Page 68 of An Inheritance of Monsters

The stink of the Dagonite—rotting fish and seaweed—billowed over me and made me gag as it gained ground.

The hallway I’d taken was a frenetic path, back and forth, climbing up stairs and then down lower, ripping around sharp corners.

But it slowed down the Dagonite, though I was panting for breath, a stitch in my side growing sharper by the moment. In the distance, I heard a shout, and the temple quivered all around us with the aftershocks of whatever Voraal had done.

And there it was, the door to freedom. A black rectangle up ahead, couched between two fallen columns.

I pushed myself into a final burst, breath tearing in and out of my lungs, and just before I went careening into the doorway, the Dagonite screeched, a shrill sound that raked against my eardrums and sent a bolt of pain through my skull.

The darkness enveloped me, sucking me through. I clutched at my head, the remnants of that screech making my eyes water…

And I tumbled through the Void into a bedroom.

A bedroom that wasn’t mine.

Rosalie sat on her bed, clutching several papers, and staring at me with huge eyes that were magnified by her reading glasses.

Fuck.

“Juno…?” she started to ask, then those over-magnified eyes went to the closet I’d just emerged from and her mouth dropped open.

I whipped around, already expecting a clawed Dagonite hand to be reaching out to grab me by the hair and haul me back in, but there was nothing.

Just the swirling darkness of a doorway to the Void.

As we watched, it condensed and winked out.

I heaved a sigh of relief, my knees and arms starting to shake from the near-miss, but Rosalie was… well, not having a great time, to put it nicely.

I couldn’t even keep up with the amount of half-formed words and questions tumbling out of her mouth, but I definitely registered the note of increasing hysteria.

“WHAT WAS THAT?” she finally whisper-screamed, voice ragged, her fingers pressed over her mouth. She’d backed up so far her back was pressed against the wall.

I tried to straighten up, clutching the roaring stitch in my side.

“Yeah, so… you know when people say this manor is haunted?” I jerked a thumb back at the closet, trying to look like I hadn’t just run for my life from a deformed fish-man. “That’s what they mean.”

Rosalie’s hands were shaking worse than mine. “That… what?What? That wasn’t even… when they said haunted, I thought it meant cabinet doors slamming! Not that! Whatever that was, that wasnota haunting!”

I took a deep breath, finally working out some of the aches.

And I found I had zero fucks left to give.

Screw it, she’d seen the doorway herself.

“It was just a doorway to another world. If you see a patch of shadows that’s darker than everything else, you can reach it through there.”

Rosalie pressed her pale, trembling lips together. “Get out.”

“I’m serious.”

“No, I meanget outof my room,” she snapped. “I’m a researcher, not a ghost hunter. I came here for historical records for my thesis paper, not to see… whatever the hellthatwas!”

I was all too happy to oblige, considering I hadn’t meant to come bursting into her room in the first place. “Sorry for the intrusion. I was just running for my life.”

Rosalie was off her bed, carefully skirting the closet, before I even reached her door.

“I’m done. All the records here contradict themselves anyways—completely useless.” She threw her papers into a backpack and began piling clothes into a suitcase. “I don’t know if I believe you, but I know that whatever I just saw wasn’t right. And everyone else has been seeing weird shit. I’m over it. Time to go.”

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