Fifteen minutes earlier.
The second Veyric and the others smashed through the front entrance and pulled every set of eyes in the block their way, a hidden vent louver at the back of the Defenders' base shifted loose from outside without a sound.
The fighting at the gate thundered through the duct in dull, heavy waves. Dust and rust rained down from the old metal, catching on the collars of the two figures crawling through it.
The shaft was cramped enough to be offensive.
Blade, built like a tank, had to drag himself forward inch by inch on his stomach.
After nearly twenty meters of crawling, they finally reached an exhaust opening angled down into the basement.
Using the gunfire up front as cover, Natasha and Blade slipped through the vent and dropped into the underground level like two strips of black smoke.
Blade hit first. Heavy combat boots touched concrete without so much as a wobble. Natasha landed a beat after him, light and silent. Her thumb had already flicked the safety off her Widow's Bite, and her eyes were moving before she even settled.
There were no lights in the passage. Barely any ambient glow. Darkness pushed in from every side.
The streets above smelled like cordite and rot.
Down here, it was different.
Blood.
Just blood.
"Something's off about that smell." Blade frowned. Behind the sunglasses, his dark red pupils narrowed on instinct.
He'd spent his whole life hunting vampires. When it came to blood, his nose was past human.
He could feel the half-vampire side of him waking up too, a dry thirst scratching at the back of his throat.
"Too fresh," he said under his breath. "Not zombie blood. Not that old rotten stuff. This is living blood, spilled recently and still oxidizing."
He paused, then added, "Human. No doubt."
Natasha clicked her tactical flashlight over to UV.
The pale blue beam skimmed across the walls, and what should've been bare concrete lit up in ugly fluorescent patches.
Dried blood.
And not a little.
Spray patterns climbed from knee height all the way to the ceiling, wild and messy. The floor showed no footprints, just two thick dark-red drag marks disappearing deeper into the passage.
They followed them.
At the far corner, behind a pile of rotten wooden crates, the light found a heap of bones that made both of them stop.
The remains weren't all from the same time.
Some bones had gone yellow and chalky with age. Others still had wet strips of tissue clinging to them.
A few were heartbreakingly small.
Children.
There was no reading it any other way.
The pile wasn't huge. Maybe enough to make up a few adult skeletons and a few smaller ones.
But every long bone showed the same ugly pattern. Ragged bite marks gouged deep into the surface. Hollow shafts where the marrow had been ripped out by force.
Natasha's face went still, the way it always did when the anger got buried too deep to show properly. Her eyes tracked over the scraps of flesh on the floor, then back to the stripped bones.
The answer was obvious.
And disgusting.
This was where the zombie Defenders kept their livestock.
Their slaughter room. Their prep station for fresh meat.
This was the real Hell's Kitchen.
"Well," Natasha said quietly, forcing the words out while her stomach tried to revolt, "at least now we know we're in the right place."
Then a song drifted through the silence.
"I'm never gonna dance again..."
Careless Whisper.
No way to mistake it.
The voice doing the singing, though, was terrible. Truly terrible. Like someone had shoved a cracked gong down a throat and told it to perform. The real song had that smooth ache to it. This version sounded like it'd been dragged behind a truck.
And it was happening here.
In a butcher's basement full of human remains.
Someone was down here singing a mangled love song like this was a normal Tuesday.
Both of them went still at the same time.
Blade lowered his sword into a silent guard. Natasha killed the flashlight.
In the dark, they moved along the walls like hunting cats, slow and measured, tracking the sound one step at a time.
The deeper they went, the louder the warped melody got. It bounced through the blood-slick corridor in weird echoes that made it hard to place.
Eventually it led them to a half-open rusted iron door set into the wall on the left.
Blade flashed a quick hand signal.
Then he drove his boot into the door.
It slammed inward.
He went through with both hands on the hilt and thrust into the blind spot behind the frame fast enough to split a man in half.
Nothing.
Just an empty security booth.
On the desk, under a layer of dust and smeared bloody handprints, sat an old speaker with a cracked casing.
Blade's shoulders loosened maybe half an inch.
His jaw unclenched a little too.
Natasha stepped in with her knife reversed in her hand.
One clean slash.
The speaker's power cord split in a crackle of sparks, and the music died instantly.
Silence.
Three seconds. Maybe less.
Then the same ruined voice started singing again.
"Guilty feet have got no rhythm..."
This time there was no speaker hum under it. No electronic fuzz. No distortion.
Just a real throat.
Somebody deeper in the passage was singing it live.
They stayed still and listened, trying to pin down the source.
Under the voice came another sound from the end of the corridor.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
A heavy cleaver hitting something solid, over and over, steady as a metronome.
Between strikes came the wet crack of bone giving way.
Both of them snapped their attention to the far end of the hall.
A heavy metal door stood there, the frame wrapped in rough welded reinforcement, one layer over another, like someone had gone way out of their way to make sure whatever was inside stayed inside.
Blade and Natasha looked at each other for one brief second.
The same image hit both of them at once.
A blood-covered zombie butcher with red on his mouth, happily humming a ruined love song while chopping fresh meat to pieces on a block.
A lunatic.
Hannibal Lecter with a hunger virus.
They could both see the same anger in the other's eyes.
No words. Just one small nod.
Blade took half a step back. His calves tightened.
BOOM.
The kick was pure brute force.
The metal door, hinges and reinforcements and all, ripped free and slammed flat into the room beyond, skidding across a floor slick with blood.
"Don't move!"
Natasha shot through the doorway like a black lightning strike, Widow's Bite already aimed.
Blade came in right behind her, sword drawn back and ready to cut down whatever was waiting inside.
Then they saw the room.
And both of them stopped.
These were two people who'd survived a hundred battlefields between them. Two of the deadliest operators alive.
They froze anyway.
A cluster of surgical lamps flickered overhead, throwing sick white light across the room. The air was thick enough to taste, iron-heavy blood mixed with the sharp sting of formaldehyde until every breath felt like inhaling rust. Rusted meat hooks hung from the ceiling in ugly rows. Some still carried scraps of flesh too mangled to identify. Blood ran down in slow lines and gathered in drainage channels cut into the floor.
But there was no crazed zombie butcher in the middle of the room.
Only a stainless steel operating table crusted over with dried black blood.
And on top of it lay something deeply, horribly wrong.