Page 113 of A Step You Shouldn't Take

“I know.”

His arm tightened, and he bent to kiss my hair. “Fuck. I thought you were gone too. After a week… We couldn’t find you. What happened to your legs?”

“Poison oak.”

He called out to the guy on the phone. “Will, make sure there’s an ambulance coming too.”

I reached up to Rania’s face, and my fingers passed through her weird aura and touched smooth skin.

“You’ve got this glow. A white light.”

“So have you, but pink.”

“I do?”

To me, my skin looked perfectly normal. Well, pale and a little pimply because I hadn’t showered for a week, but it wasn’t glowing pink. But the ghosts had told me I glimmered and that was how they recognised me. Was I now seeing what they saw?

Rania read my mind. “This must be how they see us. The spirits.”

“No wonder they always shout at me when I walk down the street.” I screwed my eyes shut. “You killed him.”

“Yes.”

“Wyatt, why did you give her the gun?” Reed asked. “Is that your service piece?”

I opened my eyes and saw Wyatt in my peripheral vision, wiping the butt of his pistol with his sleeve.

“Yeah. We’ll tell them I did it, but it had to be Rania. It was the only way to set Emma free.” His voice hitched as Rania nodded her agreement. “If what the girls say about trapped souls is true, I didn’t want her to be stuck here on earth forever.”

Freaking heck, they didn’t know!

“Emma’s alive,” I croaked, emotion getting the better of me. “They’re all alive except Georgette.”

Reed stiffened. “Emma’s alive?”

“She helped me to escape. I-I-I think she might be injured. I heard them fighting as I crawled away, and I wanted to turn back and help, but she yelled at me to keep going.”

“Where is she? Kim, where is she?”

“Underground. There’s an old moonshine distillery, and I found a hidden tunnel in the bathroom, but then I kept walking because I wanted to find a road, and it was just trees, trees, trees, and I don’t know how to get back there.” I looked down at my legs, now blistering nicely. “The exit was in the middle of a patch of poison oak. That’s all I can remember.”

“Fuck. We’ll get a search party out here.”

I shook my head, trying to clear the fuzz. Everything was jumbled up inside. “No, wait. There’s another entrance. The one Peter used.” What had Josie told me? “An old barn, and there’s a trapdoor in one of the animal stalls.”

“Guys, spread out!” Wyatt said. “We’re looking for the remains of an old barn.”

“Wait! Get Peter’s keys first.”

Reed hesitated. “Fuck. Kim, you should get to the hospital.”

“Are you kidding? I’m not going anywhere until we find the others.”

I didn’t even know which direction I’d come from. Reed picked me up, cradling me in his arms so I wouldn’t be left behind as they searched. The rest of the girls would be okay for a few days—they had food and water—but what about Emma? How badly had she been hurt?

To our left, Rania stopped suddenly, looking up. I followed her gaze and almost vomited. A man hovered six feet above us, spinning gently with his neck at an unnatural angle as he hung from a tree limb that no longer existed.

“Hey,” she called. “We’re looking for a barn. Do you know where it is?”

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