Page 17 of Consume
Panic sliced down my back. Muscle memory, from all those years I thought I’d left behind, had me moving, but not before the lights winked on for one more second. One more second while I turned my head to see how close he was.
Filed teeth snapped at my head from an unnaturally large human mouth, spread wider with that bloody gash. I screamed with the voices of all the ghosts inside of me. A sound that terrified me even more.
I sprinted down the hallway, but the ghostly presence pressed in close enough to rip a chill up and down my back.
“So...hungry,” he growled.
I dodged left toward a closed door and threw myself into it. It held still, like rooms should, and I bolted the door shut behind me and backed away.
The tall man slammed into the door from the other side and made it shudder. My stomach jumped, and I jerked backward into a wooden table in the center of the room, making it squeal against the marble floor.
No. I had to do better. Reacting in terror was what the old Absidy would do, not me.Iwas the spirit eater. He wouldn’t ever draw me into his mouth and eat me. That wasn’t the way this worked. I could do this. I could make him go away.
I could make him go away if only I had some ir—
An imperfection in the floral-patterned wallpaper by the door caught my eye. A compulsion shook through my legs to acknowledge that imperfection, to try to smooth it away.
Oh no. I didn’t have time for this. A slimy film coated my scaled palms. My heart raced an anxious rhythm as I tried to fight the compulsion.
The door rattled on its hinges with unnatural force.
I didn’t have time for Doctor Daryl’s OCD tendencies. Ihadto find some iron.
My legs wouldn’t obey though. They jerked me toward the imperfection, and my arm lifted toward the slightly uneven seam in the wallpaper as if I were just a puppet.
An unholy bellow echoed from behind the door as I neared. The sound filled my eyes with tears and streaked them down my cheeks, but I was no longer in control. I couldn’t stop this.
“Hungry,” the man screamed.
The door stopped shaking. The bolt locking it began to slide free.
With great effort, I turned my head to scan the room. A long table with a pristine white tablecloth sat in the middle of a heavily trod wooden floor. Above swung a lit chandelier dripping with what looked like diamonds and rainbows. I could take both the table and chandelier apart.
Beyond the table on the far wall, something else beckoned. Something Daryl didn’t like. The glass panel on a fancy dining room hutch stood slightly open. His compulsion yanked me toward it as the lock on the door behind me clicked.
Shit. My breaths grew too loud. My stomach squirmed with nerves.
“Daryl, you can’t cross over if I’m dead,” I tried to plead, though I had no idea if that were true. Nesbit’s laugh was the only thing that flowed off my tongue though.
They wanted this. Even dead, they were still trying to kill me.
My hands touched the glass pane on the hutch, completely independent of my mind, and slid it into place.
Behind me, the doorknob began to rattle. The tall man was coming, and there was nothing I could do.
Except I wasn’t dead yet. I still had time.
I didn’t fight Daryl as he led me to the third wall where a large framed picture of the Byrian family hung crooked. They glared out from their perches on straight-backed chairs, a smug twist to their lips. They probably wanted me dead more than the Saelises given that I knew all their dirty secrets. They might just get their wish.
As soon as the frame hung straight, the door burst open. The force blasted me to the marble floor and cracked my head against it. An arctic wave swallowed up the room.
The tall man was here, and Daryl still had one more wall to check for imperfections before he set me free.Ifhe set me free.
His compulsion was the only thing keeping me from blacking out. Daryl pulled me to my knees, and my vision warped and swam with the pain in my head.
In the doorway stood the tall man. A thin silhouette, right next to the wall where Daryl needed to go next. Toward a bell connected by a silver chain that hung from the ceiling.
Daryl—and I—would never make it.
