Alara kept her distance. “Do you think any of them were innocent?”
A crude wooden chair with heavy armrests was bolted onto a raised platform in the center of the room, like a dead man’s throne. Padded leather wrist and ankle cuffs were buckled below the thick straps that secured the prisoner’s chest to the chair. A coiled black wire snaked up the back and attached to a medieval-looking headpiece, with a metal band that matched the scarred skin around Darien Shears’ head.
Lukas stopped in front of a row of numbered switches under the words CAUTION—HIGH VOLTAGE. “I don’t know, but it looks like they all suffered.”
Rows of hatch marks extended across the wall beside the panel. Someone must’ve been keeping a tally of the men who had died here.
“Maybe they deserved to suffer.” Jared sounded like the guy who burst into my house the first night I met him, not the boy I kissed inside the wall.
Echoes of murmuring voices bombarded us, too faint to decipher, and the unmistakable sound of frantic scratching coming from behind the walls.
“Well done, Jared.” Alara sprinkled salt around the base of the chair. “Good to know you can piss off the living and the dead.”
The scratching grew louder. Then all at once it stopped, plunging the room into an eerie silence.
Priest took a step back and bumped into the panel of switches.
“You’re all monsters.” A disembodied voice slithered through the room. “That’s what they said right before they threw the switch.”
Alara’s body lurched back violently and she fell into the electric chair. The padded cuffs unbuckled themselves and closed around her wrists and ankles. The leather chest strap snaked around her torso and tightened, completely immobilizing her.
“Stop it!” she screamed.
Jared and Lukas struggled to unfasten the cuffs, but the leather straps held tight.
“Leave her alone, Darien,” Priest shouted.
The voice laughed. “It’s not Darien.”
Faces appeared one by one, solidifying into full body apparitions—men still wearing their prison-issue orange jumpsuits. With their shaved heads and identical scars circling their foreheads where the metal had seared their skin, they looked like shells of the men who had died in the same chair where Alara was sitting now.
A man with dark shadows around his eyes stepped in front of her. “Do you have anything to say? They gotta ask you that before they throw the switch.”
The one with empty gray eyes nodded. “It’s the law.”
“Let her go.” Jared raised the semiautomatic paintball gun. “Or I’ll give you a new set of burns.”
Lukas aimed his own weapon and a vengeance spirit with a jagged scar across his cheek and the number thirteen tattooed on his neck smiled. “Ain’t nothin’ left to burn. Except your friend.”
Jared and Lukas opened fire, the lethal mixture of holy water, salt, and cloves spraying across the walls until they ran out of ammunition. Two vengeance spirits exploded, but a half dozen stood fast.
Priest and I lifted our weapons.
Before I could squeeze the trigger, the gun was ripped from my hands.
I searched for a faded form, or the shadowy features of a spirit that wasn’t fully materialized, but there was nothing. Priest was disarmed the same way, his weapon floating in the air next to mine.
Our guns hovered for a moment, then turned and pointed directly at us.
Then the weapons changed direction, and the rounds discharged in rapid succession, hitting the tally marks on the wall over and over. When the ammo was spent, the weapons dropped at our feet.
“A prisoner built this chair. That seem right to you?” The spirit with the dark shadows around his eyes appeared. “Saying goes that if you die in this prison, your soul stays here. Don’t matter if you’re an inmate or not—no heaven or hell, just Moundsville.” He lowered the metal cap onto Alara’s head. “Let’s see if your friend makes it out.”
Alara screamed as Darien Shears materialized and clamped his hand over her mouth. He held a finger to his lips. “Shh.”
Flashes of the prisoners’ faces superimposed themselves over hers—the spirit with the shadows around his eyes, the one with the number thirteen on his neck—a parade of faces rotating in front of Alara’s. Each man buckled and strapped in the chair, the metal headpiece secured to his skull.
Each one screaming and writhing in pain the way Alara was now.
Jared and Lukas ran for the chair.
“I wouldn’t do that.” Number Thirteen flipped the switches on the panel.
“It’s okay,” Priest said. “There’s no power in this building anymore.”
The vengeance spirit tilted his head, considering it. “Who said anything about using the building’s power?”
The spirits focused on the control panel, and the indicators lit up one by one.
Oh god.
The last indicator blinked, but the light didn’t fully illuminate.
“Shears,” Number Thirteen called out. “We need more juice. Hit the generator downstairs.”
Darien looked at Alara, then back at the rest of us. “Now don’t go anywhere. Everybody will get a turn.” He vanished, leaving the other vengeance spirits behind.
Priest reached under his hoodie and pulled out the caulking gun from the hardware store, the barrel loaded with purple cans of cheap hair spray.
What was he doing?
He aimed at the vengeance spirits and pulled the trigger, simultaneously igniting the fireplace starters wired to the end of the caulking gun. It was a makeshift flamethrower made from Aqua Net, electrical tape, and ingenuity.
A stream of flames shot out, and Priest scorched the wall from left to right. The prisoners’ faces contorted as the fire burned them to ash—and then nothing.
I knelt in front of the chair, unbuckling the stubborn leather cuffs.
“Come on!” Alara jerked against the restraints, her face streaked with tears. “Get me out of this thing!”
“I’m working on it.” I fumbled with the ankle cuffs, pulling the last one free. Alara leapt from the chair.
My eyes were still level with the base. A single piece of wood attached the chair to the platform.
A piece shaped like a cylinder.
Someone had cut a crude notch in the wood. I held my breath and reached inside. The wood popped out, and a strip of silver glinted behind it.
My hand closed around the metal that felt as smooth and seamless as glass.
It looked exactly like the sketch in Priest’s journal—strange looping symbols cut into the outside, and empty slots where the disks slid into place.
Lukas noticed the casing in my hand, his expression a mixture of awe and relief. “You found it.”
Jared’s eyes darted to the door. “We still have to get it out of here.”
“Shears said he was coming back. He might catch us before we make it,” Priest said. “We have to destroy him.”
“How?” Alara’s voice trembled.
The answer appeared in my mind slowly, like a print developing in a darkroom. “I know what to do, but I need you to distract him.”
Jared grabbed my arm. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t have time to explain.” And I knew he would never agree if I did. “Do you trust me?”
The words hung between us—the question the four of them had been asking me all along. Now I was the one asking.
One by one they nodded and Jared spoke the words. “I trust you. But—”
“Then I need you to buy me some time.”
Priest handed me the disks. “Take these just in case.”
“No.” I tried to push them back into his hand.
“Don’t you trust me?” Priest gave me a lopsided grin, but his tone was serious.
I shoved them in my pocket.
“I’ll buy you that time,” Priest said before he turned to Alara. “You have to get back in the chair.”
She stumbled away, her eyes wild. “Are you crazy? I’m not going anywhere near that thing.”
Priest led her by the elbow as I took off down the hall. “It’ll be fine. I’ll disconnect the wires.…”