Page 128 of Grave Beginnings

Ezra.

45

Ezra floated,suspended in a gelatinous green liquid. His face was slack and his eyes closed, and he seemed to be asleep. I stared at him for a long moment, searching for a sign that he was breathing, but found none. I swallowed hard. Was he dead?

I put my hand to the side of the tube. The glass was freezing beneath my palm. No connection flared, nor did I sense that strange void like I had when I’d been scanning recovered bodies. It was more like a barrier. Did that mean the glass was too thick, or that he was alive and maybe in some sort of cryo-sleep?

The second tube held a young man, maybe mid-twenties, with sharp features distorted by his silent scream of terror. His eyes wide open, he was frozen mid-cry, body rigid, fingers curled like claws reaching out. His hair was a pop of turquoise, floating around his head. Ice was etched across the inside of the tube, like he’d gone in awake and fought.

I stared for a long minute, waiting for him to move, but he, too, seemed frozen.

Bones floated in the next tube, with some cartilage still stringing them together. My stomach churned. Was the fluiddissolving them slowly? What the hell was I supposed to do? Was there a way to free them?

The rest of the tubes contained people in various stages of decay. Dead, or dying? I touched one, the glass smooth and cool, though not freezing. The remains inside were barely human anymore, just bones strung together by stubborn threads of tissue, drifting like macabre puppets in the murky fluid.

With my palm flat on the surface, I tried like I had yesterday to sense the corpse, or any connection to life like a whisper of a soul.Anything. That familiar connection that should have hummed between life and death remained stubbornly silent. It was a void, like the corpses I’d been unable to call. No whisper of a soul lingered, just a hollow void where personhood had been completely scoured away.

My magic recoiled, repelled not by death, but by the utter emptiness. This wasn't just a corpse. It was negative space where someone had been erased, absorbed—eaten.

The last impression made my heart race as if it came from some whispered source. Yet, as I glanced around the room, I couldn’t find any trace of a ghost.

I jerked my hand back. The remains inside collapsed in on themselves with unsettling finality. Bones dissolved into gray silt, swirling through the gooey fluid like ash in oil. A domino effect rippled through the neighboring tubes as, one after another, the suspended remains disintegrated.

"Fuck." The word escaped in a shocked exhale. My fingers tingled where they'd touched the glass, as if the void inside had tried to leech something vital from me, too. My soul, perhaps?

I stared at the blue-haired man and Ezra, feeling more desperate than ever to get them out. But how? The tubes looked like some sort of science experiment in human preservation. Neither had any controls that I could find. Grates stretched across the bottom of their tubes, perhaps a way to empty them?

The scent of antiseptic tainted the air along with somethingmetallic and bitter. Old blood, though it was faint. My gaze swept across each wall, looking for a way out, or some sort of panel to open the tubes, or a door, but there was nothing. A solid wall stretched behind me, as if I’d somehow fallen through it, rather than the doorway I’d seen in the hall. I couldn’t imagine how freaked out Angel was, but hoped he found a way free of this insanity rather than finding himself in a crazy science experiment gone wrong with nightmare equipment to drain life.

Tables lined the opposite wall, home to all manner of vials, shining liquids, and strange instruments I couldn’t begin to comprehend. The air hummed with a thick, pulsating energy. Magic, perhaps.

The fairy-looking lights flickered overhead, the motion throbbing a migraine behind my eyes. Well, that wasn’t good.

I put my hand on the glass of Ezra’s tube again. “Ezra? Can you hear me?” Please don’t be dead. I had a feeling Angel would be devastated. Ezra remained still as the grave.

Not dead,my senses said, as if they would know first. Neither he nor the blue-haired guy gave me that sense of finality, even though neither seemed to be breathing. Okay then, that meant I had to engineer some sort of supernatural jailbreak.

I scanned the room for anything that could free them; a panel, a button, a tool. Wait. I had my baton. I’d never used the damn thing, but it was always part of my equipment. Would it be enough to break the glass? I snapped the stick off my belt and extended it to its full length, adjusted my grip, then swung hard at Ezra’s prison.

The impact jolted up my arm with a tooth-rattling clang but the glass didn’t crack. Nor did the fluid move. I might not be a shifter, but I wasn’t weak. I growled and struck again, double-handed, higher this time, putting my entire body weight behind the blow. But the tube clanged as if I’d hit concrete instead of glass. Maybe it was one of those bulletproof glass things? I couldtry to shoot it, but that seemed a really bad idea in a sealed room. The rebound might kill me, then where would they be?

I needed to free them, like, yesterday.

Think, Jude, think!I berated myself, scanning the room for other ideas. There were bookshelves made of metal, filled with specimens; tables filled with vials and jars of fluid, but not a single button or tool in sight.

My gaze snagged on an enormous jar at the far end, filled with liquid the color of blue Gatorade. Inside, something floated, and maybe moved? From where I stood frozen across the room, I thought I caught the flutter of movement again. Was it still alive?

I approached it with hesitation, eyeing the overhead lights and other jars with apprehension. Nothing else moved. And though energy swirled around me, something inside me categorized each still creature I passed as dead. Helpful, but creepy.

I tiptoed toward the container, trying to make out the shape. A tiny creature curled in on itself, limbs tangled, suspended in the glowing goo. It looked a little like a baby axolotl lizard with silver wings. Maybe this was what a faerie looked like?

My breath caught as a pair of tiny, dark purple eyes snapped open, locking onto mine with unsettling clarity and an unspoken plea. The creature blinked slowly.

Holy fuck, it was alive and moving!

The container had no lid, just a fully glass exterior like a giant water cooler sealed shut. I ran my hands along the icy sides of it, searching for a break, but finding none. The exterior felt like glass, not unlike the giant tubes containing Ezra and his companion. The jar moved, the liquid inside jiggling like jelly, and it wasn’t secured to the table.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, and shoved with all my might, knocking it off the table. The glass shattered and blue liquid splashed in a wave across the room.