I grabbed one of the binders off the shelf at random and opened it. The pages were filled with equations and chemical notations. Well, it wouldn’t do me any good to look these over. I’d barely gotten through high school. Chloe might know what it was all about, though. She seemed scientifically minded.
I put the binder on the floor next to me and flipped through another one. More chemical jibber-jabber. This time I noticed that the sections were dated, and the binder I held was from two years ago. That was unhelpful. I wanted to know what Azazel was up to now, and I didn’t want to carry every single binder with me. Besides, I could always come back and get the others if I needed them later.
I flipped as quickly as I could through the binders, trying to find the most recent information. After several minutes I had compiled a stack of four binders that represented the last six months.
Whatever Azazel was experimenting on, he’d spent a lot of time on it recently. Several of the notations were followed by cryptic comments like “Poor tolerance” and “Donors ill.” I wondered who the “donors” were, what they were donating, and whether the donation was voluntary. Somehow I doubted it.
I carried the binders out into the hall. Jude and Nathaniel’s relationship had degraded further. Nathaniel’s right eye was bruising and his lip was bloody. He was sitting on the floor, sulking, near the entrance to the hallway. Jude stood by the door to the lab with a self-satisfied smile on his face despite the fact that the front of his vest was covered in nightfire burns.
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“You said you didn’t want to know,” he said, shrugging.
I thrust the stack of binders at him. “Find some convenient way to carry these while I look in the next lab.”
“Are we just going to stand around in the hallway while you explore?”
“Yes, unless you can find a way to get into the labs without disintegrating,” I retorted.
“The spell may not be on every door,” Jude pointed out.
I held out my hand. “Give me some pocket change, then.”
Jude fished out a couple of pennies and tossed one at the next door. The coin fell to the floor in one piece. The wolf gave me a pointed look.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “So we just need to get through the padlock, then. Although whatever’s in there is probably not that important if Azazel didn’t bother to enspell the door.”
Jude unceremoniously dropped the binders on the floor and waved me out of the way. I scooted away from the door as Jude turned his shoulder to one side and ran toward it.
There was the sound of splintering wood as the door cracked and came off its hinges. An ordinary human would never have the strength to do that. I grinned at Jude.
My smile faded almost immediately as we were hit by the smell. I gagged, bile rising in my throat. I tried to take deep breaths to calm down. If I puked in front of Jude and Nathaniel, they might suspect about the baby. I didn’t mind Jude knowing, but I wanted to keep it from Nathaniel for as long as possible.
I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve and went to stand behind Jude. Nathaniel had gotten up during the ruckus and joined us.
The door hung lopsided, blocking most of the view but allowing that horrible rotting smell to leak into the hallway. Jude looked at me questioningly.
“We’ve got to see,” I said, my voice muffled by my coat.
He pushed the door and it fell through the opening and to the floor with a tremendous crash. And then I saw, and I wished I hadn’t.
5
THE THREE OF US FILED RELUCTANTLY INTO THE ROOM.
“I guess these are the ‘donors,’” I said bitterly.
The room stretched away before us, three times the length of the lab, and the remaining two doors that emptied into the hall were visible farther down along the wall.
The rest of the room was filled with cages. The cages were stacked floor to ceiling, and each one had a person inside it. A dead person.
“He treated them like lab monkeys,” Jude said, and I could hear the undercurrent of fury in his voice.
I walked slowly down the aisle between the cages. Azazel hadn’t discriminated in his choice of donors. There were men and women, boys and girls. Some of them were very old, some middle-aged, some of them so young that I had to turn away, sick at heart.
He’d left them here to die, slowly and painfully, while he’d fled. This was the work of the angel who had fathered me. This was the monster I had come from.
I whirled on Nathaniel, tears blurring my eyes. “Did you know about this?”
“No, I did not,” he said, his face troubled.
“How could you not know?” I asked. “You lived here. Whatever Azazel was doing, he could hardly have hidden the presence of dozens of prisoners from his right-hand man.”
“On my honor, I swear to you that I did not know,” Nathaniel insisted. “Whatever faults I may have, I would not have condoned this.”
“Your honor doesn’t mean a whole lot,” Jude growled.
“And you didn’t seem to mind when Azazel was capturing people to steal their memories,” I said. “How is this any different?”
I turned away from him, not wanting to hear any more excuses. Even if he didn’t know what was in the lab, I wasn’t certain Nathaniel would have objected. No matter how morally repugnant Azazel’s actions, Nathaniel’s favorite person was Nathaniel. Defying Azazel would have put his favorite person at risk.
I stared into the cage in front of me, automatically cataloging what I saw. The woman was in her mid-twenties, dressed for a night out at the clubs. Her makeup was smeared on her face and her once-neat manicure was torn. She had probably clawed at the bars of the cage, screaming until her voice was gone.