Page 155 of Black Castle

Her breath turns shallow as sweat coats her skin, her legs trembling.

“Ten.”

She rips off the blindfold.

The darkness is vast, swallowing everything in its grasp as the graveyard stretches around her, quiet and still, a sea of headstones jutting out of the damp earth like jagged teeth.

Zev is nowhere to be found.

She is alone.

A howl rips from her throat, loud, raw, and shattering. Her breath shuddering out of her lungs, a heavy weight like a noose around her neck as she spins, frantic, her pulse hammering against her ribs.

Then she hears it, a crunch of gravel beneath a movement. She gasps, spinning toward the direction the sound comes from. And then she sees it, a shadow flickering behind a gravestone, so fleeting she can mistake it for the trick of the lightning flashing across the sky. But it’s there, she can feel it.

There’s a single beat of silence, adrenaline brewing in her blood as her eyes remain pin on the gravestone, waiting for the shadow.

Another beat.

Another.

Then he steps out. And her heart drops.

It’s a ghost—well, a man with a grotesque ghostly face, hollow-eyed, bone-white in the dim glow of the moonlight.

He tilts his head to the side, studying her.

The first drop of rain lands on her left cheek.

Then he lunges at her.

She runs.

Then another drop of rain.

She hears him behind her, the loud staccato of heavy boots against gravel and damp soil.

Then a thousand drops of rain at a time.

Her doc martens skids over scattered graves, damp soil, broken branches, adrenaline charging in her veins, her heart pounding in her chest as she runs.

The sky rips open in anger, unleashing a downpour so violent, so raging it drowns the world in sounds. The rain hammers against stone, against earth and her trembling skin. The scent of wet soil and rot thickens, suffocating.

And the harder she runs, the closer he seems to get. She takes a step, and he takes a thousand leaps right after her.

The harder the rain pours, the slicker the earth beneath her feet, and the more unsteady her ground as she continues to lose her balance and stumble, grabbing onto cracked headstones to hold herself up before she continues again.

Water pools in the erosion between graves, scooping into her shoes, soaking her white socks that have now taken a dirty shade of brown. Her uniform clings to her body, nearly becoming one with her olive skin. Water gathers in her lids, some escaping into her mouth as she pants.

She can barely see, barely breathe as wind howls through the graveyard, wailing through jagged iron gates, plastering her fiery hair on her face.

But she can’t stop. Not even for a minute. He is behind her. He is so close she can feel his breath on the nape of her neck. She can feel the bony, cold fingers brushing against her wrist.

But she continues to run even when her lungs begin to constrict and her chest burns. She runs even when the rain stings her eyes and the sharp water chokes her. She runs even when the world becomes a blur of shadows and headstones.

Then all of a sudden, she can no longer run as her limbs have started to go limp. She veers around a tomb that looks newer than most, nameless, except the date of the person’s death. She squats, her body pressing against the cold concrete, her breath ragged, heart pounding, her calves aching.

It seems she has lost him. No, she prays she has lost him, blended with the shadow, become one with the dead.

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