"How many guards are missing?" I asked one of the agents.
She flicked through several sheets of paper on a clipboard before answering. "Twenty-two, ten are confirmed dead and fifteen were locked in the comm or guard's room. Apparently there was no communication with the outside world for an hour, and all internal alarm systems were shut down. One of the guard's wives got worried that she couldn't get through to her husband on his mobile and called the police. The police notified us two hours later, and we gained entry and secured the building an hour after arriving."
"Why let any of the guards live?" Sky asked.
"They were on a break," the agent said. "They weren't in the wing when the attack commenced. My guess is they locked themselves in to stay alive, and they weren't important enough for the lich to bother with."
I did some quick maths in my head. "I need to speak to Olivia. Now."
"What's got you all worked up?" Agent Reid asked, as Sky and I made our way over to him and Olivia.
"They were in here for an hour before anyone was even notified that something was wrong," I said. "What time did you actually gain entry?"
"Half eight this morning," Olivia said.
"It was light then, yes?"
Sky tapped something into her phone. "Dawn was at 06:58. So they would have been gone well before then. But that still means they had the place to themselves for three hours at least. By the time they left, all of the prisoners would have been pretty much on the way to becoming husks."
"How do four hundred husks leave without anyone noticing?" I asked. "That's what doesn't make sense."
"I'll be back in a second," Olivia said and marched off toward where I'd seen the guards being interviewed.
"The lich will have a home base. He'll want to go there, although if he has four hundred people about to turn into husks, it must be somewhere big. He'd have known the LOA would be all over this place after his attack, and he wouldn't want to be left vulnerable."
"That still doesn't explain how the hell he got out of here with all of those prisoners in tow."
"Maybe I can be of assistance with that," a middle-aged man in a very nice, immaculate, grey suit said, as he arrived with Olivia. He glanced at Agent Reid and me and then extended a hand to Sky, apparently we weren't important enough. "Maxwell Perkins," he said with a smirk.
"Okay, so who are you and how can you help?" I asked as Sky rolled her eyes once Maxwell had decided to stop staring at her.
"He's the assistant warden," Olivia said for him. "You need to listen to what he has to say."
Maxwell straightened his already perfectly straight tie, and I resisted the urge to hang him with it for being a pompous ass. "As I was explaining to your lovely director, there are tunnels under the prison. The whole building was built during the Georgian era, and those tunnels were never permanently sealed up.
"You have a set of open tunnels under a prison?" Sky snapped.
"They're not open, my dear." The smugness oozed out of him like oil. "A very large, thick steel door bars the way. And there's no prisoner in existence that has ever gotten even close to it. And even if they did, the exit is sealed with a three foot concrete wall."
"How long is the tunnel?" I asked
"Two miles, it ends near a selection of woodland."
"Why would the original architects have built a two mile tunnel under the prison?" Olivia asked.
"The tunnel was designed to move people in and out of the prison in a discreet manner. There are rooms down there where they used to torture people, and the tunnel made it easier to dispose of the bodies."
"Can you show us the way?" Agent Reid asked.
Maxwell beamed. "Of course, follow me. And ladies, you'd best stay close, don't want you to get spooked by anything."
Chapter 30
We followed Maxwell down the corridor to the solitary confinement cells, which had lost none of their creepiness from when Olivia and I had walked past earlier. Some of the gore splattered cells still had bodies inside where the ghouls had attacked and spared no one.
"These men were helpless," Agent Reid said.
"They were serial murderers and rapists," Maxwell said. "I would feel more pity for their victims. These men paid for their crimes with their lives in as brutal a fashion as they had done unto others."
No one made any further comment about what we saw as we made our way by the cells and up to a door which had the word "Maintenance" in big red letters. Maxwell entered the code into the keypad next to it, and the door lock clicked open.
"The tunnel is through here," he said. "But it won't do you any good, the end is blocked."
"Still worth a look," I said, and opened the door fully to reveal a set of stairs that led down, where a row of low-level lights lit the wall as far as I could see. "Are these lights on all the time?"
Maxwell nodded. "It’s easier to leave them on, than to turn them off and on every time we go down here."
"What do you come down here for?" Olivia asked as we all descended the steep stairs into the tunnel.
"A lot of the cables and pipes that run through the prison start down here, and occasionally we have a few glitches with the electricity or hot water. And we use the empty rooms to store supplies."
We made our way along the dingy tunnel, with Maxwell and Olivia taking the lead and Agent Reid following behind Sky and me. Occasionally, we passed locked doors where the handles had become rusted through lack of use, or open ones showing stacks of boxes. But there certainly didn't appear to be anything down here except for the five of us. After a half hour of walking at a steady pace, we arrived at the remains of a concrete wall. Something had punched its way through the concrete to get to the old exit beyond, leaving pieces of broken wall all around.
"I think we've found how the lich got everyone out of here," I said.
I stepped over the pile of rubble and pushed open the rusted, iron gate with a squeak. The lock had been torn off by someone, ripping part of the gate in the process.
The rest of the group followed me out into the clearing near an area of woodland.
"So, these bastards could be anywhere?" Olivia said as she exited the tunnel.
"And they had maybe three hours to start the transformation before they left here," Sky said. "Tonight is when the shit is going to start hitting the fan."
Maxwell laughed. It started as a slight chuckle, but soon made its way into a full-throated roar of laughter. "You have no idea what's happening," he said after everyone had turned to stare at him. Blood trickled from his mouth and nose, dropping onto his shirt.
Agent Reid's Glock was out of its holster in an instant and aimed at the assistant warden who regarded him with mild indifference. "This bag of meat is already dead," Maxwell said. "He was the first to die when I turned up to claim what was mine."
"You're the lich," Sky said.
"And a brownie point goes to the American, although technically I'm still just a useless human."
"Puppeteer," Sky whispered.
Maxwell clapped his hands and laughed. "That's right, aren't you a smart one? Bet you haven't seen this before."
"You controlled Maxwell all this time."
"From the moment I arrived to kill that snitch, Neil, until just now, Maxwell has been my puppet to control as I wished."
"Where are the rest of the prisoners?" I asked.
"I warned you to stay out of this," he said to me. "I told you to let it happen and nothing would befall you. But you ignored me. You killed my ghoul, and now I find you here trying to help them catch me once more. You can't kill me, sorcerer. You can't even hurt me. For your disobedience and for killing my ghoul, you will feel my full wrath."
His mention of the ghoul I'd killed reminded me that I'd had his blood on my hand. "The men in the farm basement, you turned them to ghouls."
"I look forward to feasting on your heart and having my ghouls tear you limb from limb."
"Well, you're down one ghoul already, so it'll probably take longer than it would have if I hadn't killed it."
Maxwell spat bright red blood onto the grass. "You will regret those words, sorcerer."
"You know, it's funny," I said," but everyone who says I'm going to feel their wrath tends to die a horribly violent death. Guess I can add one more to the list."
Maxwell's head turned slowly to face the director. "Olivia Green." His voice was full of venom and barely contained rage. "How I've longed to see you again."
"If you'd have waited long enough the other night, I'd have put a bullet in your face to remember me by," Olivia said.
"You stupid little bitch. You ruined my life, do you know that? Destroyed everything I'd worked so hard to achieve, turned the woman I loved against me. And now, I'm going to do the exact same to you. I'm going to burn your life to the ground and make you watch as the embers are finally extinguished one at a time, until all that's left is destruction. And then you'll die. Slowly. I'm very much looking forward to it."
"I'm going to make sure you stay dead this time," Olivia shouted, as she shook with rage.
"I'm so glad you remember me," Peter said. "I came back because of you. My hatred of you brought me back here, the need to feel your skin burst open as I carve into it. The need to feel your hot blood down my throat was all that kept me going."
"And those women, the friends of Vicki and Amber, why kill them?" I asked, hoping to get his attention off a clearly upset Olivia.
Unfortunately, it didn't work and Maxwell continued to stare at Olivia. "I have something to show you, a gift." He removed a small camera from his pocket and tossed it onto the soft grass by Olivia's feet. "I took some photos for you."
Olivia picked the camera up and used the viewing screen on the back to scroll through the photos it contained. After viewing a few of the photos I noticed a tear trickle down her face.
"Olivia," I whispered and she passed me the camera.
I flicked through the photos and quickly realised that they were a timeline of Vicki's transformation from living enchanter to ghoul.
"Turning Vicki was the most fun I'd ever had," Maxwell said. "And now she'll serve me for all eternity. Her pain and suffering is nothing compared to what I'm going to do to you, Olivia."
"I've heard enough," Agent Reid said and shot Maxwell in the centre of his chest, throwing him off his feet and onto the soft grass.
Nobody admonished Agent Reid for the act. Hell if I'd been holding a gun, I'd have done the same, but even so, no one moved or spoke.
"You stupid fucking idiots," Maxwell said, getting back to his feet. His shirt was drenched in red and clinging to his chest, two large holes where his heart used to be. "You can't even kill my puppet. What chance do you have of killing me?"
"The head," Sky said.
Olivia was still shocked, and more than a little scared, and didn't argue as I removed her Glock from its holster.
"Going to tear all of your flesh from your bones," Maxwell said. His voice was raspy and no longer resembled anything remotely human.
I walked over to him and raised the gun. "Go fuck yourself," I said, and pulled the trigger, destroying Maxwell's brain and a large portion of Maxwell's skull. The corpse fell to the ground, where I put another two in what remained of his head. Just in case.
"What the hell was that?" I asked, as Olivia slumped to the ground, her gaze never leaving Maxwell's body.
"A puppet," Sky said, not sounding all that together herself. "Some liches can take control of the bodies of those they've killed." She raised Maxwell's sleeve to show a marking painted on his forearm in blood.
"This is all new to me," I said, and noticed Agent Reid checking on Olivia.
"New to me, too, Nate. I've heard of it happening twice. Ever." Sky removed a phone from her pocket. "I need to make a call—this has just gotten a lot worse."
I left Sky to her conversation and walked over to Olivia, who appeared to be slightly more with it. "You want to talk about it?" I asked.
She shook her head.
"How does the lich know you?" Sky asked as she joined us.
"Peter Jarvis would dress as a cop, pull women over and pretend that they'd done something, or that there was a problem with their car. Once he got them into his own car, he took them to a secluded house he owned where he would rape and kill them. He took a week with each one. He murdered sixteen women in a twenty-four month period, until he got caught by Vicki."
I remembered reading the file in Vicki's basement.
"His own girlfriend caught him?" Sky asked.
"After she left him, Vicki had heard rumours that he was involved in some bad stuff. She thought it was drugs or something, so followed him to his little nest and caught him as he was about to murder a young woman."
"So, why does he hate you?"
"Because she called and asked if I'd go with her. She was terrified of him. He fought back when we found him and pretty much got his ass kicked by me while Vicki freed the latest girl he'd taken."
"He changed his M.O," I said. "These new girls aren't raped, aren't held for a week. What happened?"
"He did," Sky said as she rejoined us. "Liches can't get it up. So, if he can't have his fun, then why keep them alive?"
"So who raped Vicki's girlfriend, Amber?" I asked.
"Neil confessed on the way to the prison," Reid said.
I was suddenly no longer bothered that he'd died. Horribly. "So, do you have a plan?" I asked Olivia
"Peter's apartment isn't too far from Winchester city centre. We could go look around, see if anything jumps out at us.
"It's been a few years, what if someone else lives there now?" I asked.
"About six weeks ago, Vicki got me to check the place out," Olivia said. "She wanted to make sure no one lived there. I think the anniversary had her spooked."
With good reason
, I thought. "Did you find anything?" I asked.
"No one had lived there since Peter was arrested, but it was still paid for on a regular basis."