CHAPTER SIXTEEN
KENNEDY
I open my eyes to find Jenna watching me, three new torches lined up beside her.
“You ready?” she asks.
I blink the sleep out of my eyes. I think about my comfortable apartment in Boston, my practice, my semi-normal life that seems to belong to someone else entirely.
“No,” I say honestly. “But let’s do it anyway.”
Jenna’s smile is fierce. “That’s the spirit.”
And for the first time since I woke up in this cell, I actually believe we might have a chance. A small one. A probably-going-to-get-us-killed one. But a chance, nonetheless.
“So,” I say, standing and brushing off my pants again. “Lock-picking tutorial time?”
Jenna’s laugh echoes off the stone walls. “YouTube had better not let us down.”
“If it does, we’ll haunt them together,” I joke, clearly doing my best to deflect the desperate situation we’re in.
“Deal.
As Jenna hands me one of the makeshift tools she’s created—a thin piece of metal she’s somehow fashioned from goddess-knows-what—I feel something shift inside me.
The fear is still there, coiled tightly in my chest, but it’s now joined by something else.
Perseverance combined with a little hostility, topped with a healthy dose of stubbornness.
Pestilence thinks she’s planned for everything. She thinks she knows how this ends. But she’s never met me, and I have a point to prove and a YouTube education in lock picking. Well, that and a PhD.
We’re going to escape this cell, find Gabriel, and shove her entire plan so far up her perfectly aerobicized ass, she won’t know what hit her.
I work on the lock for what feels like hours. Jenna has created five torches now, each carefully constructed from materials I try not to examine too closely. My fingers are cramping, and I’m starting to think YouTube has failed me when finally—finally—something shifts inside the lock mechanism.
“Wait,” I breathe. “I think I got something.”
Jenna comes to stand over my shoulder. “Don’t get excited yet.”
The words are barely out of her mouth when we both hear the lock click. The sound is probably not as loud as we think, but I swear it echoes through the entire dungeon, bouncing off the walls and most likely waking up monsters that are preparing to eat us.
When the lock springs open, we both freeze, staring at it like it might be a trick.
“Holy shit,” I whisper.
“Holy fucking shit,” Jenna echoes before patting me on the shoulder. “You fucking did it.”
“I fucking did it,” I repeat, as surprised as she is. I carefully remove the padlock, unwinding the chain as quietly as possible. Every clink of metal sounds like a gong in the silence.
The chain falls away, but to our shock, the bars still don’t move.
“Right,” Jenna says. “The lock was just insurance. The real barrier is the magic.”
“Can you break it?”
Jenna tilts her head as she stares at me as if I’ve suddenly sprouted horns. “If I could break it, I would have done it ten years ago.” She examines the runes again. “But magic is designed to keep me in. Specifically, me. Specifically what I am. You’re human. You are just human, aren’t you?”
I give her a nod. “Just your run-of-the-mill human.”
“Then the runes might not recognize you as a threat.”
“So, I might just be able to walk through?”
“It’s possible.” She steps back. “Try it.”
I reach for the bars, half-expecting them to shock me. Instead, my hand closes around cold metal, and I push.
Nothing. I push harder. Still nothing.
“There’s got to be a trick,” I mutter, examining where the gate meets the frame. And then I see it—a small latch, barely visible in the shadows. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What? It’s a pull door.”
“No, it’s just latched, like a normal door.” I flip the latch up, and the gate swings open with a rusty creak that echoes down the corridor like a scream. I take a small, tentative step through the gate.
We both freeze, listening.
Silence.
Then, from somewhere in the darkness, a sound. A wet, sliding sound, like something large dragging itself across stone.
“Get back in,” Jenna whispers urgently, “Close it. Now.”
But I’m already reaching for the torches. “No. This is our chance. We don’t know when we’ll get another one.”
“Kennedy—”
“No, what if she doesn’t come back for days or ever? I’m not going to let Reaver walk into her trap.” I grab two torches, thrusting one at Jenna. “I’m not waiting. I’m done waiting.”
The sliding, slithering sound is getting closer.
Jenna takes the torch, her face pale but determined. “You’re insane.”
“You keep saying that like it’s news.” I step through the open gate into the corridor, my heart hammering so hard, I can feel it in my throat.
“Are you coming or not?” For a moment, I think she’s going to refuse.
That she’s going to retreat into the cell, back into the safety of her ten-year prison.
Then she steps through the gate to stand beside me. “Left or right?” I whisper.
“Left. The stairs are to the left.” She’s gripping her torch so hard, her knuckles are white. “Stay close to the wall, don’t make any sudden movements, and whatever you do, don’t—
Something moves in the darkness ahead of us, something big, and we both freeze.
“Don’t what?” I hiss, doing my best to keep my voice barely above a whisper.
“Don’t scream,” Jenna finishes, and I really wish she hadn’t.
The thing moves again, and in the torchlight, I catch a glimpse of something that makes my brain reject what my eyes are seeing. Too many legs, too many angles, and a mouth that opens wrong.
“What the hell is that?” My voice is barely audible.
“A Gatherer,” Jenna breathes. “She must have gotten more since I’ve been here. They didn’t use to come this close to the cells.”
“A Gatherer of what?”
“Souls, flesh… whatever she tells them to collect.” Jenna raises her torch higher. “They’re blind, but they hunt by sound and scent.”
The Gatherer moves closer, and I can see more of it now, and I wish I couldn’t.
It’s vaguely humanoid, if humans were designed by something that had only heard about humans third hand and decided to improvise.
Its skin—if you can call it that—is the color of a corpse three days dead, and it moves with a terrible, lurching grace.
“The fire,” I say suddenly. “You said they don’t like fire.”
“No, I said most things don’t like fire. I have no idea if—”
I thrust my torch toward it, and the Gatherer recoils, making a sound like metal scraping on metal mixed with a child’s cry. It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard, and I’ve been to open mic nights where Salem sang.
“Go,” I say, giving Jenna a nudge. “Go now while it’s distracted.”
Jenna grabs my free hand. “We stay together—”
“MOVE!” I thrust the torch again, and the Gatherer retreats further, but I can hear more sounds now, more sliding, more wet scraping. “There are more coming. We have to pick up the pace.”
Jenna hesitates for one more heartbeat, then she turns and runs. I back away slowly, keeping my torch between the Gatherer and me, then I turn and sprint after her.
Behind us, the sounds multiply. The Gatherers are calling each other, a cacophony of metal and screaming that raises every hair on my body.
“Stairs!” Jenna shouts ahead of me. “I see the stairs!”
We’re going to make it despite everything. Despite the horror movie nightmare chasing us, we’re actually going to—
My foot catches on something—a loose stone, a bone, I don’t look to see—and I go down hard, my torch flying from my hand and skittering across the floor.
“Kennedy!” Jenna skids to a stop.
“Keep going!” I scramble to my feet, but the torch has rolled too far, and one of the Gatherers is between me and it now.
And then it lunges. But Jenna is there, her torch swinging in an arc that would make a baseball player proud, catching the thing across what might be its face. It shrieks and stumbles back.
“I said together!” she yells, grabbing my arm and hauling me forward. “Now run!”
We run.
The stairs loom ahead, stone steps leading up into darkness that somehow seems less oppressive than the darkness we’re leaving behind.
My lungs are burning, my legs are screaming, and I can hear the Gatherers right behind us, close enough that I swear I can feel their corpse-breath on the back of my neck.
We hit the stairs at full speed, taking them two at a time, Jenna’s grip on my arm the only thing keeping me upright when I stumble.
Up. Up. Up.
How many stairs can there possibly be?
One of the Gatherers is on the stairs now, I can hear its too many limbs clicking against stone as it climbs.
“We’re not going to make it,” I gasp, trying to keep the desperate thoughts of failure from my voice.
“Yes, we are,” Jenna snarls, and there’s something in her voice now, something powerful and absolutely terrifying. “I didn’t survive ten years in that hell to die on these stairs.”
We burst through a doorway at the top of the stairs into a corridor lit by actual wall sconces, real ones, mounted on walls that look significantly less dungeon-like than where we just came from.
Jenna slams the door behind us, and I see her do something with her hand—a gesture, a word in a language I don’t recognize—and light flares around the door frame.
The sound of the Gatherers cuts off abruptly. We both collapse against the opposite wall, gasping for breath.
“What did you do?” I manage.
“A Warding,” Jenna says between breaths. “It won’t hold long, maybe a few minutes. But it should slow them down.”
“Good. Great. Fan-fucking-tastic.” I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor. “That was…”
“Horrifying?”
“I was going to say ‘character building,’ but horrifying works too.”
Jenna looks at me, and then—impossibly—she starts to laugh.
Not the bitter laugh from before, but real laughter, the kind that comes from surviving something you shouldn’t have.
I start laughing too, and soon we’re both sitting on the floor of this strange corridor, laughing like lunatics while somewhere behind that door, monsters scratch and search, disappointed that their next meal somehow escaped.
“We did it,” I say when I can breathe again. “We actually did it.”
“We got out of the cell. You got me out of that cell,” Jenna corrects. “We’re still in her dwelling, still in danger, and very likely to die.”
“But we got out of the cell,” I repeat, grinning. “And now we find Gabriel.”
I push myself to my feet, offering her my hand. She takes it, and we stand together in this corridor that’s somewhere between freedom and captivity, between life and death.
“Any idea which way?” I ask.
Jenna closes her eyes, and I feel that tingle of power again, stronger this time. When she opens them, she points to the left.
“That way,” she says with certainty. “I can feel… something familiar. A pull. I don’t know, it’s been so long since I’ve felt anything at all.”
“Could it be Gabriel? Is it possible she has him here? And what are you feeling about your connection to him?” I know I’m probably reaching, but from everything I know about fallen Archangels, they have an unbreakable connection to their true love.
“Maybe. Or maybe Pestilence is leading us into another trap.” She looks at me. “Last chance to turn back, try to hide until Reaver comes for you.”
I think about that option, think about waiting, about being rescued, about Reaver sacrificing everything because of me. I also think about the ticking minutes before the Gatherers bust through the door and eat us.
“No,” I say firmly. “We do this together or not at all. We find Gabriel and we burn her whole plan to the ground.”
Jenna’s smile is fierce and proud. “Then let’s go find me a Blood Angel.”
We start walking, two unlikely allies in a corridor lit by hellfire, heading toward a confrontation we’re probably not ready for.
But ready or not, we’re done waiting.