Page 17 of Haunted Heart
Juliafitshere.
I shove that thought away. She doesn’t belong in Hell. She belongs with me.
“Is this what it looked like… before?” I ask as Julia wanders to the opposite wall.
“Yes.” She touches a crystal dangling from a table lamp. “We can linger here. It’s safe inside these walls, but outside… If a demon finds us, they’ll shove you back through.”
The way she says it makes me think aloud, “Just me?”
“You don’t belong here.”
It isn’t hard to guess that every moment she spends here puts her at risk.
I take her hand. “We’ll hurry.”
I walk down the stairs, skipping the last one out of habit… even though I didn’t need to.
Julia follows me without a word.
I go to the drawing room first. The floor is clear of the sand circle. There are no remnants of the gathering I had tonight… And there are no bodies.
“I had hoped…”
“They left,” Julia says, and when I look back at her, her eyes are on the floor. “I can see their footprints.”
“I can’t.”
She looks at me with an apologetic smile. “There will be many things here that I can see which you cannot.”
You don’t belong hereechoes in my head, in Julia’s voice.
“Where did they go?”
“To find the entrance to their specific Hells…” She looks from me to the front door and then back again. “This house is a haven for us… but not for them. They would have been compelled to leave.”
I have to go find them.
Julia doesn’t touch the doorknob, so I hesitate. “The frame was too hot, will this be too?”
“No.” She smiles at me and I see… fear in the slant of her lips. “It’s been a very long time since I left this house… I just needed to take a moment.”
I understand, but, “I don’t think we have time.”
“I know.” She takes a deep breath and nods. “Let’s find them so we can get back.”
The knob is warm, but doesn’t burn me as I grip it. I open the front door to a wave of heat as the taste of ash fills my mouth. Brimstone assaults my nose.
There is nothing but silence beyond that door, and when I blink past the brightness…
“Welcome to Hell,” Julia says quietly, staring out at it. Her voice is more solid than it was before. “Be careful, your magic won’t work here.”
“Well,thatsucks.”
The house sits in the middle of a cloud of motionless red dust. It extends up into the sky, ceaseless.
A strange and stagnant calm hangs over this place that is a near mirror of the world Above. Red sky, red dirt, and spindly trees with black bark, gray leaves, and shriveled apples.
The fruit is rotten.
