I wasn’t taking chances. My cards nestled against my chest, my wand up my sleeve in its spring-loaded holster. I hadn’t just changed my clothes back at the apartment; I’d rounded out my arsenal. The velvet pouch of alchemist’s clay, Bentley’s gift, rode snug in my hip pocket. On the opposite side, a nine-millimeter in a shoulder holster under my linen jacket. Whatever Grimm threw at me—magic or hot lead—I was ready with a rebuttal.
“Which leaves the unanswered question,” Caitlin said.
One word: why?
We rolled into a small town northwest of Vegas just before dusk. It was a sleepy chunk of nowhere, the kind of place you’re either born in and die in, or drive through and forget. We refueled at a no-name gas station with an awning painted like a faded circus tent, then followed the back roads until we reached the end of the line.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
The Wellness House rose up to blot the setting sun behind its Victorian-styled gables. A central tower speared the sky with a sharp, steep peak and a shattered window for a heart. The white paint was peeling from the clapboard now, and the first-floor windows lay sheathed under nailed boards and signs reading CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF THE STATE.
Red spray paint defaced the once-grim sign out front, a childish scrawl that proclaimed FOCK YOU. The misspelling gave the defiant statement more power somehow. Maybe it was hidden in the faint smile it brought to my lips. There was a reason I usually resorted to a wisecrack in moments like this. I carried two weapons up my sleeve when it came to fighting fear: laughter and anger.
I had a feeling I was going to need both. For now the house sat dormant, rusting in its sleep, like an elderly tiger that might spring awake to claw and bite at any moment. Caitlin stared at me, waiting for an answer to her question.
“It’s just a building,” I said and got out of the car.
We circled the property on foot. No sign of the panel van, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t inside, waiting. All the doors were secure, fixed with extra padlocks on the outside, and the windows were boarded up tight.
“This one,” Caitlin said. She had been appraising the windows with an architect’s eye and singled out one for her personal attention. She hooked her fingers around a board and heaved. Nails popped free from the groaning wood one by one, until a board wriggled loose. She tossed it aside, letting it clatter to the dirt at her back, and reached for the next in line.
Eventually she cleared an opening big enough for us to invade. The window beneath the boards was long broken, nothing left but a ring of jagged glass teeth. I broke out the shards with the butt of my pistol one by one. I wasn’t worried about the noise; if the cambion was inside, waiting for us, he already knew we were here.
I pulled myself over the window frame. My feet touched down on rough floorboards, coated in twenty years of dust and neglect. I gazed across an old industrial kitchen and memories flooded in. In my mind’s eye the stark overhead lights—shattered and dead now—were buzzing and bright. The chipped particleboard counter, host to cobwebs and mummified flies, was lined with corroded, moldy cans of bulk-bought green beans and generic potted meat.
We both took out our phones and turned them into flashlights, with the outside light fading fast. Once we left the open window behind, there would be no light at all beyond what we brought in with us.
I stood still for a moment, ears perked, listening to anything the Wellness House wanted to say. It kept its secrets. Nothing stirred in the bottomless gloom, not even the rats.
We weren’t its only recent visitors, though. As we walked along a narrow corridor, my phone’s beam trailed across smears of dust on the floor. There were footprints, signs of shuffling, dragging.
“He’s been here,” I said.
I poked my head into a half-open doorway while I tried to get my bearings. It was strange returning after so many years; some halls I knew by heart, down to the detail of the striped wallpaper or a particular crack in the baseboards, and others seemed utterly alien to me. My memory had reshaped and twisted this place, altered it under the weight of over two decades of nightmares, and being confronted with concrete reality again was jarring. We passed a dorm room I knew—absolutely knew—was on the second floor, not the first. I expected a pair of bathroom doors on the left wall, and they were actually on the right.
I pushed open another door and froze.
“Pet?” Caitlin asked. She looked between my face and the cramped room, barely big enough for the wire-frame bed inside and its rotting, yellowed mattress. And the old, dangling hospital-grade restraints with their white buckled straps.
“You know those cigarette burns on my back?” I asked her.
I went inside. I had to. I don’t know why. Some bone-deep command pulled me over the threshold, to stare at my teenage ghost on the mattress.
“This is the ‘segregation and discipline’ hall,” I told her. “Six rooms, all just like this, but…it was this room. Once a week, twice sometimes. This was where they put me.”
Caitlin put her hand on my shoulder. She didn’t speak, letting me process whatever I needed to. I think she wanted me to know I wasn’t alone.
“The abuse that got this place shut down,” I said, “it wasn’t…deliberate, if that makes sense. It was born out of neglect. They had too few doctors, too many kids—the state funding paid them by the head, so they packed us in like sardines. Their solution was to hire minimum-wage ‘orderlies’ with no training, most of them barely a year or two older than we were. Kids watching kids. And when kids get frustrated, they lash out.”
“That doesn’t excuse what happened to you,” Caitlin said. Her voice was barely a whisper.
“No. It doesn’t.”
I didn’t have anything else to say. There was nothing else to see. We backed out of the room and kept moving.
We climbed a wide staircase, the runner rotted to scraps of vaguely floral fabric. A musty odor, like old books and mothballs, hung in the air and tickled the back of my throat. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. A hunch pushed my footsteps, or maybe I was just feeling masochistic and wanted to wallow in the bad old days.
No. Something was significant about this place, outside my own checkered past. Grimm had taken the Wellness House van—and I assumed he’d would have had to put some elbow grease into making it run, after it had been sitting under a tarp or something for twenty years—and gotten his plates caught on camera. He wanted me to see it, wanted me to follow him here.
So where was he?
I strobed my light across an open doorway. I didn’t find the cambion, but I found his lair.
32.
“He’s living here,” Caitlin said.
He had been, anyway, if the missing van meant he wasn’t coming back. This side room had been swept more or less clean, broken furniture shoved to the corners, and he’d carved out a little sanctuary for himself. A down-stuffed sleeping bag and a pillow lay near a hotplate and a can of Sterno. He had a battery-powered camping lantern, the green plastic hood pulled down tight, and junk-food wrappers spilled from the half-open mouth of a garbage bag. From the food debris and empty soda cans, I figured he’d been here for a week, at least.
A black plastic case sat at the foot of his bedroll. I crouched down, ran my fingertips across the grainy surface and unclasped it. Inside, foam had been cut to securely carry a single pistol and a couple of magazines. Empty. Wherever he was right now, he had the piece on him.
“Only one firearm?” Caitlin asked.
I shut the lid. “Only need one bullet, if you know how to aim. This doesn’t make any sense. Why would he camp out here?”
Caitlin glanced to a boarded-over window. “He would have had to fix the van up to get it running again, yes? If he was working alone, and not familiar with that kind of engine, it could have taken him a few days.”
I pushed myself back to my feet.
“Hell of a lot of effort. Too much effort.”