Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(74)

‘Okay,’ Joan said. ‘Okay.’ She got to her feet fast, sorting through the roll of picks. She squinted at the keyhole. ‘How are we for time?’

‘Nine minutes away,’ Tom said.

‘Okay,’ Joan said again. She took a pick from Ruth’s kit and probed at the keyhole. To her surprise, the pick met something just inside. It felt like a metal plate. Joan’s heart started to beat faster as she traced the shape of it. It seemed to cover the hole entirely. ‘Can I have some light?’ she asked.

Light appeared from Aaron’s dying phone. The battery icon was red.

Joan bent to examine the keyhole. It was big enough that she should have been able to glimpse the room beyond. But instead the phone’s torch revealed a metal sheet just inside the keyhole.

‘What’s wrong?’ Aaron said.

‘I can’t pick it,’ Joan said.

‘I thought Hunts could pick any lock,’ Tom said. ‘That was the deal we made. I get you in the gate. You get me in there.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Joan said. ‘It’s not a lock. There’s nothing to pick.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tom said.

‘The keyhole is sealed up. There’s no room to fit a key into it.’

Tom peered at the keyhole and swore.

‘We’re out of time,’ Aaron said.

‘No!’ Joan heard herself. ‘No!’ They’d come so far to get here, and the gate wouldn’t open again for a hundred years. They were so close to saving their families. They were so close to where they needed to be. And someone had made this stupid, false, mocking lock. ‘No!’

‘Joan—’ Aaron said.

‘No!’ Joan slammed her hand against the door, frustrated and furious.

And something woke up inside her.

Not the Hunt power, but another. Someday soon, you’ll come into an ability, Gran had said. You can trust no one with the knowledge of it.

Power poured out of Joan—invisible, but real and strong as electricity. She felt disoriented and unbalanced. She felt as if she were falling off a cliff.

There was a sound like ice cracking.

From far away, Aaron’s voice said, ‘We need to go.’

‘Wait.’ That was Tom. ‘Look, she did it. The door’s ajar.’

The torrent of power ended abruptly, and Joan was left feeling shaken and drained.

Aaron and Tom were peering around the edge of the door, into the next room, but all Joan could see was the keyhole she’d touched.

The silver metal of the lock had become reddish and dull, as if the metal had been turned into stone. Cracks ran through it; the new material seemed too brittle for this form.

Joan had a sudden clear memory of the gold chain with those dark, stonelike patches. I did that, she thought. And I did this.

And then Tom flung the door open, and the lock disappeared from Joan’s view.

‘Good God.’ Aaron took a step back.

The smell hit Joan first. It was familiar and terrible: excrement and confinement. Joan knew it well. It was the smell from the nightmare she’d had since she was small.

The room was tiny, with stone walls and a vaulted wooden ceiling.

‘What is this?’ Aaron sounded bewildered.

There was a mattress on the floor with a thin blanket—too thin for this cold stone room. A bucket had been pushed into one corner. A wooden desk was against a wall.

Joan made herself step inside. ‘It’s a prison cell.’ Not the prison from her nightmares, but she knew one when she saw one.

‘But where are all the King’s treasures?’ Aaron said.

Someone had been kept in here. There were brown bloodstains on the edge of the desk. Scuff marks on the stone floor. Someone had put up a fight.

Tom crouched to touch an indentation in the mattress. The mattress was so thin that his knee compressed it to the cold stone floor.

‘Where is everything?’ Aaron said. ‘Where are the books? Where are the records? Where’s the transformatio? Isn’t this supposed to be the Royal Archive?’ He turned to Tom. ‘This is the wrong room.’

‘It’s the right room,’ Tom said. ‘You saw the protections around it.’

‘But there’s nothing in here.’

‘I can see that, can’t I?’ Tom growled. He’d been talking for days about what the room might hold. They say that the King collects treasures from all of time. Now, frustrated, he ripped into the mattress, as if something might be hidden there. When he found nothing, he hurled it against the wall. It hit the bucket, and something disgusting slopped all over the floor.

‘Oh, for—’ Aaron backed up from the spreading mess. ‘Oh, that’s repugnant. Why did you do that? Frankie, no.’ He called the dog back before she could bound over there.

And now Tom was pushing at the walls, apparently hoping to find a hidden door.

‘Tom, stop,’ Joan said. ‘We can see what was in here.’

A person had been here. A prisoner. Someone all alone, cut off from the world, behind a slice of winter from a hundred thousand years ago.

‘For God’s sake,’ Aaron said. He hoisted up Frankie with a grunt, staggering a bit, as if she was much heavier than he’d expected. ‘Come on. There’s nothing here. We need to go.’