Remington stood behind us, her head cocked slightly to the side. She had her long, delicate fingers resting on her hips, looking as red as her hair did. I shouldn’t have been intimidated by someone half of Lochlynn’s size, but I didn’t think he would attack her if it came down to that.
“Nothing, go back to the party,” Lochlynn said, staring right in Remington’s eyes.
The demon cocked her head, stepping forward. “Did you really think that would work? Cuz, it doesn’t. What the hell are you doing here? If Nigel catches you over here, you think that ‘go back to the party’ line is going to work on him. Unless you’re dropping your pet off.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder, eying me. Yet, despite the look she had on her face, I didn’t know if I believed the act she put on. I didn’t think she wanted me down there.
Lochlynn’s jaw ground tight. “Please, Remington. Go back to the party.”
“Now I’m just even more curious,” she said, and those eyes of hers lasered in on Lochlynn like a cat going for prey. “If you won’t tell me…” She turned to me.
I didn’t even have a chance to feel the magic. It slammed through me so hard that I actually stumbled back a step. I felt her in my head, and it was the oddest thing. It felt like she dug through my mind with clawed fingers, and every couple of seconds, she would leave scratches and scars that I’d feel forever.
“What are you doing here?”
My hands went to the sides of my head and breathing became more difficult.
“Remington,” Lochlynn hissed.
She turned to glare at him. “If your human pet is going to get you into trouble, I want to know about it. That’s not so wrong, is it?”
“Stop this.”
“Why?” she asked, lifting her head.
Those fingers in my mind started to claw harder, peeling thoughts away, as if she tried to dig underneath them. I threw more thoughts at those seeking fingers, trying to keep all my secrets hidden. I didn’t think about my sister, or about Linda, or about anything. I threw memories of TV shows at her, lines that I had read in books and adored. Anything that I could to keep her from seeking something worse to take away from me.
Lochlynn shot across the hallway so fast that I barely saw him move. His hand locked around Remington’s throat, and her eyes widened in surprise as he lifted her off her feet. He had her pressed against the wall in under a second, speaking low and threatening, under his breath. “Let her go, or I’m going to rip your throat out.”
Remington’s hand twitched, and that overbearing presence in my mind disappeared. I collapsed to the ground. She stared at Lochlynn with hurt in her eyes, like she couldn’t imagine why he did this to her.
My head started to pound.
Lochlynn didn’t let the demon go.
Pushing to my feet, I stumbled over to Lochlynn, touching his shoulder. “It’s fine,” I said, breathy voice barley making sense. “She let me go, you don’t have to hurt her.” Because I thought that hurting her would do something to him as well. Even though Remington acted like a queen bitch.
Lochlynn didn’t listen to me, his hand still around Remington’s throat. I stepped forward and touched his back. The tense muscles felt like stone underneath my hand, and I couldn’t imagine the fear of being locked in his grip.
Actually, if it felt anything like being restrained by his father, I could. It didn’t feel good.
Remington struggled, pulling against his hand. “Let me go,” she said, trying to free herself. “I didn’t hurt your human pet.”
Lochlynn lifted her head off the wall and then slammed it back. The plaster behind her skull cracked, and Remington’s eyes widened. “You need to shut up, now,” Lochlynn said. “She is not a pet, and she is not something that you get to use against me, do you understand?”
Remington’s eyes changed, becoming softer, more hurt than they had been before. “Okay, yeah. I get it. Put me down. I won’t touch yo—Tomorrow. I’ll leave the two of you alone. You can play your stupid Scooby games without me. It’s not like I wanted in on it anyway.”
Her words made me think of little children playing, when one got shunned. Fine, I didn’t want your stupid toys anyway! I would’ve felt guilty if she hadn’t tried to rip my mind apart with her magic. I figured that kinda of canceled out any of her weaknesses.
Lochlynn pulled away from Remington, and she jerked back. I didn’t get a warning out fast enough before she slapped him across the face. “You don’t have to be such an ass your whole life. You’re going to be just like your father.” She spat that last sentence with all the venom she could muster.
Before Lochlynn could respond, Remington turned on her heel and marched away. She kept her back straight and her head held high. I figured she would have it out for me twice as bad after this, and that I would just have to live with it.
Shaking my head, I walked over to Lochlynn and knelt down next to him. “Are you okay?” I asked. He had a smudge of blood on the corner of his mouth from where she hit him. Either demons hit much harder than I thought, or she had caught him with a nail. Either seemed likely.
“Fine,” he said, wiping the blood away.
“Is she going to tell anyone about this?”
“No,” Lochlynn said. “She wouldn’t have lied about that, because she knows that I wouldn’t have been able to kill her.”
I almost asked why but managed to keep the rude question to myself. Just because I thought she was an epic bitch didn’t mean that Lochlynn did. “I feel like I’m just messing up your life,” I grumbled.
Lochlynn snorted. “It’s not like my life had a lot going for it to begin with. Let’s get this over with.”
He stepped over to the door and finished pushing it open. The scent hat rose from the rooms below made me think of holocaust camps and torture chambers. Obviously, I had no clue what either smelled like, but I felt like they had to have been something similar to this.
I covered my mouth with one hand as Lochlynn stepped into the room. He sealed the door behind us with a mechanical whirr, and then breathed out. “At least it’ll make noise if someone comes in after us now.” He rubbed his eyes. “It won’t be much of a heads up, but we don’t have anything else to work with.”
His words barely registered. I could only think about that scent and what had caused it. Everything had that metallic scent of blood over it. It made my stomach roll over and over, causing me to gag.
We started walking down the stairs. The basement had a dim light to it, making it much harder to see things. Shadows danced on the walls, tricking my eyes into thinking that people lurked around. My helpful imagination through a bunch of images at me. Like people leaping out from around corners to grab us, or demons swarming me, thinking that I belonged in a cage, with the rest of the humans. My stomach twisted around in knots.
Then we got down to the bottom of the stairs, and my thoughts stopped altogether. My hands went limp at my sides, and I looked around. I couldn’t talk, though my mouth hung open.
It…was so much worse than what Lochlynn had shown me at his own estate.
The smell came from the cage of humans that clearly existed as vampire food. They all lazed about, hanging off cots too small for most of them. They had teeth marks in their neck that bled freely, and a doped-up expression on their faces. On occasion, one of them would let out a sigh or a laugh. The latter sounded so creepy that goosebumps had spread across my entire body, making my head tingle.
Another cage held a man in it, and he panted on the floor. His eyes watched me with bald hunger that I couldn’t look at for too long. “What…”
“He’s a vampire,” Lochlynn said.
“Why is he down here?” I asked.
Now that I looked, I could see the fangs that poked out of his upper jaw. They had blood smeared on them, like he had recently fed. Considering how thin his body looked, I didn’t think I could trust that. All of his ribs stuck out, his skin looked dirty, and filthy brown hair hung in his face, obscuring his eyes.
“He’s probably being punished,” Lochlynn said. “He has to watch the vampire feeders all day, every day, and he can’t have a drop. It’s more like torture.”
“What did he have to do to earn something like this?” I asked.
Lochlynn just stared at me for a second. “You saw Nigel. Met my father. What do you think he did?”
After a beat, I said, “Not much.”
Lochlynn nodded, and then gestured to another cage, one that I hadn’t wanted to look at. The one that held the rest of the humans, the ones that didn’t feed the vampires. When he pointed it out, though, he forced me to pay attention. I turned to look at the cage filled with people, and tears filled my eyes.
Nigel didn’t treat them as well as Landers did. That thought scared me. Landers hadn’t shown much of a soul then entire time I had been in his house, despite the fact that he had to have several in him. He fed off them regularly, after all. Yet, he had treated his human feed as well as he could, when they lived in a cage.
Nigel kept all of his in a single cage, crowded together like cattle. They had been stripped of most of them clothes, all of them wearing a simple tunic-like top and a pair of underpants. They didn’t smell dirty, and I attributed that to the shower heads that had been installed over the cage. I could picture them all huddled there when the water started to fall, some of them trying to escape it, while others just took the abuse.
Along the cage, troughs had been installed, letting me know just how little Nigel thought of his people. I didn’t want to know what being fed from that felt like, or what it looked like. To have to compete for food with all the other people, and that only if you didn’t give up first.
I wrapped my arms around my middle, feeling the silk dress that draped my body. I hated it, and the rich green fabric with the fancy shoes. I hated the entire outfit, because a demon had given this to me. Not a good one, either, but Lochlynn’s mother had given it to me. I hated everything about that moment, including myself and Lochlynn for not getting there faster.
He touched my shoulder, and I did my best not to shy away from him. Lochlynn didn’t like this kind of treatment. He didn’t stand for this kind of abuse, and he never would. I knew that.
It could be hard to remember when standing in front of tortured souls, though.
“How do we open it?” I asked.
“The door is rigged to close after three seconds,” Lochlynn said. “I can open it, but we have to get in there fast.”
“We? Shouldn’t you stay out here, in case I get trapped inside?”
Lochlynn frowned. “Sometimes the humans fight back. I don’t want you stuck in there while I waste precious seconds in getting the door back open.”
“How long could it take?” I asked. “Five seconds to press the buttons, two to run over, and then however many to get me away from the attackers. I’m willing to take the risk. I’d rather have you out here, because if we both get trapped inside…” I swallowed, thinking about being stuck in that cage for the rest of my life. Probably a short life, too.
Lochlynn’s hands balled up, but he nodded.
Much like all the other locks I’d seen in demon households, the one had a keypad attached to it. Lochlynn typed in some numbers, and then waited a heartbeat until the pad blinked green. I had a moment of déjà vu, thinking of all the other times I had watched something like that in the last week. It felt more like an eternity.
The door swung open, and I stepped inside the cage.
It smelled worse than it had outside. Probably some kind of demon magic at work there. They didn’t mind the smell of death and blood, but human waste, sweat, and pain wouldn’t do.
My shoulders curled inward as I tried to make myself smaller.
Someone grabbed me from behind and I almost decked them. The person turned me around, and I found myself staring at the withered face of a man I didn’t know. “No, no, girlie. So young, too young for this. Walk back out. Make a break for it. Make them kill you. Die young, rather than live in this cage. Do it!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, pushing him away. “I’m trying to find someone.”
“We’re all looking for someone,” a woman said, her voice dry, crackling. She laughed from the floor. “All of us are looking for someone or running from someone else. You ain’t no different from us.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, shaking my head.
“Ain’t we all?” she asked, looking over at me. She had dead eyes that had once been blue. Now they looked almost white. “Sorry for the sins we committed, the mistakes that we made, the vices we held. Sorry for the things that brought us here. Them churches, they all preach about saving your soul, or burning in Hell. They don’t know Hell. This is Hell, and we’ll all burn together, for eternity in the heart of our own tormentors. That is Hell.”
“I like your dress,” another voice said. I turned again, finding myself staring at a girl not much older than me. She huddled against the cage, her knees up to her chest. She had black hair and dark eyes, and constantly ran her hands over her hair. It looked like she had worn a bald spot onto her head. “It’s been so long since I got to wear a dress. I miss them. They used to be my favorite.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be,” she said. “I asked for this. I ran to it with open arms thinking that it couldn’t be that bad. Margaret is right, though. This is Hell. They don’t even take away our minds. They just let us suffer as they sip us up like hot chocolate.”
Swallowing hard, I forced myself to keep going. I looked at every face, even the ones I knew couldn’t be Derrick. I just couldn’t help myself. They suffered so much, and I felt like I had to memorize them, to know what their pain had been like. Who else would’ve cared about them?
They all looked so different from every kind of life that I could think of. Some had calluses on their hands and some still had highlights in their hair from the last time they got to go to a salon. It must’ve felt like years down in that cage.
Then I caught sight of curly brown hair, in the back corner. It seemed so familiar that I had to think I would be wrong. It couldn’t have been this easy, right? Even though easy didn’t feel like the right word. I’d gone through so much to find him, but it felt too impossible at the same time.
It couldn’t have been Derrick, because…because I had accepted his death. Even in my grief, and my certainty that we could save him, some voice in the back of my mind whispered that I was insane. That voice told me that he had been dead for the better part of six months, and I just loved the pain of tricking myself.
My eyes started to search the boy that I saw. He had thin shoulders but looked about the right height. He laid on his side, with his back to the cage, so I couldn’t see his face.
I stumbled over to him, my hopes starting to soar. My brain threw words at me over and over again. Derrick. Derrick. You found Derrick. After all this time, you found Derrick! The words repeated in my head, until I believed them.
Reaching the boy, I touched his shoulders, making him roll over.
“Derrick?” I said, my voice already filled with hope.
The boy that I stared down at didn’t look anything like my friend. Oh, his skin tone looked about the right color, and he had curly brown hair, but everything else didn’t match. He had too thick a brow, too strong a chin, too blocky features. Not my friend, but a stranger that I had never seen before.
Blinking, I rose up again.
“Did you want something?” the boy asked, his voice sounding as dead as his eyes looked.
“Do you know a boy named Derrick?”
“Over there,” he said, pointing.
I turned to look, but he had pointed at a white kid with blond hair. Not my friend.
“Does anyone here know a kid named Derrick?” I asked, calling out to everyone in the cage.
“Why do you want to know?” a man with a heavy body asked. He had a beer gut, curly red hair, and a beard that made him look about as redneck as a person could. He had his arms resting on his knees and watched me with the kind of predatory stare that I had been getting used to these last few weeks.
“Because I came here looking for him,” I said. “He’s my friend.”
The man gave a bitter smile. “The rest of us don’t matter to you? Is that it?”
“I didn’t say that,” I told the man. “Looking at all of this…it makes me sick. Genuinely sick that this happened, and you have to go through this. But I came here looking for my friend, and I really want to see him. Does anyone here know a boy named Derrick? He’s got dark skin, curly brown hair, he’s quiet and kind of reserved, but intelligent. Anyone?”
The white kid, Derek I assumed, looked over at me. “I’ll be your friend. If you’ve come to get him out, then I’ll be the best friend that you’ve ever had.”
My shoulders slumped.
The woman from the front of the cage spoke up. “They aren’t gonna help you, honey,” she said, her crackling voice breaking through the other people talking to me. I turned to face her again, having to push past a couple of people to do so.
“What do you mean?”
“Most of them weren’t here when that boy you speak of was,” she said, lifting her head to stare at me. “Even if they had been, they don’t care about him. That’s the whole point of this cage, right? Most of us only care about ourselves and making better lives for ourselves.”
“Not Derrick,” I said. “He did this for his sister.” It didn’t matter, and I knew that. The words just popped out of my mouth.
The woman smiled, cackling. “No, he didn’t. He either wanted to save himself grief or save himself guilt. Anyone else would’ve gone through the pain of life, without asking for this kind of boon. We’re all selfish creatures, dear. Altruism dies at the gate.”
Despite her words, I still asked, “But you know who I’m talking about?”
“Sure do,” the woman said. “He was in this cage with me for about ten days. He handled it better than most of these people could dream. He didn’t talk, stayed in the corner with his shoulders against the cage door, and didn’t fight the demons when they came by.”
“Then he wanted it,” the redneck said without getting up.
The woman shook her head. “No. He just knew that he couldn’t win and saw no reason to take everyone down with him. Us old timers, we call that smart. I’ve been here for almost two years. I should know.”
Impatience tried to bleed through my voice. “Where is Derrick? Did he die?”
“Not here, he didn’t,” the woman said, turning those milky white eyes back to me. “He caught Savannah’s eye, and she took him away. Haven’t seen him since.”
I walked over to the cage door and slapped my hand against it. Lochlynn opened the door without hesitating, and I pushed my way out. “Did you hear that?”
“Every word,” Lochlynn said, rubbing his forehead.
“Who’s Savannah?”
“That’s Nigel’s daughter. She doesn’t live in his estate anymore, because she runs things for him out in Arizona. A couple of casinos, I think.”
“What does that mean for Derrick?” In my head, I pictured us boarding a plane, even thought that sounded ridiculous. Even if we found Derrick with Savannah, how the hell did we grab him without everyone realizing that it had been us? I couldn’t begin to fathom it, and yet I still wanted to try.
“Savannah likes to keep humans for long periods of time, but not as pets. She drains them little by little, letting them heal some every day and then draining them again until they break.”
My heart twisted. “How long do they usually last?”
“Depends on the human,” Lochlynn said, rubbing his face. “Sometimes, they last only a month. The longest she’s kept one is three years.”
I closed my eyes, fighting the urge to fall to the floor. “What does…What are we going to do, then?”
Lochlynn came over to me, kneeling on the floor beside me. He touched my knees, and I didn’t pull away from him, too tired to do anything but sit and sulk like a child. Even if that made me feel foolish. “We’re going to figure this out,” he said. “It’s another clue as to where your friend is, and there’s a good chance that he’s still alive.”
“What will he be like?” I asked, looking back at the cage, watching all those people’s faces. “What will he be like, after suffering like this?”
Lochlynn’s thumbs made little rotations on my knees, calming me. “I can’t tell you that. No one can. Everyone is different, Tomorrow. He might be fine. He might be damaged. We just don’t know.”
I hated that. I hated it so much, that I couldn’t just blink my eyes, and find the information that I wanted. I had Lochlynn’s magic, a phone, a computer, a tablet, and not one of those things could give me the information I wanted, and it sucked. It just sucked to be stuck in the dark and feeling helpless. I hated it.
Lochlynn continued to rub my knees through the dress. “Is there anything that I can do to make this better.”
‘Better’ was impossible, so I gave him an impossible task. “Yeah, open that cage, and let everyone out.”
The humans hadn’t even bothered to stay focused on me, like they had already given up, and it hurt to see.
So distracted with that, I almost missed with Lochlynn said, “All right.”