“Kyson?” she shouted, her head spinning as she leaned into the door of her cage, putting her mouth right up to one of the openings in the grating. “Kyson, wake up!”
“I wouldn’t shout like that,” a soft voice said from out of the darkness to her right. “Rogi will come down here and you don’t want that. He’s not right in the head.”
Samantha spun around in the direction of the woman’s voice, peering into the heavy shadows that filled the cell beside hers. All she could make out was a ratty-looking mattress shoved into the far corner and a pile of rags sitting on top of it.
“Who’s there?” she demanded, keeping her voice down this time, not wanting to attract Rogi’s attention…whoever the hell that was. “Who are you?”
There was nothing but silence for a few moments, and then the pile of what she’d thought were rags moved, revealing a woman who couldn’t have been much over five feet tall. As she moved closer, Samantha could see that her long, blond hair was unkempt and dirty, her face pale and exhausted looking.
Samantha gasped as she realized she’d seen the woman before. She’d been in the same photo with Kyson.
“Shaylee?” Samantha murmured, leaning against the grating separating her cell from the one beside it, hooking her fingers through the openings. “How did you get here?”
The woman gazed at her with eyes that seemed so much older than the rest of her. “Do I know you?”
Samantha shook her head. “We’ve never met, but I know Trey—Kyson’s friend. I saw a picture of you and Kyson together.”
“Trey knows where we are? He’s coming to help us?”
The hope that lit up the young woman’s face was heart wrenching to see because Samantha already knew her next words would crush that hope completely.
“No, Trey doesn’t know we’re here.” She gave Shaylee a small smile. “I doubt he even knows I’m missing yet. On top of that, he thinks Kyson is dead. He won’t be able to help us, but maybe Kyson can? If we can wake him up.”
Just as she’d predicted, the glimmer of hope disappeared from the woman’s eyes like it had never been there at all.
“Ky can’t help us,” Shaylee said sadly. “When he came back from taking out the body parts the other night, he was all slashed up. It was so bad I could see his rib bones showing through. The doctor shut him down to heal him. Ky can hear us talking right now, but he can’t do anything to help us. He can’t snap out of the trance he’s in on his own. Only the doctor can wake him up.”
Samantha knew she probably looked like an idiot standing there with her mouth hanging open, but there was so much to unpack after what Shaylee had just said. She needed a moment to process everything. Figuring out what to ask first was even more difficult.
“Shaylee, did Kyson kill himself?” she finally asked. Samantha knew how insane her next question was going to sound, but she needed to know the answer “Is that true, or did the doctor you mentioned make it look that way?”
Tears shone in Shaylee’s blue eyes. “It’s true. I saw his body right after the guy who lives in the room next to his found him. Ky was dead.” She swallowed hard. “But then a week ago, I saw him getting into a truck near the Trinity River Audubon Center and…well, I completely lost it. I chased after him and they caught me and brought me here.”
“They?” Samantha pressed, forcing down the curiosity that also wanted to know what the hell the Shaylee had been doing in the woods near Trinity River. She needed to focus on the important details first. Everything else could wait. “Who caught you?”
“Rogi…and Ky.” Shaylee took a deep breath, letting it out with a shudder. “Ky didn’t want to do it, but the doctor did something to him that makes it hard for him to do anything but what he’s told. It didn’t help that Rogi threatened to shoot me if Ky didn’t grab me. He had no choice.”
Samantha almost groaned out loud in frustration. What Shaylee was saying about Kyson killing himself couldn’t be true. Somehow, Louis must have made it appear that way. Dead people didn’t come back to life. But it seemed that every question she had generated four more. Once again, she had to force herself to focus on the important stuff first.
“Okay, so they brought you here,” Samantha said. “Which prompts the question: Where are we?”
Shaylee shook her head. “I don’t know for sure. I only got a quick look around before Rogi dragged me down here. The place is big and fancy, though. All stone. Like a castle.”
Castle.
That pretty much confirmed they were in Louis’s home and that it actually had a basement. It also confirmed Louis was the doctor Shaylee mentioned, not that she’d doubted that part. But was still being at Louis’s home a good thing? If Trey found out she was missing and that she’d come to see her boss earlier, would he look for her here?
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard the doctor’s name, but he’s older, with a lot of gray in his hair,” Shaylee said, moving a little closer to the grating and lowering her voice like she was worried someone was eavesdropping. “Other than that, all I can really say about him is that he’s effing insane. Even Rogi is terrified of him. I wasn’t here when they brought Ky back to life, but I’ve seen what they do when they replace the parts of his body that are dying. The doctor straps Ky to that damn table, does the surgery, pumps him full of that green junk, and then electrocutes him. He’s done it to him multiple times since I’ve been here, anytime he has to fix something or puts him under so he can study him. It’s horrible.”
The rational, scientific part of Samantha’s mind wanted to rebel at all of this, to rant and rave that it was all impossible. But the truth was standing across the room strapped to an inclined rack, covered in scars that couldn’t be ignored. Kyson had killed himself. The man she and Trey had talked to at that motel had confirmed that and so had Shaylee. Yet he was obviously alive now. If being strapped to a table and used as a test subject could be called alive. Being shut down to heal the injuries he’d obviously gotten in his fight with Trey, to replace parts that were dying, should have been beyond the realm of possibility. But she supposed it paled in comparison to the fact that Louis had apparently raised Kyson from the dead to begin with.
“Shaylee, do you know why they’ve kept you here?” Samantha asked carefully.
She didn’t want to be blunt about it, but while she understood that grabbing Shaylee and bringing her back here was simply about hiding their secret, she didn’t understand why the woman was still alive. After everything she’d heard about Louis, it didn’t seem like he was doing it out of the goodness of his heart. If the man even had a heart any longer.
“Ky has started to resist the doctor’s orders. Rogi’s, too.” Shaylee sighed dejectedly. “But now that I’m here, all they have to do is threaten me and he’ll do anything they want. He doesn’t want them to hurt me.”