Page 44 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

Joe wanted the foul suggestion away from both of them as quickly as possible. “You don’t know that’s what this is…”

His words drifted away as Percy’s search halted, and as he held up a small, blackened object. Small and round. Unmistakably bone. “Vertebra?”

The enormity of it washed over Joe in one sick wave. So sick that he felt his mouth water, the bile at the back of his throat, hisstomach churning as he stood, staggered to the bannister of the staircase to support himself.

Percy’s hand was on his back, travelling softly to his shoulder, where he gave a gentle squeeze, then snapped Joe out of the swoon with his thickly spoken words. “Save it. We haven’t figured out where that smell’s coming from yet. Things are about to get a whole lot worse.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ANOTHER HORRIFYING DISCOVERY IN THE HOUSE OF DEATH

The third and final floor was eerily similar to its predecessor. Smaller, thinner, but what space there was had also been converted into cells. One bed, metal frame, bars on the windows.

Percy peered through the grimy glass and down at the dead, brown earth far below. Every inch, right up to the wall, lifeless, then flourishing beyond that stone barrier.

He assessed the makeshift graveyard. It was probably a pointless exercise, as Cleo had locked the place up so long ago, but he couldn’t help but observe, with a touch of relief, that the graves looked undisturbed. Something heinous awaited them within the house. He could sense it in the walls, and he could smell it on the musty air. The last thing either of them needed, in addition to that, was the unveiling of an eight-month-old corpse at the bottom of a long dig.

“Althea said there was a secret compartment somewhere in the house.”

Percy turned to look at Joe. He was holding it together remarkably well. Perhaps better than Percy was. Even as he made the assessment, Percy’s hands gripped his dagger tighter than usual because his fingers shook, and he was trying veryhard to hide that fact from Joe. Maybe to make Joe believe he was more capable than he really was.

What Percy wanted was to flee. To tell the police, pass the buck, and pat himself on the back for a job well done. Cleo would, in theory, be found, arrested, and that would be the end of that grisly saga. But two considerations halted him.

First, the house was alive and bad. Police might, eventually, get everything they needed. But Percy expected at least a few would die in the process, maybe more, if he and Joe didn’t fix the place first. It was a death trap, set and waiting. He didn’t know how, or where the spring was, but he was determined to loosen it before anyone else set foot in the place.

The second, and more pressing, consideration—the thought that had begun to nag at him incessantly as they searched the house—was the increasingly certain belief that Cleo wasn’t to blame. At least, not for all of it.

Althea knew her. Recognised her. Told them she did it. Percy saw Cleo, saw the change in her, saw the supernatural creatures she presumably had some sort of control over. One thing and another all pointed straight at her…

But not these walls. Not the forethought and the cold calculation. Not the time it must have taken to build these cells. And if she needed blood for some reason, maybe the undertaking made sense at an extreme stretch… But there were so many dead beneath his feet. So many girls burned to obliteration and scattered into one careless, thoughtless mess.

Cleo, he was sure, didn’t have it in her to do it.

He knew her.

She didn’t do it.

But what could have happened there in that forgotten mansion, on that small and lonely island, to set such a cascade of gruesome events in motion?

His eyes flicked to Joe’s patient face. “Follow me.”

Down the first flight of stairs, reluctantly, Percy dropped one foot before another.

The dark, suffocating feeling the entire house and the very land had taken on, he now recognised as the same foreboding he’d felt in front of her bricked-up fireplace, only amplified one hundred fold.

She must have knocked it through.

Dust flew up around Percy’s ankles as he reached the ground floor and quickened his pace across the long hallway, darker, lower, more claustrophobic, where floorboards gave way to slate, until they arrived in that small, miserable little room at the end. A huge eighteenth-century bookcase that sat bereft of books was taken in four strong hands, and on Percy’s lead, was hurled to the floor. The entire wall behind was smooth and seemingly untouched, out of the ordinary only because it was the one ordinary spot in the old, cold remains of the original twelfth-century dwelling, where a ramshackle fireplace had once stood.

“Smash it.”

At Percy’s word, Joe rammed the crowbar into the plaster, looking at Percy with a mixture of impressed and fearful when it went straight through so easily he almost lost his grip.

“Stand back.” Percy took his place in front of the wall and kicked an enormous hole in it.

Just as quickly, that smell—that dead and rotting, thick and malevolent, humid and clinging smell—flooded the room, and sent both Joe and Percy into a fit of retching so extreme they were forced to stumble back to the passage, leaning on one another for support.

“What the fuck-blurrrrh,” gagged Joe.

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