“What are they waiting for?” I asked, “Is this normal, too?”
“Yep,” Alexa said, “They aren’t sure if it’s over yet.”
“How can they be that scared of it?”
“Wouldn’t you be? I mean, you heard what happened in there… that was like a wild animal attack.”
“Worse than that,” Azlu said, “Wild animals where I come from don’t play with their prey—they deliver a single killing blow, and then feast. The devil plays with its victims until they’re not fun to play with anymore. Then it leaves.”
“And they’re not even trying to do anything about it,” I growled. “How can they just stand there?”
Howes eventually gave the order for one of the guards to open the door to the cell. The one that had been standing at the top of the stairs returned to his post. A moment later a loud buzz rang out, and then the cell door started to open.
The guards holding shotguns took their positions, readying themselves. Howes reached for his Baton, and even Sanchez stiffened up. As the fingers in her right hand flexed, I noticed tiny sparks of light arcing between them. It was easy to forget these people were all mages, with plenty of tools for dealing with all sorts of situations.
That thought only made the idea of what had just happened even more terrifying to think about.
Here was an entire roster of mages, powerful creatures capable of wielding magic with little more than a thought, and every last one of them looked as ragged and scared as the next. That made a couple of things clear to me. Number one, that these people had no idea what they were really dealing with. And number two, that it would be wrong for me to underestimate the devil.
The cell door opened.
Part of me had been expecting to see a beast emerge and go on a rampage, killing guards left and right. I had an image in my head of the dead inmate’s body, propped up against the door, falling limply out of the cell. None of that happened. What happened was probably worse.
The guard standing closest to the cell, one of the men with batons in their hands, immediately went green in the face, turned around, and hurled next to a support column. The man behind him peered into the cell, and then backed up, all the blood drained from his face. Howes told the two guys holding shotguns to go in, but they both shook their heads and told him to go fuck himself.
Rolling his eyes, Howes stepped closer to the cell and peered inside. He cringed, I could tell he didn’t like what he had just seen, but to his credit he didn’t flinch as bad as the others had. With a wave of his hand, he called the orderlies and the doctor over, and under his supervision, the extraction of the body commenced.
It was brutal.
I remembered the first time someone had been dragged out of their cell after an attack. That inmate had come out covered in bruises and marks, especially around his neck. This inmate wasn’t just covered in bruises and marks, but also cuts. His skin had been torn in places, as if he’d been savaged by an animal with claws. And his body… he had been turned into a human pretzel, his limbs and bones broken, some of them sticking out of the skin in awful, totally wrong angles.
It was hard to look at. Alexa couldn’t stomach it, and she turned away from the window. I waited, and watched, as the orderlies dragged the gurney out of the cell with the battered, twisted corpse on top of it.
Catching Sanchez’s glance, I waved her to me. She looked at Howes, who wasn’t paying attention, and drifted over to the cell.
“What is it?” she asked through the door. “I’m busy.”
“You didn’t tell me this was happening,” I said.
“I don’t know what you think this is, but it’s under control.”
“Bullshit. I need to see him.”
Sanchez stared at me through the window. The look in her eyes told me she knew damn well who I meant. “Not possible.”
“More bullshit. I know you can reach him; tell him I need to talk to him.”
She frowned, gave Howes another glance, and then turned to look at me again. “I can’t make any promises.”
“I don’t expect any.”
Keeping her frown, Sanchez turned around and rejoined the guards as they made their way out of the cell block. Howes cast a suspicious look my way, but I ignored it and stepped away from the window. I didn’t need to see the clean-up that was about to happen. What I needed was to see the Horseman.
I needed answers, and he was the only person who could give them to me.
CHAPTER FIVE
We weren’t allowed out of our cells. When it was time to eat, our meals were brought to our cells. When we wanted to exercise, we were told to exercise in our cells. If anyone wanted to go to the bathroom, it was accompanied by two guards—one of them usually armed with a gun of some kind.
Harrowgate had always been a tough place, I knew that, but it was worse than ever, now. At least, before now, inmates had been able to move around the common area, they’d been able to go to the mess hall, or go outside. It didn’t make sense to me that the inmates were strictly confined to their cells considering they were the victims of this creature’s attacks.
The way the guards were treating us, you’d think we were responsible for the deaths.
Time slowed to a crawl as I waited to hear from Sanchez again. After the dead inmate had been removed from his cell, a kind of somber quiet had fallen upon the cellblock. Very few people spoke, and those that did spoke in hushed tones, worried they’d be overheard not by the guards, but by the beast.
I was glad we had Azlu with us. The three of us were able to talk, to keep each other sane, but the day dragged. It didn’t help that, under the fluorescent lights hanging overhead, it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night. The only real indicators came whenever the guards needed to open our cell door to deliver our food.
They didn’t know Azlu was in our cell. They also didn’t know she wasn’t in her cell. It was some weird Arachnon quirk that made people forget about her so long as they weren’t directly interacting with her. It meant she never got a plate of food delivered, but she also didn’t need to eat nearly as much as Alexa, and I did.
We also needed way more sleep than she did. Alexa was already running on fumes, and if it weren’t for the occasional lick of Azlu’s strange, disgusting mucus, we’d have both fallen asleep long ago. Every hit of it was like a fresh shot of adrenaline. It made Alexa talk way more than normal, and it made me pace around the room, but neither of us had any idea what kind of toll it was taking on our minds.
It was at some point after the second meal call of the day that movement in the cellblock stirred up the quiet. I pulled up to the little porthole in my cell door in time to catch other inmates doing the same, tired eyes staring out into the emptiness of the cellblock. Then the buzzer blared, my door vibrated, and a moment later, it opened just as Sanchez arrived.
Without so much as a single word of explanation, she grabbed my arm and marched me out of the cell block. I heard the door to the cell shut behind me, and as Sanchez ushered me out of the cellblock, I kept my eyes low to the ground.
It wasn’t until we had made it to the stretch of corridor leading up to the Horseman’s door that she finally spoke. “I’m going to give you ten minutes,” she said, “Fifteen, at the most. Say what you’ve got to say to him, but do it quickly.”