Page 61 of Haunted Prey

“I was scared. I knew I couldn’t say no,” she continued. “So I tried to stay away. I tried…but I couldn’t.” Her hand drifted up to my face, fingers trailing along my jaw. “I didn’t want this to be a dream. I didn’t want this to stop. Didn’t want to stop seeing you like this…so I did as you asked, even when I was sure you were betraying me. I can’t say no.” She smiled sadly, and the blood started to bead again, wetting my hand. “Even if you’re just a ghost.”

A ghost.

Oh no, Eve.

I gripped her face firmly, tilting her head back, making sure she looked at me. “Listen to me, Eve. I wouldneverask you to hurt yourself for me, do you understand? Never.” My hands shook as I held her. “Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not me.”

She paled. She studied my face now as if seeing it for the first time. “You won’t go?”

I pulled her to me, pressing my mouth to her forehead where I noticed she had a Band-Aid—another cut. Oh, my sweet girl. My baby.

“I swear it, Evee,” I whispered against her hair. “I fucking swear it with my life.”

I sat by the door as Eve slept, her friend lying beside her. Morning was approaching, and Dom was already up, having only slept a few hours because of me. He’d taken the girls’phones before they could contact anyone and shut them off to ensure they couldn’t be tracked.

Lez had been working on his car in the garage and was now “napping” in his room, though I could hear the TV playing faintly. No one slept normally around here.

Andrea returned at first light. She jumped when I approached her in the kitchen.

“I take it they’re still alive,” she said passively. “So I got a few things. Extra clothes, groceries, hygiene and bathroom products, stuff they may need, more bottles of water. They’ll be the most well cared for hostages you’ve ever kept.” She didn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it. I started going through the bags and putting some of the food and water bottles away. I noticed her watching me, but she didn’t tell me to stop.

“I’m going to ask you a question about the drugs we took under the warehouse, and I need you to tell me honestly,” I said as I put cans on a shelf.

She stilled by the counter where she set down a bag of oranges. “Okay,” she said.

I put away some of the bottles in the fridge before I turned to her. “The side effects,” I said. “I know some have to be more common than others.”

She gripped the counter, and I could see it was hard for her to look at me. She cleared her throat. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Were hallucinations common?”

“No,” she said.

“But they weren’t rare either, were they?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “Not rare, no, just not common.”

“That’s why Leslie and I had them but not so much the others.”

She opened her eyes and locked with mine. “You, Leslie, and sometimes Cassidy. There were maybe a handful of others but that was all, out of the…”

“The twenty or so kids,” I finished for her.

She nodded. “It usually depends on…several factors. How much you were drugged and tested, and for how long.”

“And if someone were easily traumatized?”

She gave me a serious look. “Why are you asking this?”

I grit my teeth, trying to keep a measure of control. “Eve was in Severfalls for weeks. Now she’s seeing…things that aren’t there.”

Andrea looked ashen as I said it. “What does she see?”

I looked her dead in the eye and said, “Me. Or rather a version of me like how I see—”

“Your sister.” She covered her mouth.

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