His blood chilled.
Cavin was the one who realized Jude hadn't left the elevator. He looked over his shoulder and cocked an eyebrow, only to narrow his eyes an instant later. "What?"
Hold what you have.
"It's here." The words came out a snarl past erupting fangs. "It's been here, it was with the rats and the pigeon shit baked into the roof when you took the warehouse."
But where? Where?
He mentally raced through the security schematics, ticking off every camera, every access point, matching up the locations with the number in his head, until one number remained unaccounted for. The elevator door shuddered against his hand, dinging as it tried to close. Jude looked at it, and then jerked his head back to stare up at the moveable tile on the ceiling of the elevator car. The maintenance access panel.
"Fuck. Me," he breathed.
There were two ways into the elevator shaft-through the elevator car and through a steel door on the roof. Cavin had decided to leave the roof accessible, an if-shit-hits-the-fan escape route. There was a camera up there but it was of tertiary importance and had minimal time on the monitors.
"It's here," he repeated, and slammed his fist against the control panel. "Under our fucking noses, waiting for years."
Ares and Cavin were both moving, mouths tense, eyes sharp as they worked through Jude's harsh, changing speech.
"Our revelry, the lust, night after night. Year after year. It's a charge. Energy. What it does to us-"
"It sets us free." Ares stepped back into the elevator, followed by Cavin.
"It-" Jude shook his head and punched up, smashing his fist into the access tile. It flew back, leaving a dark, gaping hole. "It sets us free. It drugs our humans. What does it do to something smaller, something with a less complex life system? What does fucking aspartame do to a rat?"
"Poison," Ares finished darkly as Jude gripped the edges of the overhead door, swinging himself up and through. "Radiation, changing the makeup of your cells."
"You saw the human that attacked Jude's woman." That was Cavin.
Ares said something in reply but Jude wasn't listening anymore.
"Send it back down," Jude instructed. Crouched on the top of the car, he braced himself as the cables groaned and the elevator started to descend.
Cavin joined him amid the pulleys and gears. Side by side, they rode down the shaft, grimly silent in the face of their findings.
Steel ladders climbed two walls of the vertical tunnel. They extended up from a sub-basement, a dark place below the garage, where a long-cold boiler lurked in an unused cellar. Dug a century ago by steam shovels, the space had probably once stank of coal and industrial waste. The only way from the cellar to the used parts of the Jungle was the elevator-or the ladders-which only staff could access, and every floor had a coded key. Cavin, Jude and Ares were the only ones who knew of the yawning level beyond the garage.
Or so they'd believed. Now, as he studied the walls of thick web that obscured long stretches of ladder, he knew the error in assumption.
"I fucked up," he bit out as the car slowed and stopped, rocking slightly on its cables before going still.
Cavin swung down into the elevator without answering. Jude stayed behind, studying the web that criss-crossed back and forth across the spaces between ladder rungs until it formed a gray wall of silk. Both ladders had been coated in that manner. Small dark spots dotted the net, meals caught and stored for later. The ladders were useless now to anything but the creatures who'd manufactured the opaque shroud.
Below, Cavin and Ares moved off into the cellar with its aged, worn concrete floor. Jude started to go after them but passed as his lion rumbled a deep warning.
Instinct lifted his head. He peered up the length of the shaft, following the walls of web up to the roof access far above. Coded locks and a silent alarm rigged inside and outside the rooftop access should have made the point impenetrable, and there, it was closed, and no goddamn wonder, because something bigger and darker than cameras and alarms guarded it.
Slowly, he straightened. Gripping the cable, he started to climb foot over fist. The twisted steel fibers bit at his hands, slicing callouses and leaving blood to mark his path.
The emergency lights were buried behind the curtains of web, leaving the shaft dark except for the silvery glow of silk. The insect graveyard grew more crowded, the shells thicker, until they were white, opaque knots woven into the fabric.
Climbing became harder as his blood flowed. He lost his grip and started to back slide. Legs locked, Jude shot his arm out in an instinctive bid for the ladder. Force punched his hand straight through the matted web, which tore with a sound like ripping fabric. As it touched his skin, sticking to his raw palm, fire shot through him. With a hiss and a curse, he jerked his hand back. Strands of stubborn, clinging web followed and with them, a handful of the husks. No, not husks.