Page 94 of Inflamed By an Incubus

He shook his head now. “Think about how deep we are. This place might have been closer to the surface when it was built. Makes me think of some of the places in Rome or Greece. I’m getting serious old-world vibes from it.”

And he didn’t like it.

“Why did they build it?” Evelyn moved a step closer to him as the air chilled.

“To worship something.” That was his best guess. “Why else would you build a place that looks so much like a temple?”

“Worship what? God?”

A wall to his right that formed a line that cut across several of the columns ended, revealing that the room expanded further in that direction than he had first thought, and he moved between a set of columns into what had to be the centre of the room.

And locked up tight.

“That,” he muttered and Evelyn was swift to join him, her eyes widening again as she saw what he had. “They were worshipping that.”

He drifted forwards, towards the huge sphere that stood ahead of him on a raised dais in the centre of the room. The modern lights positioned around it reflected off the smooth glass surface, and Archangel had constructed a round base beneath it, making it look like the world’s biggest snow globe.

Only it wasn’t a winter scene or a tourist attraction inside the ball.

It was a woman.

She floated in a foetal position with her side to him, her toes pointed towards the ground and her body curled over. Long lilac hair streamed behind her, drifting slightly while her bare body was perfectly still, and as Fenix moved, the liquid around her shimmered and glittered.

“Do you think it’s her?” Evelyn whispered, sounding as awed as he felt, and he wanted to look at her as she drifted away from him but couldn’t tear his eyes away from the woman.

“Maybe.” He wasn’t sure though.

“What kind of cell is this?” She moved further from him, wrenching his gaze from the female as the need to tell her to remain close to him blasted through him.

It turned to relief when he saw she was only a few feet away, within lunging distance if anything happened. She pored over a trolley that had equipment on it, tools he had never seen before, and inspected a machine that was beeping. He tracked the leads that emerged from the back of it to the point where they had been affixed to the glass ball.

“Some kind of cryogenics?” he offered and shrugged when she looked at him. “Your guess is as good as mine. What’s all the machinery for if not to monitor her vitals and keep her on ice?”

“Makes sense, but…” Evelyn glanced at the woman, a frown knitting her fair eyebrows. “It doesn’t feel quite right.”

He silently admitted that it didn’t. If Archangel wanted to use her, why keep her on ice?

The great silver canisters that clustered together to the left of the ball, beyond the beeping machine, and were attached to the base of the snow globe by silver ducting made him feel this was a cryogenic chamber of some kind though.

Evelyn moved to one of the computers on another trolley and began scrolling through documents that flashed up on the screen.

Fenix looked at the globe and frowned as something caught his eye. He drifted towards it, his eyes narrowing on the plaque mounted on the base.

“Subject Zero,” he murmured and glanced at Evelyn. “Try looking that up.”

She nodded.

He stared at the inscription again and figured out the roman numerals.

“Seventeen-twenty-eight.” He looked at the woman in the sphere. “The year you were found?”

It certainly didn’t feel like the date this place was built. It looked as if it had been here for long centuries before Archangel had discovered it and stabilised the building to preserve it.

He moved around her, watching the liquid shimmering with flecks of turquoise, violet and crimson as the angle of the light changed, and then frowned, backtracked a few steps to confirm his suspicions and peered closer.

“It’s two spheres.”

“What?” Evelyn said, lifting her gaze from the screen. When he pointed to the glass ball, she came to him and looked at it, angling her head and causing her fall of golden hair to drop away from the shoulder of her black T-shirt. “You’re right. There’s another sphere inside the glass one.”

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