between the cages. Azazel hadn’t discriminated in his choice of donors. There were men and women, boys and girls. Some of them were very old, some middle-aged, some of them so young that I had to turn away, sick at heart.
He’d left them here to die, slowly and painfully, while he’d fled. This was the work of the angel who had fathered me. This was the monster I had come from.
I whirled on Nathaniel, tears blurring my eyes. “Did you know about this?”
“No, I did not,” he said, his face troubled.
“How could you not know?” I asked. “You lived here. Whatever Azazel was doing, he could hardly have hidden the presence of dozens of prisoners from his right-hand man.”
“On my honor, I swear to you that I did not know,” Nathaniel insisted. “Whatever faults I may have, I would not have condoned this.”
“Your honor doesn’t mean a whole lot,” Jude growled.
“And you didn’t seem to mind when Azazel was capturing people to steal their memories,” I said. “How is this any different?”
I turned away from him, not wanting to hear any more excuses. Even if he didn’t know what was in the lab, I wasn’t certain Nathaniel would have objected. No matter how morally repugnant Azazel’s actions, Nathaniel’s favorite person was Nathaniel. Defying Azazel would have put his favorite person at risk.
I stared into the cage in front of me, automatically cataloging what I saw. The woman was in her mid-twenties, dressed for a night out at the clubs. Her makeup was smeared on her face and her once-neat manicure was torn. She had probably clawed at the bars of the cage, screaming until her voice was gone.
She lay on her stomach, head turned to the side, and I noticed a large bruise at her neck. I stepped closer, heedless of the stink and the rot, to look more carefully. There were two little puncture wounds inside the bruise.
“Vampires,” I breathed. “Check the others. See if they have bite marks.”
Jude and Nathaniel moved closer to the cages. I walked down the row, searching the bodies for evidence of vampires. Almost every corpse had at least one bite mark.
“They’ve all got them,” Jude said.
“So whatever Azazel was experimenting with, it involved some kind of chemical mixture, human blood and vampires,” I said. I thought about the cryptic notes in the binder. “Maybe he was concocting something that the prisoners ingested and it was then passed to the vampires in human blood.”
“Why?” Jude said. “And what?”
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “I hope Chloe can figure out what Azazel was making from the notebooks.”
Jude frowned. “That fruitcake who works at the Agency?”
“She’s a little eccentric,” I admitted. “But she was the one who figured out how to restore the stolen memories.”
Jude grunted, which was probably the highest praise Chloe would ever get from him. Jude was a man of few words.
“I do not understand,” Nathaniel said.
We both turned to look at him. He frowned at the body in the cage in front of him.
“What’s not to understand?” I asked.
“In order for these people to be so damaged, a vampire would have to be living on the premises. Lo… Azazel may have been able to explain away the presence of humans, but not vampires. Most angels cannot tolerate the presence of vampires.”
“Is there someplace in the mansion that was off-limits to everyone? Besides the labs?” I asked.
“The basement has long been guarded by Azazel’s soldiers,” Nathaniel said slowly. “But there are prisons down there, for Azazel’s enemies.”
“And wouldn’t the soldiers have blabbed if Azazel was hiding vampires in the basement?”
“Azazel’s special guard cannot speak. They have had their tongues cut out.”
He said this very matter-of-factly, as if the soldiers’ disfigurement was of no note whatsoever.
I sighed. “I guess we have to check the basement, then.”
“To what end?” Jude said. “Surely the vampire will have moved on with Azazel.”
“But if it hasn’t, we might be able to find out what Azazel was trying to accomplish. Wherever he’s gone, Azazel is going to try to finish what he started, and that can’t mean anything good.”
“Madeline is correct. We should at least investigate before we leave this place,” Nathaniel said.
Jude grumbled something under his breath but he went into the hall. Nathaniel and I followed. Jude collected the notebooks on the floor and slung them under his arm.
“Which way?” he asked Nathaniel.
“The best way is to return to the ballroom and then enter the basement stairs at the rear, behind Azazel’s throne.”
We backtracked down the stairs toward the ballroom. Jude kept sneezing and blowing air out of his nose.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“There’s too much death in that room. I can still smell it. And if I can still smell the corpses, then I can’t smell anything else that might sneak up on us,” he said, exhaling air through his nose again.
My own sense of smell had been almost completely deadened by the stench in that room, and my nose wasn’t even a fraction as sensitive as Jude’s. It must feel like being blind for a werewolf to be unable to smell.
Jude and I walked side by side, Nathaniel trailing behind. We reached the ballroom, and the snake on my palm twitched just as I pushed the doors open.
For the second time that day, I wished I had left a door closed.
The room was filled with vampires.
Not a few to help Azazel with his vile project. Hundreds.
“Gods above and below,” Nathaniel said. “Where did they all come from?”
The vampires had turned as one silent entity to face us when we’d opened the door. The majority of the creatures stood in shadow, but a few were touched by the weak beams of winter sun that came through the windows. Their dead flesh smoldered where the sun touched, but instead of fleeing from the solar rays, the creatures stood and burned.
The vampires watched us, but made no move to approach. It was as if they waited for an order.
Beside me Jude transformed into a wolf. The binders clattered to the floor.
“We can’t fight them all,” I hissed. “So don’t do anything foolish.”
Jude barked at me, but I couldn’t tell if his reply was agreement or argument. I hoped he would restrain his natural impulse toward aggression until we got free of this mess.
The vampires stood silent and still. They were acting so weird, so un-vampire-like. I took a step backward, and Nathaniel mirrored me. I would have felt safer with my sword in my hand, but I didn’t want the vamps to construe that as aggression and attack us. Jude reluctantly followed Nathaniel and me while growling low in his throat.
We had gone about five paces when the vampires suddenly surged forward as one body.
“Run!” I said, but Jude leapt at the first vampire to approach him, tearing at its throat.