120.

  The staircase went deep. It was at least 50 steps to the bottom, and I had the overwhelming sense that I was deep underground. There was another door at the bottom, and the lock picking feather made quick work of it. I pushed it open and found myself in some sort of large underground cavern. The walls were roughly hewn from the stone, and there were no lights down here, just flickering flames in sconces on the walls. That smell was sharper than ever, and I realized now what it was. Blood. The tang of pennies in the back of my throat made me want to spit. That abstract feeling of dread in my stomach had begun to morph into terror. Some animal survival instinct screamed at me to run, to flee this place. But I swallowed down that terror and forced myself to take a step into the darkness.

  The sconces barely lit the way, offering only small pools of light amongst the deep shadows. The whispers had calmed, but only slightly. They were still there at the corners of my hearing, and I couldn't figure out whether they were urging me forward or warning me to turn around. I closed my eyes for a second, fought through the terror, and found my calm place. It was jagged and weak, but it was there. I slowed my breathing and forced the whispers away. I needed a clear head. Blundering around deep underground in almost complete darkness and being panic stricken at the same time sounded like a recipe for an early grave.

  I opened my eyes, unsheathed my Grandad’s bat, and slowly began walking forward. I thought about activating the cloaking charm again but I was already worn out from using it before and wanted to save it in case I did have to run. For now, I stuck to the darkness, dodging around the pools of light. Finally, I came upon an open space. It looked like another cavern. This one was still poorly lit but had more sconces dancing around. There was the drip of water from somewhere, and I wondered if I was underneath the Thames itself. The idea of there being millions of tons of turgid river water frothing above my head made me queasy. That was just another fear I had to swallow down.

  What the hell were the Syndicate up to? I'd seen their stash houses before and they weren’t like this. They were modern and well-secured. This was something entirely different. This didn't even feel human. The floor was uneven and jagged, as were the walls and ceilings, like some giant had taken a chisel to the space and hacked out a hollow deep underground. I walked, looking left and right constantly, and every now and again checking over my shoulder. The feeling that I was being hunted began to grow the further I went underground, but I couldn't stop now. I had to figure out what the hell was going on.

  The air had completely died around me. There was no breeze, not even a stir of any vermin, or life of any sort. The place was completely dead, and I got the sense that not even insects lived down here. I might be the only living thing for miles.

  Just as the worry began to set in that I'd maybe gone too deep to find my way back, I stumbled across a narrow passageway hewn out of the larger cavern. It was barely wide enough for a single person, and it was pitch black. I swallowed, took a deep breath, and made a mental note to myself that if I survived this, the first thing I would do was craft a new set of see-in-the-dark goggles. But for now, all I had was my hearing and my balls, and I hoped neither failed me.

  I stepped into the darkness. I considered activating the Zap Knuckles and using the sporadic blue sparks to light my way but the fear that something was lurking in here with me made me reconsider. I'd rather stumble blindly into something than give away my position right now. I kept one hand trailing along the wall, the other ready, clenched, energy just at the tips of my fingers, ready to explode through my knuckles. I hadn't realised it, but I was holding my breath, my ears pricking up, desperate to catch the sound of anything. All I could hear was the drip of water and the scuff of my own boots. Finally, I saw lights flickering at the end of the tunnel. My footsteps quickened. I didn't care what was on the other side. I just wanted to get back to the light.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  I stumbled out into an octagonal-shaped chamber and wished I was back in the darkness. On each wall of the octagon was a cage large enough for a few people, and in the middle was a dais of black marble, also shaped in an octagon, a dark liquid oozed on its surface, glimmering in the light of the flames.

  The second I stepped out into this chamber, I felt that unnatural, inhuman evil wash over me, suffocating me and drowning me at the same time. Above each one of the cages was a Rune about six foot high, and I realised they were written in blood. I didn't recognise the Runes, but just from the way they were constructed, they didn't seem right. They weren't like the Runes that I used. The Runes that I had experimented with were elegant, with a geometry that was pleasing to the eye. These ones were rough and jagged, without human intelligence behind them.

  I hadn't realised it, but I was standing frozen at the mouth of the passageway, just taking in all of this. I forced my frozen legs to move. I didn't want to go near the dais in the middle, so I worked my way around the perimeter. The chamber was big, so big that in the darkness, it was almost difficult to see the other side of it. As I approached one of the cages, I realised, with a gut-wrenching, sick feeling, that they were caked in blood. I could see bloody fingerprints on the bars, as if someone had desperately clung to them. I swallowed down the urge to vomit again. I couldn't breathe, my chest felt tight, and I was getting dizzy.

  I walked around the cages. They were tall and made of rusting iron bars. I reached out my trembling hand to touch a bar but pulled it away as I felt the sheer terror radiating from them. In the flickering torchlight, I could see each one was flecked with blood. The Runes above made me tremble and wretch. They too glistened with fresh blood. I couldn’t look at them. They radiated evil. I felt physically nauseous even glancing up at them.

  Then I saw something that made bile rise in the back of my throat. Inside one of the cages was a small teddy bear, half its face bathed in blood, discarded on the floor. Human beings had been in these cages. All of this was human blood. Terror fountained in my chest. This was human sacrifice. I hadn't even considered such a thing possible. None of the literature I had read in the Codex had ever mentioned blood magic or sacrifices, but what else could this be? As I studied the cages closer I saw the bloody human handprints on the walls of the cage. There were patches of hair and shreds of clothing littered about. In one of them, I even saw a broken tooth.

  My whole body was trembling now. I was freezing cold and bathed in sweat. Slowly, I turned and looked over my shoulder at the dais in the centre of the room. With will power I didn’t know I possessed, I forced myself to walk towards it.

  The octagonal slab of black marble was drenched in dried blood the colour of rust. There had been so much blood spilt on it that it had dripped down the sides, drying like a giant’s teardrops. I noticed, or forced myself to notice, the chips taken out of the surface of the black marble where a blade had stabbed down again and again. I looked away, blinking tears from my eyes, and I noticed there were blood-covered footprints all around the dais, as if an audience had gathered to watch this horror take place.

  I looked around the cavernous space. There were eight cages. That meant, there would have been at least eight sacrifices, but I had the sense there was more than one person per cage, and at least one of them had been a small child. That could mean dozens of people had been slaughtered here. But why? Why would the Syndicate be involved in blood sacrifices? What the hell did this have to do with selling guns on the Mulberry?

  I couldn't take it anymore. I was going to vomit or burst into tears. I needed to get out of this evil place. Before I knew it, I was sprinting back down the passageway, through the multiple chambers of the rough-hewn caverns. The instinct for air and to see the moonlight again, drove me forward as I retraced my winding path back up and away from whatever the hell that place was.

  I burst through the door and charged up the stairs back out into the warehouse, and I had just enough sense to close the doors and the shelf behind me, replacing the boxes in a frantic panic before activating my cloaking charm and sprinting back the way I'd come through the back door. I didn't stop until I was floundering through the mud of the bank of the Thames. I felt tears running down my face, my breath was coming short, but I couldn't stop running. I gulped down fresh, sweet air, but even that couldn't remove the taint of evil. I just kept running. I didn't watch out for cameras or patrolmen, I just had to get away. I had to get away from wherever that was, and in my blind terror and panic, I didn't notice that I wasn't alone.

  Something was following me.