Page 46 of Echoes From the Void
Locke Asylum looms against the pre-dawn sky, its Victorian architecture a twisted parody of grandeur. Five years of my life disappeared behind those walls. Five years of needles and tests and screaming in the dark. Now I’m standing here again, by choice this time, and my hands won’t stop shaking.
“We don’t have to do this,” Leo says softly, his usual smile replaced with something fierce and protective. “We could find another way?—”
“No.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “It has to be us. Has to be me.”
Through our pack bonds, I feel their worry, their rage on my behalf. Bishop carefully doesn’t look at how I’m trembling, maintaining the fiction that I’m fine. That we’re all fine.
“Remember,” he says, Guardian marks pulsing with barely contained violence, “we get in, gather intel, get out. No one splits up.”
I want to make a joke about their overprotectiveness. But all I can see is that second-floor window—my window—where I used to press my face against the bars and dream of freedom.
Finn’s fingers find mine, his light matching my shadows. The twin bond pulses between us, carrying understanding no words could capture. He may not have been held here, but he knows. He remembers his own cage in Blackwood’s labs.
Matteo materializes from the shadows, all predator grace. His new fangs flash in the dim light as he scents the air. “Perimeter’s clear of guards, but something’s wrong. The air tastes... corrupt.”
He exchanges a look with Leo, their years of friendship evident in the silent communication. Step by careful step, we cross the broken threshold into darkness that feels alive, hungry.
“Trail’s fresh,” Leo confirms, tension beneath his casual tone. “Maybe three days old. And there’s something else...” He touches one of the walls, tracing sigils I remember being carved with bloody fingers. “Power signatures. Recent ones.”
Through our connection, I feel Finn’s pulse quicken to match mine. The empty corridors ahead look exactly as I remember—the same sterile walls that used to close in during the dark hours, the same fluorescent lights that never fully turned off. Always watching. Always monitoring.
A memory threatens to surface: antiseptic masking blood, screams echoing down identical halls. My screams. Other children’s screams.
“Hey.” Bishop’s hand finds my shoulder, grounding me in the present. His touch carries warmth, strength, understanding. “We’re not here as victims. Not anymore.”
“We’re here for evidence,” Matteo reminds us, but his eyes promise violence at what that evidence might reveal. The predator in him responds to my trauma, ready to hunt those who hurt me.
“And to make sure she can never use this place again,” Leo adds, his usual warmth hardening to something dangerous. Shadow essence curls around his fingers, responding to the rage he usually keeps hidden behind smiles.
“The power grid is intricate,” Dorian murmurs, trailing frost across control panels. “Multiple redundancies, experimental wards I’ve never seen before. Valerie’s work, but... modified. She was trying to stabilize something. Or contain it.”
“Or someone,” Finn says softly, light gathering around his fingers. I catch him doing that thing with his jaw—the same tension I feel in mine as we pass rooms I remember too well. Observation rooms. Testing chambers. Places where children went in but didn’t always come out.
“Okay, seriously,” I say, needing to break the growing tension before memories overwhelm me, “we need to stop with the twin thing. It’s freaking everyone out.”
“You started it.”
“Did not.”
“In the ancient and immortal words of modern youth,” Dorian drawls, “shut up.”
The banter helps, keeps us centered as we move deeper into the facility. But beneath it, through pack bonds still new and raw, I feel their protective rage building. Every room we passtells its own horror story—medical equipment still spattered with old blood, child-sized restraints bolted to examination tables, observation windows with claw marks on the inside.
This place holds more ghosts than just my own.
“Split up?” Leo suggests, but Matteo’s already shaking his head, fangs catching dim light.
“Together,” he growls, and through our bond I feel him fighting memories of his own—nights spent holding me through nightmares about this place. “Always together in places like this.”
Bishop’s hand finds mine as we approach the first set of labs. My old labs. Where it all started. “Ready?”
I look at Finn, see my own determination reflected back. “Let’s see what the bitch left behind.”
We don’t go upstairs to the bedrooms, and I avoid the ballroom at all costs. Instead I lead them to the basement that was never a basement.
The first lab knocks the breath from my lungs—not from gore or obvious signs of torture, but from the mundane details that somehow make it worse. Coffee cups still on desks, rings stained into the wood. Post-it notes with grocery lists. A child’s drawing pinned to a bulletin board right next to a chart tracking “subject responses to shadow essence infusion.”
“People worked here,” I say, bile rising. “Regular people who went home to their families after... after...”
