Page 30 of Haunted Heart
“You are an asshole,” Jonas says, voice echoing and chain rattling.
“Yeah, I’m an asshole, and Gen’s a bitch.” He glares down at me, and a smile slowly creeps over his lips. “You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
Julia’s face elongates as her chest moves in deep breaths. Dylan doesn’t seem to even know she’s there anymore.
“What the fuck, dude.” Jonas struggles, trying to climb the chain.
“Go inside,” Julia instructs. Her voice is thin, almost as transparent as her body.
Dylan doesn’t hear her, or he doesn’t pay any attention to her, at the very least.
“I don’t know what you want,” I say as I lift myself up onto the steps, crawling up them backward.
“Yes you do.”
I get to the next step, and he sighs.
“Fine,” Dylan says, eerily calm. “I’ll take what I want.”
“Excuse me?”
He doesn’t answer, just looks at me like I’m a child too stupid to understand him.
“Go ahead and scream.” He takes a step forward. “It’ll be hotter if you struggle.”
“What the fuck? Is this who you were the whole time? Just acting like my friend because you wanted to fuck me?”
“Why else would I put up with your woo woo bullshit?”
I don’t want to abandon Jonas, but I don’t actually know what Dylan can do to me here. He’s already tried to rip Jonas’s head off… and I came here with abody.
I scramble to my feet and run inside. The chains worked on Jonas… maybe I can tie Dylan up with a sheet, or a curtain chord or…
I race up the stairs, Dylan following me. He doesn’t run. I wonder if he thinks I don’t have anywhere to go.
Tie him up, or shove him through to the living world and deal with him out there where I can use my magic.Those are my only options right now.
“Taking yourself to a bed for me?” he asks, laughing as he stalks me. “What a good girl.”
My skin crawls. Before I reach it, the bedroom door slams shut. There’s nowhere else to go, and I back up against it, cursing under my breath.
There’s only a cupboard to my right and the banister to my left with an eight-foot fall on the other side.
“What are you doing, Julia?” I whisper.
She doesn’t answer.
The lights still flickering, the doors slam shut one by one, and she rises through the floor in front of me.
She doesn’t look like the woman she was.
This is the monster who killed her murder. This is the creature that sent every ill-intending visitor back where they came from.
She’s horrific and beautiful and Dylan finally takes a step back. Hefinallybalks.
His eyes go wide. The color leaches from his skin.
