Page 53 of Monster Mansion

As Ruse exited my bedroom, he left the door open, and I quickly began to gather all my abandoned clothing off the ground and jam it into my suitcase with very little attention paid to organization.

I’ll just deal with it when I get home, I thought to myself as the pile of dirty clothes began to grow larger in my thrown-open suitcase.I just don’t want to leave any of my stuff behind. The fact that my DNA was all over this place suddenly hit me over the head like a baseball bat. Thanks, true crime podcasts.

Oh, well,my internal monologue said, dismissing the issue after a mere second of thought.Girls have gone missing here for how long, and nobody has come to truly investigate? It’s likely I’ll be in the clear, so long as they don’t decide to suddenly pay attention.The good news was I had three monsters behind me hungry for revenge, and I knew they would do a damned good job getting rid of the evidence.

“I’m glad you decided to pack,” Nox said as he appeared in my doorway. “Means you’re confident you’ll be successful.”

“I suppose,” I admitted, tossing him a smile. “But I don’t particularly feel like talking about it. It’s like Ruse said you guys talked about. There’s not a single bit of planning we can do to make up for the thousand ways this could go wrong.”

“Sure, we won’t be able to plan it play-by-play,” Nox responded as he slunk into the room and ushered me into his arms. “But think of all the thousand ways this could goright…no matter how you shake it, it’s three against one. All you have to do is aim and pull the trigger.”

“Before he does.” I scoffed against his chest.

“I still like those odds,” Nox said before pulling my face into his and kissing me firmly on the mouth. He had a way of making circumstances feel unimportant and challenges inconsequential. I knew he had my back. He, and the rest of the monsters that were trapped here. Three-to-one were good odds. Great odds.

As he pulled away from me, he paused and looked me up and down.

“This is going to sound weird,” he started. “But we really have to make you look…dead. Your usual fetching looks just won’t do.”

I raised an eyebrow with confusion and looked down at myself. “Excuse me?” I asked. “How exactly do you propose we do that?”

“It’s going to look suspicious if you’re laying in a mess of Ted’s blood, but appear to be entirely fine yourself. We’ll just, you know, rustle you up a bit,” he explained.

“Huh,” I said as I walked to the mirror in my bedroom and shook my hair out at the roots, trying to make it look disheveled. I turned back to Nox with my hair messed up and asked, “How’s that?”

He looked at me, and his pursed lips told me he was doing his best not to laugh. “It’s… it’s notgreat, but it’s a start.”

I dropped my shoulders and turned back to look at myself in the mirror. Nox was right. If we were going to do this, we had to do it right. We had to make a real effort. With a sigh, I faced Nox again. “Alright, alright. Make me look like one of your dead-girls.” I resisted the urge to drop a French girls reference fromTitanic, suspecting the shadow monster wasn’t exactly well versed in Dicaprio movies.

“Is it okay if I rip up your shirt a bit?” he asked, circling me a bit as he tapped his chin thoughtfully.

“For sure. I trust your vision,” I responded.

Nox took the collar of my t-shirt and pulled in both directions, stretching out the neck. He then took my nail clippers off the dresser behind him and cut little holes down the back, which he then stretched open further to look like slashes.

“That’s a much better start. Now it looks like we actually slashed you up, at least a little,” Nox sighed.

I turned around and looked in the mirror again, but still got the feeling something was missing. The sight of me had to give the initial impression that I wasdead. A thought struck me, and it may have been drastic, but I knew it would help to drive the point home.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said before I dumped out my purse on the bed and located my pocket knife.

“What the hell kind of idea…?” Nox began, but before he could even get his entire thought out, I slid the knife gently over my palm to create a line of beaded red across my hand.

“Logan!” He snapped.

“What?” I asked with a playful smile as I walked toward the mirror once again and smeared the blood down my cheeks and through my hair to make it look glistening and sticky. “Now I lookdead, right?”

“You look insane, but more convincing, I have to admit.” Nox said as he took my hand and wrapped it with a spare length of fabric he had torn from my shirt. “Just be careful to keep this hand hidden so that he doesn’t see your bandage. You know there was a perfectly good splatter of blood downstairs.”

“Right, like I’m going to smear old Ted blood all over me. It’s bad enough I have to lie in it. And yes, I’ll keep it hidden,” I replied.

An animalistic growl sounded from behind us. I pulled away from Nox and turned around to see Thorn standing high on his back legs, extending his beastly neck up into the air to sniff the breeze. His gaze met my face and his head tilted in confusion at the sight of the smeared blood, but quickly righted itself once he realized I wasn’t actually hurt.

“I can smell him,” Thorn muttered before he could verbally question my appearance. “He’s early. Get downstairs, you two.” He barked when we didn’t immediately move. “Now!”

The sound of tires on gravel couldn’t be heard quite yet, but all of us trusted Thorn’s impeccable sense of smell to give us a heads up. Nox and I bolted downstairs.

“My gun! It’s still on the dresser!” I said, panicked. I hadn’t brought it down with me in the rush. Faster than I had likely ever moved in my life, I bolted back up the stairs to grab it, shoving Nox, who was just trying to be helpful, out of my way in the scramble.

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