Ch. 104: The Cells

CHAPTER 104:
Evan~
The weight of breaking the bond still sat on my chest. The weight of a car or elephant wouldn’t hurt this badly. It couldn’t. But I still pushed myself out of bed. I still followed orders. I felt like I was stuck inside my own body. And speaking was just too painful.
I could see the same in Jake. We have both been reduced to grunting cavemen who speak rarely and in very few words. Anything else hurts me so bad I can’t see. I imagine anything else for Jake risks what we have been fighting so long to stop.
It feels like we’re on the verge of something. Everything feels too still, too quiet. Besides Nick and Ally saying that Kyle may know more than he’s saying, we haven’t gotten anything new to follow. No Maxine, no real information from Sophie - or T-.
My knees buckle at the thought of her.
Will this ever end?
“Evan?!” I hear my dad call from the hall.
I push myself up off my bed and rush to the door like it’s the end of my marathon and I just need one final push. That’s how I move through everything now. Apparently.
I open the door to come a few inches from my dad’s face.
“Your mom - she - are you - how are you holding up?” my dad asks gruffly.
Am I like this too? So obviously uncomfortable with anything real outside battle?
I nod.
“Good,” he says and turns on his heel. I am about to close the door when he adds, “Do you want to see her? Your mom thinks it could help.”
I don’t even know how to begin reacting to that. See her? Her? Help?
My dad turns after a moment to look at me after my obviously too-long stretch of silence. His eyebrow is raised in a question he won’t ask again. My dad has never repeated himself. Even if he does fumble for the right words when it comes to ‘soft’ things.
I shake my head very clearly for him.
“Alright, then out to training. It’s been too long,” he barks out and continues walking down.
I take another breath and use my new mantra to get down the stairs: just one final push.

Ally~
Something was very clearly weird at the field Kyle had stopped in. Some part of me - an intuitive voice - seems to be getting stronger. And it was very sure that I needed to follow Kyle. The voice is so single-minded that I almost went in without Nick. Luckily my bond rang like a little bell before I pushed through the invisible barrier. The intuitive voice could care less. I sure did though.
It was incredibly cold. That was the first sensation. Besides Nick’s hand in mine, it felt like I was thrust into a storming blizzard in the arctic. Slapped with freezing wind. Or so I thought.
It was over after a few seconds and then we stepped into a pocket of warm air. It was breezy. And as I finally could open my eyes I had to stop myself from taking in a gasp. Nick reacted faster than I did and quickly pulled us over to an area with much more cover. There in front of us was this old gothic castle looking building. Well hell, it could actually be a castle.
“Do you know where he went?” Nick asked me in the tiniest whisper.
I shook my head then followed him along the treeline as we scoped the place out.
It was about four or five stories tall depending on which way you looked at it since the land was at a deep slope. It was like building a big old house on the side of a mountain, near the top but not quite on it.
Nick’s steps were totally silent and my feet stepping on things was all you could hear. That made me pause. I stopped us by pulling lightly on Nick’s hand.
He looked at me and I held my hand to my ear, pointed around the forest, and put on my best ‘question’ face. He immediately understood and shook his head ‘no.’ Meaning even with his supersonic hearing, there were no sounds - no birds or squirrels or anything - coming from anywhere in this forest. If it even was a forest. This place certainly felt real but being so new to this world, I couldn’t count anything out.
Nick stopped suddenly and froze. His eyes went to me in a pleading look. I know what he was asking. There was some sort of threat he sensed and he wanted to deal with it alone. I almost fought back but I thought back to my earlier clunky footing… and I nodded. Nick held up one finger like he was saying ‘one minute.’
He raced down along the trees without making a sound and I tried to calm my heart and my breathing. I couldn’t panic because I couldn’t see Nick anymore. I wasn’t that girl. Right?
I waited. And waited some more. I shifted on my feet and tried not to make a sound.
Then I heard a thump.
I looked behind me to see Nick there grinning at me. After having tossed Kyle’s sleeping form in front of me.
“It’s all clear there’s no one here but him,” Nick told me, dumb smile on his face.
“Nick!” I exclaimed while I bent down to check on Kyle. “What did you do?”
“Well you said not to wake him, so I didn’t. This is how I found him I promise!” he said, his tone desperate to escape blame like a little kid.
I glanced up and gave him a look that read ‘yeah right.’
“Really!” he doubled-down. “He was wandering around the main floor banging on some creepy door I suspect goes down into a dungeon or something and then he fell-”
My head shot up again. “Cells?”
Our eyes met.
Nick bent down to pick Kyle up, and we took off running. Nick leading the way. He opened these massive front doors and I followed closely as we came up to the door Nick must have been describing. He put his hand on the handle and looked at me for permission, with Kyle flung over his shoulder in a fireman's carry.
“Do it,” I urged him.
He yanked on it then yanked harder and something cracked. He looked at me again but I wasn’t going to stop him, we needed to know.
The door opened to a stairwell that went winding steeply down. And we all went down together. Nick first, since he could far more easily see in this eerie darkness. When we reached the bottom we were greeted with more darkness and a few small modern LED lights stretching down different hallways. It was like a maze in here.
“His scent down here, it’s old. But he’s definitely been here before,” Nick concluded after spinning around slowly. I followed him as he went down one hall. “He was down this way for sure.”
I pulled my phone out and while there was absolutely no service, I could still use the camera. And so I took a couple photos with the flash on since it was still incredibly dark. And I followed Nick as he held my hand and we ended up at another door. This one seemed to be concrete or something like it.
“In here,” he said. “Are you sure we should keep going? Asher is not liking this.”
“Hold the door open for me and keep watch?” I suggested.
“Fine, but not too long okay? Something is very wrong.”
I knew what he was talking about. But I needed just a few minutes longer.
Nick pulled this ridiculously heavy door open and he didn’t even look in when he said, “That’s it. His scent is incredibly strong here. He had to have been kept in here.” After a second of me taking photos he just shook his head and whispered, “Goddess.”
Goddess indeed. This place reeked, even for my basically human nose. It was cold and wet and just awful. There was a bucket inside a jail cell looking thing and it was just so completely dark in here it was - I had to stop feeling this right now.
My pendant heated in warning. Time to go.
“Let’s go,” I said to Nick as he closed the door behind me.
We started to rush back towards the stairs back up to the castle when I heard a throat clearing.
“What are we doing here?” a voice asked.