Chapter 240
I was relieved to see Jamie and Cale already in position. Jamie made me feel safe, and he smiled at me, though I could tell he was busy. My attention was pulled in another direction as Brandon tugged on my arm.
“I gotta go get in position,” he said, leading me away from his dad a little bit.
“Okay,” I replied, feeling butterflies in my stomach, mostly of the Vampire variety but also because I was looking into his green eyes.
“Be careful,” he warned.
“You, too.”
He smiled at me and leaned down and kissed my cheek before he headed off toward his spoke. I watched him for as long as I could before I returned my focus on Elliott and Jamie who seemed to be involved in a conversation I wasn’t privy to.
Jamie nodded while Elliott continued to talk to someone as he looked around, and then he nodded before turning to me. Elliott took me gently by the arms and looked right into my eyes, which was weird because when he started to speak, his mouth didn’t move. “Listen, lil girl, you know that big observation tower we passed outside on our way in here?”
I hadn’t been looking up as I’d been concentrating on not tripping, so I only shrugged. I’d remembered seeing it earlier during Christian’s presentation.
“Well, Aaron and I agree I need to be in it.”
My eyes doubled in size as I feared he might say I was going with him.
“Relax. You get to stay on terra firma.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, but panic began to set in again as I realized that meant he’d be leaving me.
“You and the doc are good pals, right?” he asked. I shrugged again. Jamie and I got along well, but he wasn’t exactly my best buddy, not like Elliott and me. “You’re going to stay here with him, okay?” Once again I nodded. Scarlet came in just then, which meant I’d be with all three Healers. I thought they’d be busy but didn’t figure they’d all need to be out at once.
“I’m not gonna handcuff you to him,” he said with a sly grin, “but you don’t go anywhere without Jamie’s permission, got it?” I nodded, assuming Jamie wouldn’t give me permission to sneeze under the circumstances. He’d already put me back together once. “And I will be watching you through the IAC. So be careful.” Once again, I nodded, and he wrapped his arms around me quickly before taking off.
I exhaled and realized my bottom lip was trembling. Jamie pulled me over next to him with his arm around my shoulders, and kept his arm there, which I was thankful for. I could sense an electricity in the air, and it was getting thicker. Gibbon was definitely here.
Through my IAC, I could see that Elliott was in position in the watchtower now. Even looking through his perspective made my knees a little weak, thinking of how I’d felt on that bridge and how I’d assumed Zabrina was going to throw me over the side.
A flicker of light caught my attention through Elliott’s line of sight. He saw it, too. “Hey boss man,” he said addressing Aaron. “I thought we believed there wouldn’t be any people here.”
“That’s what we were told,” Aaron replied. “What are you seeing?”
“Uh, well, it looks like we’ve got a security guard walking between the greenhouse buildings carrying a flashlight.” Through Elliott’s eyes, I could see an older looking man dressed in a security guard uniform slowly walking toward my sister and Aaron’s position.
“Great,” Aaron muttered. I switched to focusing on what Cadence could see, and a few seconds later, said security guard came around the corner, only a few yards away from them.
My sister and Aaron froze, and while I was trying to stay out of this as much as possible, a terrible thought entered my mind. That security guard had to be a new addition to the measures taken by the museum staff since so many people had been disappearing nearby. One of the missing people was a teacher, allegedly missing from the museum itself. That old man might make quite the tasty meal for our Vampire. To Cadence only, I asked, “If Gibbon is here, won’t he be after that guy?”
“Not necessarily,” Cadence replied. I saw her and Aaron move into the shadows cast by the main building, and right in front of her, I could see a familiar sight. The opening to the Klondike. It took her a second to continue, and I wondered if she was also talking to someone else, but she said, “Gibbon may not realize there’s anyone here. Or he may be hiding from us.”
“I don’t think he realizes we are here yet,” I said in response. “But he is definitely nearby.” I didn’t want to go into how I knew that, but I could certainly feel him, pulling on me like a magnet.
It didn’t matter; Cadence was no longer listening to me. I saw Aaron make a few gestures and I watched as the two of them moved into position. They grabbed ahold of the grate that covered the Klondike, pulled it loose like it was nothing, and quietly leaned it against the building, leaving a gaping hole in the ground in front of them that seemed to disappear into black emptiness.
I imagined what it would be like to be dragged down there as a prisoner, but when I closed my eyes and thought about those steps leading down into the abyss, it wasn’t images of prisoners I conjured. It was images of a teenage boy, shrieking, as something—a monster—grabbed his ankle and heaved him down below the ground into the darkness.
My eyes flew open, and I pushed the memory aside. How it came to be in my mind was beyond me, but I felt Gibbon was even closer now than he had been before. I wasn’t scared for my sister, though, as she and Aaron carefully made their way down the stairs into nothingness. They would find horrors at the end of that tunnel, but Gibbon wasn’t down there.
They had come to a door. Gibbon’s essence permeated here; he had spent a lot of time beyond that door. My fingernails sunk into Jamie’s arm as I braced myself for what my sister would discover on the other side. I could see it now, with my mind’s eye, as clearly as I could’ve if it had been me who’d vacated that room just a few minutes ago. My sister and Aaron burst through the door, and even though I couldn’t smell what they could, my stomach twisted, and I doubled over along with my sister as soon as the pungent odor hit her in the lungs.
Bodies. Everywhere. Piles of them. Originally, the team’s estimate had been twenty victims. There were more. Many more. As my sister glanced over them, she saw arms and legs, a camera, a wristwatch. A nametag from a school. I saw grimaces, faces contorted in silent screams, the expressions these people had made when Gibbon sank his fangs into each of them. My stomach lurched again.
Jamie’s grip on my shoulders firmed. “You okay?” he whispered.
All I could do was nod. I didn’t have time to explain it to him, to any of them, not now, not when they didn’t want to listen anyway. He didn’t let go of me though, and I assumed he thought I just had a sensitive stomach. It wasn’t that the sights didn’t thoroughly disgust me, but the agony that washed over me in waves as I pictured them one at a time was far worse than the state of their decomposing remains.
And Gibbon wasn’t finished. His presence grew ever closer. He was on the prowl now. He was hunting something… someone.
Elliott’s voice cut through my thoughts, jarring me out of the connection I was forming with Gibbon. “Boss man, sorry to break up your macabre party down there, but we’ve got a problem.”
“What is it?” Aaron asked, backing away from the bodies, back toward the hallway.
“Paul Blart is headed through the front door, right toward Christian’s team.”
“Affirmative,” Aaron replied with an audible sigh. “We’re on our way up. Christian, be careful, but do what you need to do.”
Christian answered, “Will do,” but the security guard coming toward the front entrance was the least of our worries. It was what was coming down the hall in the back of the building that should’ve had our attention.
