Slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouse
Nikolias swallowed. "Me either... Not the coming back to Houston part, but just in general. I thought..." He shook his head. "Doesn't matter what I thought, I guess. Am I allowed to pack a bag for Tyler?"
"Yeah. That's covered." He chuckled. "I wondered what the suitcase was about."
They wound thorugh the tree-line road, hiding giant houses on Blalock, heading south towards the bayou and the supernatural side of River Oaks. He hadn't understood when they'd lived in Houston how wealthy his parents had to be to live in that area of town until he was in middle school and invited to a birthday party across town.
He'd been the perfect guest at the backyard party with the above-ground pool. He'd talked with the family, helped clean up, made sure the birthday queen got the experience she wanted out of it and a gift worth the occasion. When he'd gotten home,  he had asked his parents to explain what he should do when his own birthday came around. He hadn't wanted to make anyone feel bad or doubt how much fun he'd had at their party if they hosted a party at his house. That conversation had made Chabyul and Qiara his friends for life since he wasn't caught off guard at the cookout Qiara's family had at Hermann Park years later. 
He'd been to the Williams' house once since they'd moved down the street from him. It had been the first time since understanding how much money the Taimana-Abraham house had that he'd been invited to a friend's house that was of a similar enough socio-economic background. 
He remembered never wanting to go back, though he spent plenty of weekends, plenty of summers hanging out with Chabyul, Qiara, and Sage's family. The grounds had tugged at his mind painfully, setting him on edge no matter how long he'd been there.
As the car pulled up across the street from the house, he had that same feeling, but louder. With years of understanding that it was his empathy screaming that there was something terrible happening here, he climbed out of the car, nodded at the enforcers nearby, hauling boxes of papers into the cars and vans parked in the driveway and in front of the lawn.
"Officially," his escorting enforcer said, coming to stand beside him. "You're here to pack Tyler's stuff and find your journal."
"And... unofficially?"
He pulled a tablet out and handed it to Nikolias. The officer trailed behind. Nikolias frowned at the report on the house. They'd done a scan and found a basement but no way to access it. The basement had all the markers of an old hunter bunker. 
"This... was a hunter's home?"
"We think it's the southwest guild's old headquarters, maybe a holdover from the last days of the war?"  He sighed.
"Well, it answers a lot of questions about why I hated being here." Nikolias rolled his shoulders back. "No one's inside, right?"
He nodded, and Nikolias took a deep breath and crossed the street, easing the walls of his mind to thin. 
A woman's scream cut through the air, and he slammed the walls up, stumbling on the sidewalk. He edged away from the grass, but the paved cement wasn't much better. A million cool, reaching hands dug into the walls of his mind, bloody broken fingers curled over the high edges. They were there all reaching out for him, unsettled. He had no idea what it would take to lay them rest, or if he even could.
What would magically cleansing this place do without dismantling the network that created it?
"You okay?"
Nikolias nodded. "Suppressors... have a way of making control harder." He swallowed, careful to keep on the paved cement, and stopping before the natural stone pathway that connected the driveway to the porch. "You have... shoe covers or something?"
A pair of rubber soles appeared in front of him. Nikolias took them, put them on, and took a tentative step onto the first stone paver. Another scream came from further away, but he followed it to the porch stairs and up, and he followed it. Pressing the walls a little lower, faces peeked over the edges. The lingering suppressors burned in his veins, but he breathed through it, letting the drifting ghosts surface in his eyes.
A man snarling and thrashing, scratching and clawing against the floor as he was dragged down the hall. A woman, a child fighting captors, throwing themselves against invisible walls. His heart thudded in his throat as he picked up pace, rushing past the halls of faceless ghosts, laughing, talking, sharpening knives. 
The scent of blood, the slosh of it across the floor flipped his stomach and dragged a dry gag up his throat.
He stopped still, shutting his eyes and shuddering through the thick wet thwack of a butcher's cleaver cutting through flesh and bone as a young woman stared at him and the last of the light left her eyes.
Slaughterhouse.
This place had been a slaughterhouse for supernaturals, probably a base for poachers and black market dealers. Maybe just where hunters took their catches to torture. The floors had been redone, probably to hide the lingering evidence, but the horrors that had gone into harvesting, carving, ripping, descaling, and otherwise dismantling living people had sunk into the metal and stone bones of the building. 
He swallowed, forcing himself to stand and walk through the foyer. 
A faceless ghost thrust a bloody hand up, gripping a glowing orb in hand while a woman jerked and choked on her own blood on the table hovering in the air between the one room and the next. 
 Siren's orb shell. A lycan's eyes. A vampyr's heart. He turned down another hallway, kicking the door open with the soles. 
A living heartbeat and a recent fresh imprint screamed from within the room. 
Light gleamed on the brand new appliances. This room hadn't always been a kitchen, had it? Not the type for eating anyway.
Nikolias froze, scanning the room for a clearer hint of what it might have been once and how to access the cells Tyler mentioned.
Too many impressions were here, each faint but together forming a thick layer of fear and suffering that coated the whole room and dripped off the cabinet. Butchery tables, a drain in the floor that was now hidden beneath the polished marble-topped island.
A storage room that they had added plumbing and electricity to. The cabinets had been shelves, but most of the old stone and wood had been left intact, leaking memories into the air.
Then, Eason crept past him as an after image.
His dark hair cut short and gelled into a style. He wasn't much younger than he had been when Nikolias last saw him, but he was different. The air around him seized with vicious prejudice. He crouched at the edge of the room just beside the refrigerator a vicious smile on his face. He pulled a panel of wallpaper up. 
"You hungry?" He chuckled low and mean. "What are you willing to do for it?"