Page 24 of The Bloody Ruin Asylum & Taproom (Sam Quinn #7)

Nineteen

Storytime

Vlad walked over and tapped on it. “I hear an echo. It’s open behind this wall.” He glanced back at me and then spoke to Clive. “Take her around the corner while I knock it down.”

Clive picked me up and moved me.

“What the heck?” I demanded.

“We don’t want you inhaling whatever’s released when he breaks through the wall,” Clive said.

There was a cracking sound, but it wasn’t nearly as loud as I’d been expecting.

“Just a cheap board,” Vlad said. “Leaning on it would have brought it down.”

We came back around the corner to see Vlad holding a thin piece of wood in front of him to break through a century of cobwebs.

“Thank you for doing that,” Clive said. “Sam hates spiders.”

I wanted to refute it, but my badassery couldn’t stand up to spiders. I’d never particularly liked them, though I appreciated their place in the natural world. After that incident in Meg’s church when a demon sent a swarm of spiders at me, I was far more jumpy around them.

I angled the flashlight up, so I could make sure they weren’t up there waiting to drop on me. It looked like I was safe enough for the time being.

Clive went to the door and tried the handle. It was locked. Making a fist, he gave the door a short jab right above the knob. It popped open. He stepped in and looked around, Vlad on his heels. Their night vision was better than my own.

I stepped over the threshold and then Clive was there, blocking me. His expression said it all. It was bad. He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed.

When Vlad cursed, I steeled myself and stepped back from Clive, shining my light around the room. It was large, more of an exam room than a bedroom. A metal table stood in the center, covered in dried blood, fur, and the grime of more than a hundred years.

To the right was a table and chair. On the wall, papers were tacked up, charts and reports I couldn’t read. What was crystal clear, though, were the diagrams of a girl and a wolf with lines indicating where she had been cut open and examined in both forms.

Stomach clenching, white noise filled my mind. I knew my voice was too loud, but I had to hear myself over the turbines in my head. “Am I reading this right? She was ten years old?” I pointed at the diagram.

Clive rubbed a hand up and down my back. “Yes.”

Her name, Aliz Csonka, was at the top of the page. I opened the camera on my phone and began taking pictures of every sheet of paper tacked to the wall.

“What are you doing?” Clive asked.

“I want it translated. I want to know what they did to her.”

I hadn’t realized I was crying until Clive wiped my face and laid a kiss on my forehead.

“We will.”

I moved the flashlight, looking for a bed of some kind and instead found a cage.

I couldn’t stop my feet until I touched the bars.

Crouching, I studied the child-sized skeleton.

Around her neck bones, there was a heavy band that was chained to the wall.

The cage was made of sturdy metal, the chain barely long enough for her to lie down.

There were no fibers under her. “They didn’t give her a blanket or clothes,” I said.

“The better to study her from that little table and fill out their charts,” Vlad spat.

Cold metal. They’d chained up a naked child, caged her, and did experiments. I couldn’t keep the growl from my throat.

“I suppose we should be thankful it was a quick death,” Vlad sneered. “I worried that slow heartbeat I’d been hearing and ignoring was from a starving wolf walled into the basement of an asylum.”

I looked up at him. “How do you know it was quick?”

He pointed at the girl’s skull.

I stood and moved to his side of the cage. There I could see the hole in what would have been her forehead. “It was like putting down a cow for them, wasn’t it?” I knew it was too late, but I would have given anything to tear them all apart. Slowly.

“We can’t leave her here,” I said. “She needs a proper burial.”

Vlad yanked open a cabinet, studied its contents, and threw it across the room. Metal implements spilled out and I turned away.

“There are grave markers near the woods in the back of the Guild,” Vlad said.

Shaking my head, I swallowed, my throat tightened. “No. Not here. Not on these grounds. She needs a real cemetery, not a dump site where they discarded all the others who didn’t survive this place.”

“We’ll take care of her,” Clive promised.

“No. I will. I want to look up her name, see if there are relatives in a cemetery around here. We can’t take her home, but we can at least do that.”

“Yes,” Clive said. “When it gets dark, we’ll go out and find her people.”

Nodding, I went back to the cage, grabbed the door, and tore it off its hinges, throwing it as Vlad had. Taking off my jacket, I knelt beside her and gently laid it over her, my tears splashing on the fabric.

“Come on, love,” Clive said, helping me up. “Let’s go upstairs. We’ll get you another jacket and then we’ll go out and look for the Csonkas.”

I took his hand and squeezed, following him out of that hellish room. “Don’t you have to attend one of those gatherings?”

Scoffing, Clive said, “If they wanted me to attend, they shouldn’t have poisoned me.”

Vlad waited for us at the stairs, my pastry box and book in his hands. He handed them to me, and I waved him up with us.

“Come to our room. How much time do we have before you guys can go out?” I asked.

“Roughly thirty minutes,” Vlad said.

Clive paused at the door, listening. After a moment, he opened it and stepped out. “Can we assume no cameras are pointed in this direction?” Clive’s voice was so low, I barely caught the words, but Vlad nodded.

The door snicked closed as we made our way down the main hall before turning right, into the hall of bedrooms. At our door, Clive pulled out his key and glanced back at Vlad, who gave him a barely discernable shrug of one shoulder.

We all went in and Clive closed the door. Keeping my voice low, I said, “Why are you guys acting so weird?”

Clive went to the closet and pulled out the jacket I’d worn yesterday. “Our kind rarely ever visit each other’s rooms. And certainly not to chat.”

I looked between the guys. “So, if anyone sees us walking out together…” I left the rest of that sentence unspoken, my cheeks flaming as I turned to Vlad. “Sorry. If you want to go, we can meet up later.”

Vlad walked over to the couch and sat down, stretching his legs out. “Given what they normally say about me, this will be a nice change. Keep them wondering.”

“We were all together in Vlad’s room—” I realized why things were a little tense when Clive found me there, why Vlad was explaining to Clive how I’d ended up in his room.

I turned to Clive. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

He gave me a soft kiss. “Your loyalty was never in question. My only thought was how to explain a pile of dust in Vlad’s room if he’d tried anything with you.” He helped me on with the jacket and we sat in the two chairs opposite the couch.

Pulling out my phone, I looked up Aliz Csonka while Clive and Vlad discussed the best way to move her.

“Oh, Csonka—or however you pronounce it—is a pretty common name. There’s a museum, and a statue, and a machine shop, a glass blower, a lawyer, a high school, a bus stop…

This is dumb. One of you needs to do the search.

I can’t read Hungarian, so I don’t know what it’s telling me. ”

Clive reached over for my phone and started tapping.

Vlad’s brow was furrowed, his expression dark.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

Clive glanced up at Vlad and then resumed searching.

Shaking his head, Vlad said, “No. Just thinking.”

He misses his wife, love, Clive told me.

“You mentioned your wife Ilona when we were downstairs,” I said. “Can I ask how you met? Given how vampires respond to me, I doubt it was a typical meet cute.”

He tilted his head and finally said, “I don’t know what that means, but we met in the woods.” He paused again. “I should go back. I saw her for the first time in the palace. She was a cousin of the Hungarian King, Mathias Corvinus.

“Between campaigns, I was often summoned to the palace to report.” He shook his head.

“How many times am I supposed to say we killed them all? They wanted to hear every grisly detail while painting me as a madman. My first two wives were daughters of nobles, the marriages arranged to create alliances. They both hated me.” He shrugged.

“I wasn’t the kindest of men. They were probably right to turn to other, gentler men while I was away at war.

“My second wife had died the previous year in childbirth.” He paused again, the silence growing. “I wasn’t looking for another wife. I’d planned to report to the king and leave. Ilona was in the throne room, standing with other ladies of noble birth.” His mustache twitched.

“Beautiful, she was. Long dark hair and big brown eyes, she was taller than the other women, taller than me. And bored. She looked especially bored. Instead of leaving, I stayed for the evening meal and watched her—”

“But not in a creepy way, right?” I interrupted. “You didn’t scare her, did you?”

Clive’s shoe tapped my sneaker.

“What?” I said to Clive. “I like him and all, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for him to be creeping on some poor teenager.”

Vlad closed his eyes a moment, his expression relaxing almost into a smile. “No. I did not bother her, merely watched as her father negotiated a marriage for her with an old man, a wealthy one with a rattling cough and large boils on his neck.

“She clearly wasn’t interested, so her father yanked her away from the others to hiss in her ear, his meaty fingers digging into her arm. I wanted to beat him for that alone, but it wasn’t my place to intervene. Had the father pushed it, I was contemplating asking the king to step in. He owed me.”

“That was nice of you,” I said.

He tipped his head to me. “Ah, yes. I’m famed the world over for my niceness.” With a little headshake, he continued, “Ilona was even more strong-willed than she was beautiful. He sent her away from the excitement and glamour of the palace to punish her while continuing negotiations.”

“Probably also to control her,” I said. “To keep her away from other men while he got the best price for her.”

Nodding, Vlad continued, “Yes. His goal had been to hide her away in the country home until it was time for the wedding. She traveled by carriage with servants. A little after sunset, they were overtaken by thieves.”

“Oh, no.” I’d read stories. Usually they just robbed, but often they were more violent.

“The carriage driver carried a dagger, which he pulled, so he was the first to die. Ilona’s family was wealthy. The horses alone were worth quite a lot. The thieves killed everyone and drove the carriage with all her belongings away.”

At my confused look, Vlad continued, “Ilona was injured and left for dead. Had she not been so stubborn, she probably would have bled out with the others by the side of the road. Instead, she ripped her chemise and staunched the wound in her chest.”

He tapped the space between his heart and shoulder. “Lucky shot. She knew enough about hunting to not try to yank the arrow out. She broke off the shaft and began the long walk home.

“The stench of blood and death drew predators. She was exhausted and blood loss was taking away what little strength she had. She wanted to rest but heard the howl of a wolf and kept going.”

I drew my legs up and wrapped my arms around them.

“The wolf tracked her and attacked. She fought as best she could, but he was far stronger. He didn’t eat her, as he had some of the others in her party. Probably too full by then. When he left her, she was bleeding from multiple injuries, her body hidden in the brush.

“She said she heard riders pass on the road but didn’t have the energy or voice to call out. Angry, cursing her father for sending her to her death, she finally slept, assuming death had come for her. Instead, she eventually felt the warmth of the sun and blinked her eyes open to a new day.”

His fingers twitched. “She got herself up, her dress torn and covered in blood, and walked. It was after nightfall when she made it home. The servants panicked, wanting to call for help, but Ilona assured them she was fine. Never felt better, in fact.”