KDBookOnline
Share Us
Please let his power explain what I’m looking at.
“I’m not doing anything.”
He squints in the same direction, and when he does, the shadowy figure vanishes. I squeeze my eyes shut, then open them and look again. Just an empty staircase.
“I—” I finally look at Reven, who is staring at me with worry wrinkling the space between his brows. “I swear I saw something.”
Please say you saw it, too.
Otherwise, I’m seeing and hearing things that aren’t there.
“There wasn’t anything there, Meren,” Cain says from where he’s stopped on the stairs to my right. “Must’ve been a trick of…” He trails off.
Shadow. He was going to say a trick of shadow. By the way Reven tenses, I know he caught it, too. We all did.
“It wasn’t me,” Reven insists.
Cain holds up a hand. “I believe you.”
“Maybe we should move a little faster,” Horus says.
I guess I’ve freaked out the others enough, because they don’t dawdle. The hurried sound of our feet on the stone of the staircase is a rat-tat-tat.
Then something brushes against my hand.
I only have time to gasp before Tziah hisses, and then Pella stops and whips around, her hand going behind her head to the handle of her curved knife.
She stares at nothing, breathing hard, then… “It’s not Meren’s imagination. We’re not alone.”
31
The Shadowood
A breeze—one that shouldn’t exist in here because there are no windows—stirs the hair at my neck, and the way the rest of my friends shiver, I know they felt it, too, this time.
A floating, hollow chuckle of a laugh whispers both close to me and far away at the same time.
Pella’s right. We’re not alone. And we’re being toyed with.
“Move,” Vos says.
Forget hurrying—we run the rest of the way to the ground floor, then through the wide, ornately carved doors outside into the cold, and I swear another floating, hollow laugh chases us out.
As soon as Horus and Pella push the doors closed, we all let a collective breath go. I roll my shoulders to rid myself of the feeling of being watched or followed.
Beside me, Reven is staring at the doors, visibly lost in thought.
“The tower didn’t feel like that when we were here before,” I say, but in a low voice for him alone. “Right?”
His lips flatten. “No. Not when Vos and I checked it out, either.”
What happened, then? Has this place always been…I don’t want to think the word haunted, except I recently encountered a spirit of the dead, so who am I to say hauntings aren’t real? But why now? Did our presence wake something up?
Cain puts his hands on his hips and stares at the building behind us. “I’ll cross that off my list of possible summer homes.”
The rest of us burst into tension-breaking huffs and chuckles. Wind scatters snow across the stone terrace where we stand on a short set of stairs leading down to the icy ground, and another shiver racks through me.
I draw my fur-lined jacket closer as I’m whipped by freezing cold winds across fields of ice. The weather is teeth-gritting but manageable for the amount of time we have to be out in it.