She thundered up the stairs, not caring if one broke on her way up. The scream she’d just heard—that wasn’t otherworldly whatsoever. She’d recognize Cammie’s voice anywhere, and she sounded like she was in pain, not scared. What could’ve happened while she was…?
She almost missed the last step when she faltered, but she hurtled onward. Regardless of whatever the hell that had been, she needed to get to Cammie first, then worry about the rest later. She didn’t have to look far. On the first floor, in what had to have been a drawing room or living room of some sort, she found her friends sitting in a half circle around Cammie. Her ankle was twisted and she was posed amid a pile of fresh debris. Looking up, Madeline put the situation together and realized her friend had fallen through the floor on the second story.
“What took you so long?” Drew bitched.
“What happened?” she answered, gesturing to Cammie as Carter tried comfort their friend.
“The obvious. She fell. Sprained ankle.” Drew held his phone for her to see. “Do you have bars? I don’t have bars.”
“Bars?” she asked.
“Signal, so we can call for help,” Drew explained, his tone suggesting she was a moron for asking.
“Oh,” she said before checking her phone. “No, no bars. I’m sure we can stabilize her until morning, right? Who did you set up to check on us this time?”
Their routine was to take turns having a friend be their safe call. If something went wrong, the person knew that they were supposed to check in at five am or sometime near that, and if they didn’t…
That person would call for help. They’d been using the safe call routine for years, and it hadn’t ever come in handy, but a sprained ankle and no service meant their planning was going to pay off.
“I didn’t,” Drew mumbled.
“What?” Carter leapt to his feet. “What the hell do you mean you didn’t set up a safe call?”
“We never need one. It isn’t that big of a deal. Why bother with it when it is never something we use?” Drew might be defending himself, but he looked a bit panicked. Somehow, that knowledge calmed Madeline.
A wind, unearthly and smelling oddly like candles, swept through the room and lifted the ends of her hair. The others crouched, like the breeze itself creeped them out, but she ignored it and addressed Drew. “For shit like this, that’s why we even invented the emergency setup.” Madeline held up a hand, to keep Carter from jumping on the bandwagon. “I’m going to walk through the house and see if I can find signal anywhere inside so we can call for help. If that doesn’t work, we’ll figure something else out—some way to get her to help if we can’t make help come to us. You guys stay with Cammie, keep her safe.”
The boys didn’t complain and she headed out…
She wasn’t sure, though, if she was looking for the mystery hallucination or signal, and part of her felt a bit guilty about that.
*
This time, when he appeared, Madeline wasn’t even surprised. It was like she felt drawn to him, desiring him even if it made no sense. She met his mouth with a kiss of her own, up on tiptoes with her pulse thudding in her ears. His skin tasted like sin, warm and delightfully tempting, and she wanted to do nothing more than gulp him down, but she wasn’t willing to be distracted. She broke out of the embrace and fisted her hands to keep them off him.
“I need answers,” she said, proud her voice didn’t betray her need to be near him. “You’re not a ghost.”
She’d spent most of her life hunting for them, but he wasn’t that. He was something else, something Other, and she needed to understand exactly what if she wanted to help her friends.
A little part of her, the part she considered her evil half or the demon on her shoulder, said she didn’t care about the others. She only cared about him, this man, who they recognized on some weird cellular level. But she needed to focus on what was important, so she tried to stuff her down and demand the truth.
“Have you ever read the Bible?” he asked.
His hair was white, his eyes red, and his face enough to tempt a saint into sinning, and yet he wanted to talk about the Bible? “You don’t look like the type,” she finally said.
“What type?” He looked confused again, but their hands tangled, fingers entwining as if he felt the pull, too, and couldn’t resist touching her.
“The religious type.” She pulled his hand closer, looking at their fingers together, because the sight triggered something. Like a distant memory.
The two of them, in a room full of twisted and tangled nightmarish creatures. Him driving into her, over and over again, not caring about their many eyed and twisted audience. The slap of skin against skin and the pulsating throb of passion.
A smell like sulfur.
His eyes, in the twisted fantasy, nearly flaming red against an almost colorless backdrop of horrors.