Wild Side (Dark Side Series: Book 2)

Twenty-Three

🐺Shawn James & the Shapeshifters - "Son of the Wolf" Shawn James has some excellent songs and he deserves some recognition. 🐺

"Leave it," Caelan was saying, drawing my attention first from Lisa's picture and then the leering eyes within the cages. "She's not here."

He plucked the license from my hand and dropped it. The plastic click as it hit the tile was lost to bending bone and shedding skin. A warm hand found mine, and then Caelan was walking me quicker down the rows, glancing back only once at the writhing red skin that was Calico reforming. There was a door, not at the end of the hall, but just to the right, where the last cage would've stood. Just a simple thing, black, easy to miss except for the handle. Unlocked.

Unlocked because we were meant to head further in.

The room we'd entered was empty, filled with the stationary ghosts of equipment: linear shapes of dust on the wall, scrapes where chairs, desks, and cabinets had been assembled and moved and taken apart. There was blood on the floor, peppered rust on the walls under the dust.

"Weigh station," Caelan said. There was a ghost in his throat, hollowing his tone. "They inspect you here. Before and after, if you survive to after. Sometimes, if you were a good boy, which meant you killed someone without getting torn apart yourself, you'd get a treat."

I looked around the deserted space, trying to imagine, trying to glimpse the world he'd grown up in. Caelan didn't need anything to remember how this place looked. It wasn't the ring he'd personally been put through, his hell was further south, but they were all the same. It was in the lines of his face, a scar deep below the surface that had started to bleed into the present. Calico's howls rang through the bleak hall.

"What treat?" I asked him. The hand holding mine fell away.

"I'm not a pet person," he said, and touched his palm to a section of wall. Another door whirred and slide open with a mechanical whine. We didn't linger, didn't wait for Cal though her claws ticked along; I heard her shake, heard the last smattering of human flesh streak the hall.

The sound of the door was nothing in the buzzing hum of overhead lights recessed in a cavernous stone ceiling. We stood on the edge of a winding steel walkway, an industrial platform, the kind I'd stood on before only for tours of warehouses and beer manufacturers. Ours was not the only walkway. There were other doors, other walkways, jutting out from the earth, intersecting now and again at winding sets of stairs. There was only heat down here, as if winter could not simply penetrate this far into the ground.  My hands found a warmed steel rail; I peered over the edge, expecting to see a great excavation site, as if we were archeologists overseeing a dig for some truly special bones.

And there were bones, not fossilized but yellowed and brittle with age, stacked and piled around and sometimes inside clawed out holes, primitive pits in every sense of the word. Old lighting equipment surrounded some of the pits, usually the ones absent bones. Extra illumination if two combatants had been selected. At current, the actual depth was hidden beneath tarry shadows. A dead, sour odor seeped through the hewn walls, of old death and decay, of dens and earth and lairs and that which should never be.

"How can this exist? How is this possible?"

"There's more creatures out there than the costumes humans put out around Halloween," Caelan said, but he knew what I meant and didn't have an answer.

The door whirred shut behind me. I turned.

Caelan stood beside the sealed door, palm sliding off a scanner. Calico, evidently having just entered the room to see the door shut, howled like a dog forgotten. I tensed; there was a big bang, another one that made the steel at our feet shiver, then sound of claws scraping futility at the door. The former sheriff stepped away from Cal's frantic pawing.