22. Katalina
KATALINA
The catacombs stretched endlessly beneath the cathedral. Ancient tunnels branched in every direction. Some looked hundreds of years old. Others looked… older.
Far older.
Demon markings covered portions of the walls—ancient symbols from before this land had been settled by humans. Warnings. Wards.
The tunnel we’d chosen opened slightly. Lining each side were… cells. Old iron cages. Rusted chains. Evidence of imprisonment that predated modern construction, likely by centuries.
I ran my hand along the wall at the end, checking for another secret level but finding nothing.
Hack slowly turned in a circle. “Holy shit, this is insane,” he whispered.
Nobody disagreed. Because suddenly one thing became terrifyingly clear. The Doctor hadn’t started this.
He’d inherited it.
Whatever this place was… it existed long before him. Long before Rafael. Maybe long before any of us existing at this moment. The realization settled heavily over the group.
Because if that was true—then the conspiracy wasn’t years old. It was centuries old. Possibly older.
“Let’s go back and take the other corridor,” Boomslang grimly announced.
“What if this isn’t the right place?” Spook quietly asked as he paused ahead of me.
“It’s the right place,” I insisted and pushed past him.
“How do you know?” Mako halted me by grabbing my arm.
Glancing first at his hold on me, then up into his gray-blue eyes, I shook him off. I pressed my splayed hand to my chest. “I know.”
He stared intently into my eyes before nodding.
I carried on.
Behind me, I could sense the hesitation in the others. They didn’t believe me. Until we eventually came upon something that definitely didn’t belong.
Steel.
But not just any kind of steel… modern steel.
A massive reinforced security door sat at the end of the tunnel we had chosen. Completely out of place among the ancient stone.
It was also hard not to notice the keypad and the fresh electrical wiring that ran along the ceiling.
Hack pointed out the cameras up in the corners as he quickly went to work on a small laptop he pulled out of his backpack. He handed a wire to Zeus, who boosted Spook up to clip it to the camera’s cables.
The laboratory. It had to be. My pulse surged. Gideon was beyond that door. I knew it. I felt it. The mate bond pulsed deep inside my chest.
Weak. Muted. But there. Alive.
Thank goodness. Relief washed over me like a wave.
Alive.
“That’s where I came in with Mommy and Daddy.” Zara pointed at a metal spiral staircase set in an alcove to our right.
Boomslang pointed to Mako, then to the stairs. Mako rushed up them in a blur. He was back before I could blink. And I thought I was fast.
“Clear,” he announced.
Boomslang nodded.
There was a click, and Hack closed his laptop and stashed it back in his bag. Zeus placed his hand on the door handle. He glanced around the group, wordlessly asking if everyone was ready.
Dexter set Zara on her feet next to me. She immediately searched for and clasped tightly to my hand.
Weapons, cautiously but steadily, rose in answer. Tension crackled through the air as he pressed the lever, and the door swung wide on well-oiled hinges.
When there was no immediate alarm sounded, Boomslang motioned everyone forward.
We hadn’t taken more than ten steps into the passageway when suddenly, a sound echoed through the tunnels. A howl. Certainly not wolf. Not Rougarou either, as far as I knew. No, that keening wasn't anything natural.
The eerie noise twisted through the catacombs like something ripped apart and crookedly stitched back together.
Pain. Rage. Misery.
Every single one of us froze. The Kings glanced at each other. The howl came again. Longer this time. Closer.
My blood ran cold.
Beside me, Zara froze. Completely. The exposed part of her face went pale. The child stared into the inky darkness beyond the security door and whispered, “That’s one of the failures.”
No one asked how she knew. Because I’m pretty sure nobody wanted the answer. Yet, we all stared at her.
Boomslang knelt on the ancient stone floor in front of her. “What do you mean, sweetheart?”
Zara’s eyes were huge. She wasn’t looking at Boomslang. She was looking farther down the tunnel into the heavy darkness. Then she whispered, “We have to hurry.”
Everyone froze. Hack stepped forward. “What?”
She began to search the wall, her little hands frantically feeling for something that wasn’t there. “Where is it?” she whispered, her voice trembling and laden with fear.
“Shit,” I muttered when she took off running into the catacomb with her hand trailing the coarse stone wall. For a young child, she was insanely fast. Hurried footsteps behind me told me the rest followed.
Suddenly, she came to a screeching halt and pointed toward a keypad tucked into the rock wall. “The phone. You have to dial the phone!”
Hack frowned. “What?”
“The thing on the wall.” She swallowed, her breath quickening. “The phone thing.”
Hack shone his light and bent over to peer into the recessed square. “It’s a keypad.”
The Kings exchanged confused looks.
“I never would’ve noticed it,” he admitted as his brow pinched and he studied it.
Then Zara solemnly announced, “If they know we’re here….”
I knew that it wasn’t just my neck hair that stood on end at her pause.
“If who knows we’re here?” I asked her.
Silence. Then a shuffling sound came from down the tunnel. Her eyes went wide, and she backed up, shaking her head. “No, no, no, no, no,” she whimpered.
A faint sound like a scratchy growl carried from somewhere in the distance.
Hack immediately moved toward the panel. He attached what looked like tiny electrodes to the panel before his fingers flew over his keyboard.
“Can you stop it?” Boomslang questioned.
“I don’t know,” he honestly replied without looking up from his screen. “But I can damn sure try.”
The recessed panel flashed red several times. His focus became laser-precise as he muttered, “Shit.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Dexter grumbled. “Why don’t I like the sound of that?”
Being a fair security hacker was part of my nature as a hunter. I crouched down to see what Hack was seeing and I immediately knew. It wasn’t simply encrypted. It was warded. Magically layered.
“Oh, that’s dirty…” Hack muttered under his breath.
Boomslang looked between Hack and deeper into the tunnels where the sounds were getting louder. “Talk to me.”
“They built two systems.” Hack continued typing. “One controls the lab.” Another beep. “The other controls the cages.”
Everyone went still.
Hack’s face hardened. “They’re linked.”
Another sequence popped up on his screen.
“So if security gets tripped, or the first door opens…” I began as the pieces were clicking together for me.
He looked up. “Whatever is down there gets to you unless you know this is here and you know there’s a second code.”
Everyone held their breath. Then—Click.
Hack slipped the last line of code into the keypad. The tiny screen flashed red. Then amber. Finally, a computer-generated voice announced, “Access Override Accepted.”
Hack exhaled and glanced around in relieved triumph. “I think I bypassed it.”
“You think?” Zeus asked, lifting his mask as if he wasn’t seeing clearly with it and needed clarity. His jaw hung in disbelief.
What sounded like heavy locks somewhere deep beneath the cathedral thunked quietly. The creaking of heavy iron gates rolling on hard ground echoed from up ahead.
There was a frantic scratching and scrambling sound, then the gates rolled again. We waited a moment. Nothing opened again. Nothing moved in the corridors though a faint but vicious smacking and grunting could be heard.
“Yes, I believe it’s safe to proceed,” Hack declared as he packed up his equipment.
“And you believe?” Zeus continued incredulously. In any other circumstance, it might’ve been humorous.
“They shouldn’t be able to trigger a mass release now,” Hack added.
“Shouldn’t?” Spook chimed in.
Hack winced and shrugged. “I mean, I hate making promises with someone else’s security system.”
Boomslang nodded once and motioned ahead. “Move.”
One by one, we advanced. In my hand, Zara’s squeezed my fingers, and I gave her a reassuring one in return.
The passage beyond the security panel narrowed. Ancient stone slowly gave way to reinforced concrete. It was as if the very air changed. The scent of damp earth disappeared beneath antiseptic chemicals and old blood.
I knew that smell. It lived in Gideon’s cell. It clung to Rafael’s clothes. It lingered in my childhood nightmares as an unknown, but now I recognized it.
The deeper we walked, the quieter everyone became. Even Zeus stopped making jokes.
Then—something growled.
Not a wolf. Not a vampire. Not a werewolf. Not anything I’d ever heard before. The sound vibrated through the stone itself.
Low. Wet.
Painful.
Bronx’s flashlight swept across the darkness. Iron bars.
Another snarl. Then eyes. Dozens of them reflecting from the darkness.
Boomslang raised a hand and everyone stopped. The beams from our flashlights slowly drifted across the first cell.
“Oh… God.” I think it was Spook who whispered it.
Inside the cage crouched something that looked vaguely canine. Only… its proportions weren’t right.
One foreleg ended in claws large enough to belong to a grizzly bear.
The other resembled a human arm twisted backward until the elbow bent in the wrong direction.
Its spine arched unnaturally high beneath skin stretched too tightly across mismatched muscles.
Patches of fur gave way to gray flesh that looked almost stitched.
Not sewn, though. As if different pieces of living tissue had been coaxed into growing together.
Its head lifted. One eye glowed amber. The other was clouded white. Neither looked sane. It lunged and slammed itself into the bars.
Steel groaned. Dust sifted from above.
Zara whimpered. “It hurts.”
Everyone looked at her.
The creature slammed into the bars again. Again and again. That’s when I realized it wasn’t trying to escape. It was trying to make something stop.
My stomach twisted.
The next cage held something even worse. It had wings. Or at least what should have been wings. Instead, they were malformed masses of bone and leathery skin protruding unevenly from its shoulders, one dragging uselessly across the floor while the other twitched in violent spasms.
Its jaw was too long. Its teeth too numerous. One leg ended in talons, the other in a hoof. It looked as though someone had taken pieces from different species and forced them to agree to exist on the same body.
And they hadn’t.
The creature trembled continuously, muscles spasming beneath skin that looked painfully mismatched.
Dexter swallowed hard. “Sweet Mary, mother of Christ…”
Cell after cell. “Failure” after “failure.” Some still moved purposefully as they clawed angrily through the bars at us.
Others simply rocked back and forth or stared blankly through the bars.
One continuously scratched symbols into the stone floor with sharp claw-tipped fingers that ended in too many joints.
Another pressed its forehead against the bars and softly cried. Not growled. Or snarled. Cried. Like a child.
My throat tightened. These weren’t monsters. Not originally, anyway.
These had been people. Or wolves. Or vampires. Or demons.
Until someone decided biology was merely a suggestion.
Mako’s voice was barely audible. “This isn’t crossbreeding.”
“No,” I whispered. “It isn’t.”
Boomslang’s jaw tensed enough I could see the muscle bunch beneath his mask. He clenched it so tightly, I thought he might actually crack a tooth.
“This is genetic alteration,” Zeus softly observed.
Hack slowly shook his head. “Worse.”
He gestured toward one of the creatures whose flesh seemed to ripple beneath its skin, as though different muscles were competing for control. “This is cellular meshing.”
Nobody spoke because no one knew what to say. In a world where we knew the things that went bump in the night, that said something.
Hack continued quietly. “They’re forcing completely incompatible DNA to coexist…” His voice trailed off as he swallowed hard. “…and making the cells fight until something survives. Or doesn’t.”
A heavy, horrified silence ensued.
Zara reached for my hand, and I glanced down. Except I could see it wasn’t because she was frightened. It was because somehow, even at her young age, she pitied them. She looked up at me with tears shining in her eyes. “They called them failures.”
Firmly, I held her small hand. Not because I knew what to say, but because I absolutely didn’t. And suddenly, for the first time in years, my heart was aching… because I wasn’t thinking about revenge.
I was thinking about mercy.