Chapter 47: 46: Victoria’s Secrets

I leapt out of my chair, spinning around and grabbing the back of it, intending to use it as a makeshift weapon against the three armed soldiers. Before I could do anything else, Vincent muttered a few more words. I felt a sudden numbness take over my body. I stood stock still, the chair half raised, facing the soldiers, frozen in place.

“Put the chair down.” Vincent said.

His tone was mild. The spell he had cast was anything but. My actions were not my own. I struggled against the controlling spell Vincent had cast, but it was hopeless. Despite my internal screams at my muscles to obey me, I returned the chair to where it had been.

“Now follow the instructions of the guards.” Vincent said.

Unable to do anything other than comply with the guard’s terse instructions, I was marched through the mansion to an elevator I hadn’t seen before. The elevator shot below ground and I was taken to a large, tiled room and told to strip. Once I’d done so, they blasted me with a hose that shot out freezing cold water that smelt of bleach.

An orange jumpsuit had been laid out for me, and I was ordered to put it on.

They took me along another corridor, at the end of which was a huge circular bank vault style door. It was three metres in diameter, a metre thick and I guess weighed twenty-five, maybe thirty tons. The front of it was attached to a massive metal sheet with four huge hinges, two in the middle of the door and two attached to the wall beside it. There were two metal wheels the size of car tyres on the door, with thick steel spokes poking out. One guard span the wheels, unlocking the door’s twenty-four bolts.

I took a step back, overcome by a feeling that once I ended up on the other side of that door, I was not coming back out of by choice.

“Don’t even think about trying to fight,” one soldier said. “Inside, now.”

Vincent’s spell still held sway over me. I stepped through the vault door and into a large room on the other side.

“Wait there,” the soldier said, “until George shows you around.”

The large metal door was slowly closed, the bolts sliding shut with a swish and a clank. There was one other exit from the almost empty room, a plain metal door that was locked. There were a few plastic chairs in the room.

It felt like a waiting room at a doctor’s office, minus the magazines.

Balthazar was sitting on one of the chairs.

Like me, he was dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He raised an eyebrow as I stepped inside, but said nothing.

I felt the spell that Vincent had cast on me fading. When I flexed my arms, they were under my control again.

I pulled a chair as far away from Balthazar as possible and sat down.

“Have to admit it, I did not see this coming,” Balthazar said. His voice was resigned, muted, and solitary. I got the impression that his ‘speaking in multiple voices’ thing was a trick he pulled when he felt like it.

“Things not quite going according to plan?” I taunted.

Balthazar glowered at me.

“Well, how’s trying to be the hero working out for you, kid?” he replied, matching my sarcasm.

“I’ve had better days. Still, you won’t be able to bring your demon army into our world. So, you know, fifty-fifty from where I’m sitting.”

Being flippant was about all I had left. If I’d spent a minute pondering on how everything had gone wrong, thinking about Marian’s murder, about the Pryces’ betrayal, I’d have folded myself into a little ball and given up.

Things were what they were. I was just going to have to deal with it. Somehow.

“My demon army?” Balthazar repeated.

“Yeah. Sucks to be you right now, huh?”

“My demon army?” Balthazar said again, with even more incredulity. Then he laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

“Is that...” he gasped between laughs, “Is that what you think I’ve been trying to do? Bring a demon army to this world?”

“Well, yeah?”

He burst into laughter again.

“Oh, that is too damn precious. That’s brilliant,” Balthazar continued. “Kid, you need to stop watching so much television. ‘My demon army’. Genius.”

“So what has this all been about, then? What have you been trying to do?”

“Ethan, if there was a demon army on the other side, which I doubt there is by now, why on earth would I want to invade this world? Supernaturals, as you call them, have been hunted and murdered for as long as I can remember - and those have been the lucky ones. The unlucky ones? Tortured, vivisected, experimented on. Auctioned off to fill up exotic zoos. Turned into pets or slaves. I spent a decade in Section 13 labs being experimented on. Why would I want to bring my people into this hellhole?”

“You’ve been trying to go home...”

“We’ve been trying to go home,” Balthazar confirmed, “Or at least as close as we could get. Anywhere but here.”

“But you killed people. You nearly killed me.”

“It was nothing personal. You were just in the way.”

“And the others? The soldiers, the cursed ones?”

Balthazar’s sardonic tone returned. “Do I look like an angel to you? It was them or us. Simple. Most of us are tired, we’re weak. Half of us can’t remember what our home looks like. We only know it’s better than this. Even the remaining fey would rather head to our realm than be stuck here. All I did was what was necessary to get us all the hell out of here.”

“So you worked with the Pryces. They promised to send you home. Once the barrier was down, they were supposed to open a portal to send you back.”

“Quick on the uptake, aren’t you?”

“And now they’ve double-crossed you and your Monster Liberation Front.”

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“My what?”

“Your group.”

“Dumb name. We’re called the Alliance, and they’re not mine. I’m just one soldier.”

“Whatever. The point is, they’ve double-crossed both of us.”

“Never trust a human,” Balthazar muttered. “Which reminds me, what are you? Your blood smells funny. Like you’re one of us, but you aren’t.”

Before I replied, the metal door was unlocked and opened.

I gasped as a diminutive creature stepped through the door. Like us, he was dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He stood about three and a half feet tall, his large feet were shoeless and covered in fur. A small tail, similar to a monkey’s, poked out of his behind.

You’ve barely scratched the surface of this new world you’re living in, Victoria had said.

She hadn’t been kidding.

The creature’s wizened skin was a dark shade of brown with a tinge of green to it. He used a walking stick and moved like a tiny old man. Huge, pointed ears sprung from either side of his head. His nose was a long hook and little sharp teeth pushed up from beneath his bottom lip. He looked at the pair of us with sleepy, ancient eyes.

Seeing the way I was gawping, Balthazar commented, “First time you’ve seen an actual goblin?”

I nodded dumbly.

“Try not to stare. They’re quite self-conscious.”

I tried to close my mouth and stop gawping. I failed.

“Well, this has been an exciting week,” the wizened goblin said. “I declare, not seen anything like it for a long time. So many new residents, so much upheaval. I’m George. I’ll be your Orientation Officer for this evening. Or morning. Please follow me. You’ve been allocated rooms, but the governor wants to see you. The new governor, I should say. My, my, quite a week it has been indeed.”

We followed George onto a balcony that overlooked a textbook prison. Two floors with a large central mess area in the middle, gantries lining the sides to allow access to the cells on the second floor. The doors to the cells were simple, iron bar structures, with no privacy. Through my increasing disbelief, I noticed that George had a large set of keys. We walked along a gantry. Most of the lights were off and the prisoners were sleeping, but I could see bulky shapes in the dark that weren’t human. A stray, scaled tail here. A clawed paw hanging out from a bed there.

I felt like I’d stepped into an unholy hybrid of The Lord of The Rings and the Shawshank Redemption.

Victoria’s promise of sanctuary had been another one of her lies. She’d spent years collecting the scrappy remnants of supernaturals that hadn’t been killed by Section 13. Then she’d locked them up and used them as lab rats. I’d seen the white room where Marian had been murdered. Every prisoner here had spent time there being poked, prodded, cut, starved, tortured, injected. You name it, they’d had it done to them.

“Did you know about this?” I asked Balthazar.

He shook his head. “Do you think if I’d known the Pryces were keeping prisoners, I’d have gone along with their plans?”

“Oh, no, no no no,” George said. “No, not prisoners. Residents. Mustn’t call us prisoners.”

“So you can leave?” I said.

“Oh, no,” George replied. “It’s far too dangerous out there. Besides, the Pryces need us. For their experiments.”

“So you can’t leave and you get experimented on?” I said.

“Certainly sounds like being a prisoner to me,” Balthazar said dryly.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I told you, to see the governor. The new one. Oh, yes, we had some excitement here a few days ago. Oh yes, indeed. New resident showed up and well, I can tell you there have been some changes since he took over. Food has been rationed, no more fighting between the different gangs. All very exciting.”

“Wait, what do you mean, the governor?”

“He’s the head resident. Keeps the rest of us in line. Makes sure we go to our procedures when we’re called up, keeps things smooth. We’d had the same one for over ten years, an angel. The new guy, well, he’s been here not ten minutes, and he asks to see the governor to pay his respects. Then he beat him to a bloody pulp, threw him off the gantry, and asked the rest of us if there were any questions. Never seen anything like it in all my time here. Brutal, it was. Utterly brutal. Still, things have been settling down now. Getting back to normal, I suppose.”

“And we’re going to meet him?” I said.

“To pay your respects,” George nodded. “It’s the done thing.”

“How long have you been here, George?”

“Oh, hard to say. Maybe fifteen years, maybe twenty.”

This wizened creature had been trapped in this prison as long as I’d been alive. The thought staggered me. Over the years his mind had snapped, and he’d become a willing co-conspirator in the Pryces’ charade of sanctuary and protection. Institutionalised in every sense. There were no visible guards in the prison. I wondered if they patrolled during the day, or if they only turned up to drag prisoners away for another round of torture and experimentation. I wondered what the punishments were for disobedience and attempted escape.

“Right,” Balthazar said to me, “I guess you and me better start our own little revolution, hm kid? Differences to one side for the moment and all that? We can set ourselves up as the new governors as we figure a way out of this.”

“Yeah,” I drawled. “You won’t want to take on the new governor. Bad idea. Trust me.”

Balthazar looked at me with a puzzled expression. Once again, I was one step ahead of him, and I was enjoying it.

I’d figured out who the new governor was, of course.

“Here we are,” George said.

The cell he’d led us to was unlocked. A figure stood in the shadows at the far end of the cell. He glanced up as Balthazar and I entered, nodded at me.

“Welcome to hell, son,” he said in a soft Scottish accent.

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