“It’s the room where they keep the electric chair,” Priest answered. “In some prisons, electrocutions were held in a separate building. They called it the Death House.”
“Look.” Alara pointed at the gray metal door next to us. Words were written on this one, too:
Darien Shears
“That must have been his cell,” Lukas said.
“Who?”
“The prison serial killer. A local war hero convicted of killing this girl who turned up dead after she left a bar with him. Shears swore he didn’t do it, but the jury didn’t believe his story and sentenced him to life. After a few weeks, prisoners started dying—stabbed in the shower, strangled on the yard, suffocated in their sleep. Shears confessed to all the murders even though there were no witnesses.”
Alara raised an eyebrow. “A serial killer with a conscience?”
“Who knows?” Lukas nodded at the white door at the end of the hallway. “But they executed him in the electric chair right there.”
Shears’ cell faced the Death House. If he looked out the tiny square window of his cell, the only thing Darien Shears could see was the room where he would take his last breath.
Jared peered through the square cut into the metal and froze. “No way.”
“What?” Alara angled for a better look.
He unbolted the door, and the hinges groaned. The room was empty, but it didn’t feel that way because every inch of the walls was covered with words, symbols, and pictures, overlapping in a dizzying pattern. In the center of the madness, one drawing stood untouched by the edges of the others.
The Shift.
It looked exactly like the one in Priest’s journal, though clearly drawn by a different hand.
Priest pushed his way past Jared and stood in front of the enormous sketch. He reached out and held his hand over it, without touching the smooth concrete on which it was rendered. “It’s not possible.”
“Maybe Shears found the casing hidden in the prison,” Lukas offered. The fifth and final piece of the Shift was the casing itself, the cylinder into which the four disks slid.
Priest wasn’t convinced. “But how did he know what the disks looked like? This sketch shows the Shift assembled.”
Lukas shook his head. “I don’t know.”
As I scanned the walls, my mind memorized the pictures and symbols automatically. My eyes rested on the words scrawled over and over above the drawing of the Shift, words I knew I’d never forget: THE SPIRIT IS NOW AT WORK IN THE SONS OF DISOBEDIENCE.
Alara read them, too. “That’s not crazy or anything.”
“It’s a verse from the Bible.” Jared studied the wall. “But it should say, ‘the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.’ It’s a reference to the devil. He’s the spirit at work.”
Demons were bad enough. I didn’t want to know who the sons of disobedience were.
“There was something else in the article about Shears.” Lukas hesitated. “When he confessed, he told the warden he was just a soldier following orders.”
“You think the devil was giving him orders?” I couldn’t hide the shock in my voice.
“I was thinking more along the lines of a demon,” Lukas answered. “One that doesn’t want us to find the Shift.”
The hinges creaked again, and the heavy door slammed shut behind us.
A tall man stared wide-eyed like he caught us breaking and entering. His hair was buzzed down to nothing, pale eyes lost in the gaunt shadows of his face. A dark band of scarred skin cut across the man’s forehead, circling his skull.
Every muscle in my body urged me to run, but there was nowhere to go. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him.
“I’ve been fighting this war too long to lose now.” Darien Shears was still in the orange jumpsuit he was probably wearing when he died.
“There’s no war.” Lukas kept his voice even. “Nothing to lose.”
We all knew it was a lie. The spirit stepped away from the door. It was covered with more writing: YOU DO NOT KNOW THE DAY WHEN YOUR MASTER IS COMING.
The spirit pointed at Lukas. “I sacrificed my life to protect it. Don’t tell me there’s nothing to lose.”
It’s still here.
My eyes darted around the room. There was nowhere to hide a cylinder the size of a coffee can.
Shears straightened. “I’m a good soldier. Stopped everyone who tried to take it. The same way I’m gonna stop you.”
Priest raised the paintball gun. He fired off round after round, but the balls burst against the vengeance spirit’s chest—holy water, salt, and cloves spraying onto the walls. I waited for the spirit to explode, but he only flickered for a second and vanished.
I stared at the paintball casings lying on the floor. “Why didn’t they destroy him?”
“He’s stronger than the average vengeance spirit.” Lukas ran his hands along the walls checking for cracks. “They weakened him, but I’m not sure how much. We need to find the last piece of the Shift before he comes back.”
“It’s not here,” Jared said. “The walls are solid concrete.”
“Then where is it?” I asked.
Alara stood in the doorway, staring at the view from Darien Shears’ cell. “I think I know.”
CHAPTER 30
Death House
Priest opened the white door at the end of the hall. A crude wooden chair with heavy armrests was bolted onto a raised platform in the center of the room like a dead man’s throne. Padded leather wrist and ankle cuffs were buckled below the thick straps that secured the prisoner’s chest to the chair. A coiled black wire snaked up the back and attached to a medieval-looking headpiece, with a metal band that matched the scarred skin around Darien Shears’ head.
Alara kept her distance. “Do you think any of them were innocent?”
Lukas stopped in front of a row of numbered switches under the words CAUTION—HIGH VOLTAGE. “I don’t know, but it looks like they all suffered.”
Rows of hatch marks extended across the wall beside the panel. Someone must’ve been keeping a tally of the men who died here.
“Maybe they deserved to suffer.” Jared sounded like the guy who burst into my house the first night I met him, not the boy I kissed inside the wall.
Echoes of murmuring voices bombarded us, too faint to decipher, and the unmistakable sound of frantic scratching coming from behind the walls.
“Well done, Jared.” Lukas sprinkled salt around the base of the chair. “Good to know you can piss off the living and the dead.”
The scratching grew louder. Then all at once it stopped, plunging the room into an eerie silence.
Priest took a step back and bumped into the panel of switches.
“You’re all monsters.” A disembodied voice slithered through the room. “That’s what they said right before they threw the switch.”
Alara’s body lurched back violently, thrown by a force none of us could see.
She fell into the electric chair. The padded cuffs unbuckled themselves and closed around her wrists and ankles. The leather chest strap snaked around her torso and tightened, completely immobilizing her.
“Stop it!” she shrieked.
Jared and Lukas struggled to unfasten the cuffs, but the leather straps held tight.
“Leave her alone, Darien,” Priest shouted.
The voice laughed. “It’s not Darien.”
Faces appeared one by one, solidifying into full body apparitions—men still wearing their standard prison-issue orange jumpsuits. Their heads were shaved, and identical scars circled their foreheads where the metal had seared their skin.
They looked like shells of the men who had died in the same chair where Alara was sitting now.
A man with dark shadows around his eyes stepped in front of her. “Do you have anything to say? They gotta ask you that before they throw the switch.”
The one with empty gray eyes nodded. “It’s the law.”
“Let her go.” Jared raised t
he semiautomatic paintball gun. “Or I’ll give you a new set of burns.”
Lukas aimed his own weapon and a vengeance spirit with a jagged scar across his cheek and the number eighteen tattooed on his neck smiled. “Ain’t nothin’ left to burn. Except your friend.”
Jared and Lukas opened fire, the lethal mixture of holy water, salt, and cloves spraying across the walls until they ran out of ammunition. Two vengeance spirits exploded, but a half dozen stood fast.
Priest and I lifted our weapons.
Before I squeezed the trigger, the gun was ripped from my hands.
I searched for a faded form, or the shadowy features of a spirit that wasn’t fully materialized, but there was nothing. Priest was disarmed the same way, his weapon floating in the air next to mine.
Our guns hovered, turned, and pointed directly at us.
Then the weapons changed direction, and the rounds discharged in rapid succession, hitting the tally marks on the wall over and over. When the ammo was spent, the weapons dropped at our feet.
“A prisoner built this chair. That seem right to you?” The spirit with the dark shadows around his eyes appeared. “Saying goes that if you die in this prison, your soul stays here. Don’t matter if you’re an inmate or not—no heaven or hell, just Moundsville.” He lowered the metal cap onto Alara’s head. “Let’s see if your friend makes it out.”
Alara screamed as Darien Shears materialized and clamped his hand over her mouth. He held a finger to his lips. “Shh.”
Flashes of the prisoners’ faces superimposed themselves over hers—the spirit with the shadows around his eyes, the one with the number eighteen on his neck—a parade of faces rotating in front of Alara’s. Each man buckled and strapped in the chair, the metal headpiece secured to his skull.
Each one screaming and writhing in pain the way Alara was now.
Jared and Lukas ran for the chair.
“I wouldn’t do that.” Number Eighteen flipped the switches on the panel.
“It’s okay,” Priest said. “There’s no power in this building anymore.”
The vengeance spirit tilted his head, considering it. “Who said anything about using the building’s power?”