Page 14 of All Hallows Game

A chill went down my spine—apprehension or clairvoyance. I walked faster, my heart quickening when a loud crash came through the phone. Fuck, that hurt my eardrums. My nerves wound tighter. She’d dropped the phone.

Nightmare was there, I just knew it.

“Help!” someone screamed—distant but audible through the phone. It had to be Caroline, but her high, breathy voice sounded nothing like the woman I’d been talking to just seconds ago. Was she running? Her voice was quieter with every second. “There’s a monster! Help!”

Ice filled my blood now. I broke into a run. What did she mean monster? Had something crawled out of the lake, like Nessie lurking in the loch? I pictured scales slick with blood, huge needle teeth as long as my forearm, eyes gleaming Dracula-red.

Wind threw a veil of snow in my face, blurring the campus to a smear of white. I held my arm in front of my eyes, gritting my teeth against the sharp slice of cold that made my coat feel as flimsy as cobwebs. I should have reached the park by now. I knew the campus was bigger than it seemed, but I’d been running for minutes. The cold expanded through my whole body until I shook, my fingers locked around the phone at my ear.

“Caroline?” I demanded, desperately trying to catch my breath when her distant screams cut off. They didn’t steadily quiet, didn’t fade out of reach—they ended abruptly, the silence raising hairs on the back of my neck.

I ran faster, breath sawing in and out of my lungs, and hissed when light bounced off the sheet of snow in front of me, blinding me. I had no choice but to slow, to squint at the path, refusing to fall like every heroine in a horror film.

“I’m not your victim,” I whispered to Nightmare, and jumped when a cackle answered me.

I spun, a gasp in the back of my throat, goosebumps sweeping down my arms. But it wasn’t Nightmare in all her horrific beauty; it was a crow perched on the conical slate roof of the library building. I exhaled a hard breath but couldn’t banish the icy rime of fear. Nightmare was here; I could sense her. She was watching.

I turned from the crow and resumed running, shielding my eyes from the—

The blinding sun was smothered by dark rain clouds between one blink and the next. The snow was gone. I pulled my coat closer to myself and finally took the phone from my ear, the silence on the other end too reminiscent of my silent caller for comfort. Byron. All along, it was him terrorising her.

“Please be okay, please be okay,” I breathed as I ran faster, the shapes of familiar buildings around me made menacing by the darkness cast by the clouds. I knew that was the laboratory building, but was it usually so quiet, so dark? Where were the students? There was a wrongness in the air, like the charged electricity before a storm. I couldn’t get Caroline’s scream out of my head.

There’s a monster! Help!

I didn’t like the way the sky was darkening, the first cold spots of rain landing on my face, my neck. I didn’t like the silence that hung over the entire campus, like the world had stopped, like Caroline’s scream hadn’t been heard by a single soul. There should have been people running toward the scream, or at least away from its source. Where was the monster?

I finally hit the end of the path, rain now lashing the leaves of the trees that ringed the manicured lawn, making water dance in the two fountains. It crept under the collar of my jacket, dripped down my back until a vicious shiver wracked me.

There was no monster in the park, nothing except another raven sitting on a gnarled tree branch. It opened its beak, and I half expected Nightmare’s voice to pour out of it, but it was a loud caw instead. I exhaled a breath of relief that stuttered into a horrified gasp when a dark smear on the ground caught my eye.

“Caroline?” I breathed, exploding into a run. She’d fallen across one of the winding pathways, her arms splayed at her sides. My heart fluttered with panic, fear wrapping around me like a blanket of ice. The rain drummed my shoulders as I dropped to my knees beside the counsellor, already dialling emergency services. Not 999, because Ford’s End was an island apart from the UK, bound to its own laws. Instead, I went through to the small police department in the village, where the officers would rally the single ambulance run by volunteers.

“Help,” I blurted when the call connected. “Someone’s been attacked, she’s—” I reached for her wrist to check her pulse and shrieked, scrambling backwards when I finally registered the mess of blood, pulp, and bone that had once been a woman. I should have smelled the copper in the air, should have realised the dark stain across the grass wasn’t rain. The snow had been washed away around her, no footprints or hint to her attacker, but I couldn’t forget her scream. Monster.

“She’s in the campus at Ford,” I finished after a stuttering pause. “She’s hurt really badly.”

A serious male voice answered me, the man sounding fifties or older. “Sending officers and an ambulance now. Is there someone nearby who can help you?”

I put the officer on speakerphone and pressed my hands to the gash in Caroline’s throat. I ignored my rising dread that I was too late, and she was already gone. She’d been kind, genuine, and determined to help me. And something—man or animal or goddess—had shredded her with cuts so deep and jagged they looked like claws.

Oh god, what if they really were claw marks? She said the word monster. What if the curse had fallen, but someone was left with their monstrous Halloween form? I knew there’d been werewolves and demons, though none of the killings last month had been this gruesome.

I threw a panicked look around me, searching the park for another living soul. No students. No faculty members. Just me and the damn crow. No—there were three of them now, clustered in the trees, watching. I quickly looked away.

She’s going to be fine, I assured myself. The ambulance will get here and she’ll be fine.

“There’s no one,” I said, my throat closing up.

“Not again,” I heard the officer whisper, the words low enough that I wasn’t supposed to hear.

“What?” I breathed, my fear growing big enough to swallow me. I kept scanning the trees, looking for help, looking for monsters. The snow was already gone, that bit of frozen beauty driven out by relentless rain, so heavy that it slammed into the short grass and bounced back up.

“They’re on their way,” the officer said, as if I hadn’t heard him speak. Not again. I wanted to believe he meant, not another death after the people Nightmare forced her terrors to kill last month, after Byron, but my paranoia was alive and well.

“Has someone else been attacked lately?” I demanded, my voice shrill. I pressed harder on Caroline’s throat to keep the blood inside and couldn’t quite ignore the fact her blood was slowing—and her entire body was shredded by claw marks and there was a place on her arm that looked like… like something had taken a bite and ripped out a chunk of her skin.

“Of course not,” the officer said confidently. Too confidently. I knew a cover up when I heard one. “Ford’s just had too much loss lately is all.”

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