I have seen horrible things, things that haunt me in my dreams. But Elizaveta’s basement was one of the worst.
The basement was one big room, forty feet by twenty-five feet at a rough estimate, with a nine-foot ceiling and two doors that I assumed were bathrooms in opposite corners. Like the floor above it, the basement was well lit—though with daylight bulbs in LED fixtures, rather than windows.
A big utility sink was set up on one end of the room, and next to it was a pressure washer, the kind I use for cleaning cars. All of the rest of the walls were covered with metal racks containing various sizes of cages.
The center of the room looked almost like a doctor’s office, with twin metal examination tables. Near each bathroom was a chair that looked more like a dentist’s chair. All of them had manacles. All of them were occupied by bodies. Two additional bodies were tied to sturdy chairs that matched the ones I’d seen upstairs around the dining table. That meant there was another body down here somewhere.
Reluctantly, I approached the bodies. It had taken a very long time for them to die. Days, I thought, though never having tortured someone to death, I couldn’t be sure. Weeks maybe. The kitchen people had been in better shape than the ones down here. I searched each body carefully with both my nose and eyes.
The floor was cement with a drain. The killers hadn’t bothered to use the pressure washer to clean up after themselves, so I could see that the floor had been poured so that liquids would tend to flow to the drain without urging. Effluent from the bodies had made streams from their source to the drain.
But Elizaveta’s family weren’t the only dead bodies in the basement; the rest just didn’t happen to be human. The cages along the two long walls held dead birds—pigeons, doves, and chickens mostly, but there was an African gray parrot, a golden eagle, and a handful of parakeets. Next to the utility sink were cages of dead reptiles and amphibians.
On the wall opposite the utility sink were cages of dead small mammals. The top shelves were mice and rats. The rest were kittens and puppies.
Kittens and puppies tortured to death. If I’d been in my human body, I would have cried. I was not apologetic that their deaths bothered me more than the deaths of Elizaveta’s family. Those animals had been innocent, and I was not willing to say that of anyone else who had died here.
There were no flies, though the smell of rot was incredible. I had to assume that something kept the insects away, and it was probably not the stench—physical and spiritual—that permeated the room. Some of the smell was putrefaction, but most of it was the reek of black magic. Maybe flies were repelled by the scent of black magic. Or maybe the magic that had killed Elizaveta’s family had also killed all of the insects.
I started to go do my job, to leave the small dead creatures and search the corners for the missing dead body, when a movement caught my eye. I yipped for Sherwood, who was pacing with intent by the sink. I couldn’t smell him over the rest of it, but his skin was covered with sweat. He stopped and came over.
Without a word, he opened the cage I indicated and pulled out the body of one half-grown orange tabby kitten with gentle hands and set it aside.
“We missed this,” he said as he eased a black-and-white body out of the cage. Like the tabby, it was somewhere between kitten and cat.
The kitten twitched and tried to move away from him. “Poor thing,” he murmured. “Shh now, you’re safe.”
He pulled off his shirt and swaddled the cat in it, gently immobilizing it. He set the cat on the floor next to its cagemate.
He did a quick and complete check of the rest of the cages, but the black-and-white kitten was the only survivor. He picked up his shirt with the kitten and examined the animal more thoroughly while it struggled weakly.
Sherwood’s eyes were wholly human and raw with emotion when he met mine. “Missing an eye” was all he said.
You were missing a leg, I thought. Maybe it was a good thing I couldn’t talk in my coyote form.
I licked the face of the kitten gently. It tasted as foul as the whole basement smelled. But the touch of my tongue seemed to reassure it more than the werewolf’s voice.
Cats don’t like werewolves. The only exception I’ve ever seen to that is my own cat, Medea. I guessed that we were about to see if we could get this one to warm up to us.
“Have you seen enough?” he asked.
I started toward what I thought was the nearest bathroom, and he stepped between me and it. “No. You don’t want to go into the freezer. There are some things you don’t need to see. We should go.”
I looked pointedly at the dead bodies, scratching the floor once per body I could see. One on each of the two tables, two in the dentist chairs, two tied up on dining room chairs. I sneezed and looked around.
“I forgot,” he said.
He gave the kitten he held a worried look, but told it, “This should only take a minute.”
He strode briskly to a large storage bin near one of the corner rooms and pulled off the lid. It was a big, sturdy bin, but it shouldn’t have been big enough to store a body.
I peered inside and wished I hadn’t. The body inside was missing legs and arms—which explained the size of the bin. My brain wanted to turn the corpse into a stage prop. His face was almost featureless because his eyes, lips, nose, and ears had been removed long enough ago that the wounds had healed over with scar tissue.
He looked mummified, but my nose told me that he, like everyone else in the room, had been alive only a few hours earlier. I didn’t recognize him, but I knew the ghost who lingered, petting the corpse.
Sherwood’s voice was grim. “Adam said this was Elizaveta’s grandson and that likely Elizaveta had done most of the damage to him herself.”
His name had been Robert. The ghost looked at me, then spat over his shoulder and scowled. I ignored him as I sniffed dutifully at the pitiful body.
I made Sherwood wait until I’d sniffed around all of the bodies again, paying special attention to fingers and faces. Then we both escaped the basement of Elizaveta’s house. I don’t know who was more relieved: me, Sherwood, or that poor kitten.
* * *
• • •
I couldn’t change back. Adam assigned someone to take my car back to our house. Then he packed me, Sherwood, and the kitten into his SUV to head for the veterinary clinic while the pack pulled the bodies, human and otherwise, from the house. Pack magic would keep neighbors or low-flying aircraft from noticing what the pack was doing.
Everyone would wait for Warren to return with the firestarters. The plan was for Joel and Aiden to turn Elizaveta’s family—and all the dead animals—to ash.
Sherwood suggested that the house be burned down, too—which I was highly in favor of. Given the state of things that I’d seen, I doubted that anyone would ever be able to get a peaceful night’s sleep in that building without someone doing a major exorcism or something of the sort to lay the ghosts to rest. I’d never seen an exorcism performed in person, so I didn’t know if one would work.