“I trust you, Wild, so for now I’ll trust Wonder Bread.” And for the life of me, Gregory winked and climbed the chain hand over hand, heading straight up.
Which gave me time to think. I mean, I wasn’t about to let go and drop God only knew how far down.
With that in mind, I peered down into the depths below me. Hell, for all I knew the floor was only a few feet below me. Though I doubted it.
I closed my eyes and reached through the connection that tied us together to my friends. Pete was closer than I would have thought. In fact . . . “Wait! Gregory! Tell Ethan to come down here!”
“Are you serious?”
I looked up at him, about halfway up. “I think we can get to Pete this way! Ethan, check the maps!”
“Are you serious?” He repeated himself, and I twisted around. Pete wasn’t far at all. Maybe twenty feet below me.
And that meant that the ground couldn’t be that far. Right?
Right. Gregory hollered my question up to Ethan.
There was a pause, and while I couldn’t hear paper being rustled I was hoping.
“Yeah, I think the shifters could be below. Shit.” Ethan’s voice echoed down to us.
“Then, come on!” I hollered up through the empty space. A moment later, a figure was sliding down the chains, moving fast.
Gregory made his way back down to me. “We could have pulled you up. And found a better doorway into the shifters. Rather than dropping through the roof into the pen of some wolf pack.”
“As Orin pointed out, I’ve got a metric ton of muscle on me,” I said as I swayed slightly back and forth. “No one wants to lift me anywhere. And we aren’t going to drop on a wolf pack.”
Hopefully.
Ethan reached us a moment later, his wand held between his teeth, the end lit up like a glowstick.
“You okay?” Whoever he’d been fighting with up there he’d handled. But that didn’t mean he’d not gotten hurt in the scuffle.
He nodded and his eyes met mine and clearly said one thing. Now what?
“Now,” I loosened my hold on the chains, “we let go.”
18
The thing about having a little bit of faith is that it’s terrifying when you can’t see where you’re leaping. Leap before you look, you say. Leap and the ground will appear. Well, this was more of a let go and hope that you weren’t killing yourself and your friends.
I only knew that going back up the chains and down that main hall where the echoing laughter had come from was a terrible idea. That was what would be expected of us.
We had to do the unexpected. And maybe, just maybe it would save us all.
The air whooshed around me, and before I knew it, I’d hit solid ground. Ten feet, no more. That wasn’t too bad. At least until the boys dropped off the chains.
Two bodies hit, Gregory landing on top of me, knocking the wind out of me a second time.
Ethan landed to the side of me, at least, and let out a low groan. “I thought we would land on something softer. I thought that was why you let go. Because you could see something.”
“I did land on something softer.” Gregory rolled off me. “Well, kinda. Wild is not really soft.”
I was flat on my back, and I pushed into a sitting position, finally catching my breath while cradling my right hand to my chest. The fingers had gone blessedly numb, but I knew they would scream bloody murder at me if I so much as bumped them. I’d broken toes before, and they were the worst. Every twitch of a muscle could set them off as if you’d just broken them again. I had a feeling the fingers would be the same.
Leaning over to Ethan, careful to use only my left hand, I pulled my flashlight from my pack that he still carried. The flickering beam showed us a space that was as different from the hallway above as I could have thought possible, with the exception of the darkness.
Bars covered the walls in every direction, obvious windows and doors set into along the length of the hall. Over each door was etched words.
“Oh, this is . . . this is bad,” Ethan breathed out, his head swiveling as he took in the signs.
There were no sounds, no warning of danger coming. “Why? And be specific. Not some random ‘we’re in a jail made for supernaturals, what isn’t bad?’ kind of thing,” I said.
Ethan lifted his wand and used it to light the area more, highlighting a word not in any language I knew. But I could feel it in my belly, like a sound, more than a proper word.
“Berserker,” Ethan said. “That’s what that word is. And it’s on every single cell door. This is where they house all the shifters that go mad. They’re usually killed very soon after being brought in here, if they don’t come back from the madness.”
I did a slow turn, breathing in through my nose and picking up on the faint scent of animals, shit, and body funk. I wrinkled my face up. “But this is where Pete is. He hasn’t gone berserker.”
“Why couldn’t I smell this when I was hanging up there?” Gregory said. “I should have been able to. I really wasn’t that far away.”
Ethan grunted. “We broke through the spell that kept your section separate from this one. When we all fell, that is. But when I was climbing down to you two, I saw a platform to one side with a door in the wall. I think that’s where we were supposed to come in.”
“You’re sure about the berserker thing here? That there won’t be any others in here?” I threw the questions out, kind of half-heartedly.
“Of course I’m sure,” he snapped.
I held up a hand. “Old Ethan, go away, bring back new Ethan, please.”
Gregory snickered, though I heard the tension in him despite the laughter. “If only it were that easy.”
Sweeping the area, I let the bond between Pete and me pull me forward. “Watch for traps.”
Ethan stepped up beside me. “I doubt there are too many in this hall.” He pulled out the map he’d stolen from his father and held it out.
“Why is that?” Gregory asked. “Wait, you got a cheat sheet again?”
I noted that Gregory hadn’t said anything about Colt. It would come soon enough—I doubted he’d just take my word for it about Colt—but right then, I was glad he wasn’t pressing a confrontation.
Ethan shot him a look before glancing back at me. “This floor was protected from above. That big hallway you and I passed through? It’s the main strip through the prison. All the different sections branch out from it.” He flipped through the papers to the one showing the bottom levels of the prison. “Look. This is the Hall of Shifters. See, no protections here.”
My guts twisted at the implication. The shifters themselves were the literal monsters we’d have to deal with.
Gregory and Ethan either picked up on my thoughts or came to that conclusion on their own.
“So, berserker shifters? Great,” Gregory grumbled. “Long as we stay quiet, we should be able to get to Pete.”
I nodded. Simple. Straightforward. “Here’s the way.” I pointed to the left of the main hall. Picking up speed, I winced as my jog jiggled my fingers. Holding them tightly to my chest, I kept moving. We had to hurry.
To the left of us a low growl came from behind a metal door with slats in it. We pressed to the right only to have something hit the door we were up against with a rage-filled roar. Back and forth we went, our fear only ramping up and seeming to feed into the beasts. “I thought you said—”