Curiosity goading him, Rök approached the body, taking in the stapled skin and wasted muscles. Were those metal bolts on the wretch’s neck, like a car battery? “You sure this one isn’t yours?”
“My Frankenstein’s monster is more creature-feature, all forehead, with green skin like my witches. This one looks somewhat human.” She sounded unfazed by their gruesome find, but after the visitors, this must be nothing. “Why hasn’t it decomposed more?”
“No idea.” Rök stepped closer, had to see its face. He muttered a curse. It was a death mask of anguish: brows drawn, cheeks sunken, teeth clenched. What had this creature gone through? Was its first memory one of electrocution?
Lightning struck the rod yet again, and wires pulsed. A current leapt from a coil to fork out like roots toward the creature. Those neck bolts sparked, and the body convulsed, its spine bowing.
Rök stumbled back. “Holy fuck, it’s alive!”
“It’s alive?” Poppy asked from behind him.
“It’s alive! ALIVE!” Rök went for his sword.
She reached around to snatch his hand. “No conductors!”
With a nod, he yanked Poppy into his arms and leapt to the floor. They watched in disbelief as the creature rolled from the sparking platform onto the ground.
The thrashing ebbed. With the current disrupted, the body stilled. No breaths moved its chest. No heartbeats sounded. Only a residual spark or two crackled around those bolts.
“Or not alive.” Rök glanced back at that leg in the tank. “The body was jolted.” Even so, he squired Poppy away, putting distance between them and the wretch. “That . . . got my attention.”
She allowed him to guide her, nonchalant about what they’d just witnessed. “You really are scared of things that come back to life. You screamed like a child.”
“Thanks for the memo, Red.”
Imitating him, she cried, “It’s alive! ALIVE!”
“You done?”
“Never!” Growing serious, she said, “I do feel sorry for what it went through. Can you imagine what a true resurrection must feel like?”
Rök could. That was the problem. . . .
In the last unexplored section of the lab, they came across the wizard’s drafting desk. Its surface held ghastly sketches of a cobbled-together man, like an architect’s plans.
A leather-bound journal to the side caught their attention. Rök gazed on as she brushed dust from the cover and flipped through. Blood smeared most of the pages, obscuring the writings, but a raven’s feather marked one semi legible entry. It had a date from the last century and a heading.
“The Ending of Everything,” Rök read. “What does that mean?” And why did it give him chills?
“I remember that date. It was four Halloween full moons ago. That must have been when his family died.” Poppy glanced up at Rök. “Everyone believes the castle opens because the veil between worlds is thinnest on this date. But what if it opens because it’s an anniversary of significance?”
They read further: Four calls of my raven always beckoned them inside. Four calls of the raven came and went, but my family never returned from their nightly play among the tombstones.
Rök tapped the page. “The castle door opened for us at sunset like it used to, to let his family out to play. In the morning, to the sound of a raven’s call, it will open again to call them home to their beds.” Not much was random in the Lore. “Only they’re never coming back.”
“So what happened? Did a rival wizard strike? Or maybe vampires descended on them.” She hastily flipped the page.
As I tracked them with my raven, the wizard wrote, hope dwindled. In the forest, I found carnage. . . . Blood coated the next few paragraphs. Then: Gateway nearby to a realm of all undead immortals?
Between crimson smudges, Rök made out a word or part of one: mort or mord. “Why would he write about an undead realm in this entry? Do you think . . . ?”
Poppy’s eyes widened, and she nodded. “Something about that portrait on the landing struck me. The wife wore an armband. Rök, one of the three ghouls in the cemetery had that same armband! The mother and her two children have been here all this time. They were transformed into ghouls. The undead.”
“Of all the fates.” Rök stifled a shudder. “I’d much rather be moldering in the ground.” Understatement.
“The wizard did experiment to resurrect his family—not from death, but from undeath.”
She and Rök fell silent, both lost in thought.
That Ending of Everything heading continued to resonate with him. He felt sympathy for the wizard. If Rök had lost Poppy and their children to ghouls, he feared he would have done far, far worse than experimenting on subjects.
Poppy finally spoke. “When I picture those three forever wandering this property, I pity them.” She held Rök’s gaze. “But I also feel foreboding.” The witch’s confidence from the start of the night had vanished.
“Hey, we’re going to be fine,” he assured her, though her stark expression spooked him a touch. “No way three ghouls can get the best of immortals like us. You aren’t a seeress, are you?”
“No, my sister Clove is the budding oracle in our family. But sometimes I feel like I can borrow my sisters’ powers. I’ll make a shot only a warrioress like Lea could make, or I’ll know what cards someone is holding, like Clove always does. And right now I’ve got a bad feeling about those ghouls.”
To distract her, he said, “Why don’t you keep that journal? It might have some interesting history. At the very least, it’ll net you all kinds of forum cachet.”
She stowed the journal in her bag. “We’ve combed this lab. There’s no battery and no way out. I have to use my portal.”
“I’m against it in principle. If something happens to me, I need to know you have at least one more at bat.”
“We don’t have a choice.” She collected the pouch. “Unfortunately, I don’t know where we’ll end up. I’m too turned around to aim inside this castle, can’t plot a course for the foyer.”
What if her portal took them to another locked room? They could still be trapped within a trap.
She bit her lip. “Maybe I could try to get us outside?”
Outside. Away from this place! A part of him clamored for freedom.
But . . . “You told me those visitors won’t quit until you’re dead. Which means we have to break your curse. Tonight. Witch, I’m all in.” To deliver her from the greater, looming threat, he just had to protect his mate against more unkillable visitors, find a cursebreaker to rid her of them, then get her out of here.
She gazed up at him, her green eyes filled with an emotion he barely dared to name. Or claim—
GROOOOOAAN.
Rök and Poppy froze.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, “it really is alive.”
