Page 93 of Property of Crypt Keeper

I knew that smell. It lived in Gideon’s cell. It clung to Rafael’s clothes. It lingered in my childhood nightmares as an unknown, but now I recognized it.

The deeper we walked, the quieter everyone became. Even Zeus stopped making jokes.

Then—something growled.

Not a wolf. Not a vampire. Not a werewolf. Not anything I’d ever heard before. The sound vibrated through the stone itself.

Low. Wet.

Painful.

Bronx’s flashlight swept across the darkness. Iron bars.

Another snarl. Then eyes. Dozens of them reflecting from the darkness.

Boomslang raised a hand and everyone stopped. The beams from our flashlights slowly drifted across the first cell.

“Oh… God.” I think it was Spook who whispered it.

Inside the cage crouched something that looked vaguely canine. Only… its proportions weren’t right.

One foreleg ended in claws large enough to belong to a grizzly bear. The other resembled a human arm twisted backward until the elbow bent in the wrong direction. Its spine arched unnaturally high beneath skin stretched too tightly across mismatched muscles. Patches of fur gave way to gray flesh that looked almost stitched.

Not sewn, though. As if different pieces of living tissue had been coaxed into growing together.

Its head lifted. One eye glowed amber. The other was clouded white. Neither looked sane. It lunged and slammed itself into the bars.

Steel groaned. Dust sifted from above.

Zara whimpered. “It hurts.”

Everyone looked at her.

The creature slammed into the bars again. Again and again. That’s when I realized it wasn’t trying to escape. It was trying to make something stop.

My stomach twisted.

The next cage held something even worse. It had wings. Or at least what should have been wings. Instead, they were malformed masses of bone and leathery skin protruding unevenly from its shoulders, one dragging uselessly across the floor while the other twitched in violent spasms.

Its jaw was too long. Its teeth too numerous. One leg ended in talons, the other in a hoof. It looked as though someone had taken pieces from different species and forced them to agree to exist on the same body.

And they hadn’t.

The creature trembled continuously, muscles spasming beneath skin that looked painfully mismatched.

Dexter swallowed hard. “Sweet Mary, mother of Christ…”

Cell after cell. “Failure” after “failure.” Some still moved purposefully as they clawed angrily through the bars at us.

Others simply rocked back and forth or stared blankly through the bars.

One continuously scratched symbols into the stone floor with sharp claw-tipped fingers that ended in too many joints.

Another pressed its forehead against the bars and softly cried. Not growled. Or snarled. Cried. Like a child.

My throat tightened. These weren’t monsters. Not originally, anyway.

These had been people. Or wolves. Or vampires. Or demons.