Page 79 of Grotesque
I slid my bloodied hand through my hair as I entered Glamis once more, senses expanding in every direction in search of Sorcha. Stepping back into the foyer, my eyes traveled over the destroyed and gaping front door, its wood warped and splintered. I kept turning. There, in the middle of the hallway, another door stood open.
A fucking door that was supposed to be locked.
My blood simmered as I stalked forward. Where had she found the spare key? Oh, that little liar was in big fucking trouble.
I stopped at the top of the steps as the smell hit me.Hissmell.
“You stupid little boy,” I hissed. Of course it had been Quint to lead the posse. He’d fancied himself the hero, Sorcha’s white knight in her twisted fairy tale. How unfortunate that he was too slow. How foolish of him to be born human. I couldn’t wait to see his face when I showed him that in the real world, the monster eats the hero every time. That these so called ‘happily ever afters’ were nothing more than fiction.
Everything hurt. Pain radiated from my back, my ribs, my forehead. The drop down the stairwell had been so long I was pretty sure I’d hit every part of my body multiple times. I vaguely remembered Quint careening over me mid summersault.
I blinked, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I wiggled my fingers and toes and slowly, very slowly, tried to move the rest of my body. As far as I could tell, nothing was broken, just banged to Hell and back.
I gripped something cool and smooth to my right as I forced myself to sit up. Something rigid was digging into my back. It felt like I had landed in a pile of wood, rocks maybe? Whatever it was, was sharp and jagged.
The sickly smell was more intense down here. So putrid I had to cover my mouth with the back of my hand to keep from gagging.
Shapes slowly bled from the darkness. I could see mounds of something at the bottom of the steps, to the side– that might be a table. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and blinked again.
“Oh fuck,” I hissed as I shifted to my aching knees.
Somewhere to my left Quint answered with a groan.
I had to get up. The light at the top of the stairs was my only goal. Once I got up there, I could lock Quint in and deal with him later.
I braced myself as I eased onto my hands and knees. One of my hands slipped into something wet, and mushy. I jerked back on instinct as I fought off the urge to imagine what exactly would feel like that. Something round with two small, evenly spaced depressions met the underside of my other hand. A bowling ball?
Macky had been an odd lady. Perhaps whatever was down here was a part of weird hobby. Yes, that’s what it was. Something weird. But not too weird. Weird enough, though, that I didn’t want to think about it.
I stood just as a weak light popped on.
Quint was standing off to the side with his phone held out in front of him. He swiped his thumb across the screen until a brighter, smaller light illuminated on the back of his phone. He panned it in front of him. I took a step to the side, hoping to somehow slip past him before he saw me, when my shoe scraped one of the hard things against the ground. That light swiveled toward me, momentarily blinding me.
“Get that out of my face.” I held my hand up.
Quint inhaled sharply but he didn’t move the light. “We have to go,” he said.
“You have to go. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? I was just going to call the cops on you before, but you haveno ideawhat Corban is going to do to you.”
“Do you? Do you know what he’s capable of?”
I reached for the phone, trying to shove it out of my face. “I’ve been living with him for the last month. I know exactly what he’ll do when he finds you. He would have killed you if I hadn’t stopped him the other night.”
Quint grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled me to him. I snagged the front of his shirt as I stumbled into him. “You know about this?”
“If you don’t stop grabbing onto me!” I slammed my fist into his chest while simultaneously trying to free my arm. “I’m going tobreakyour nose this time.” I wound my fist back to do just that.
“Sorcha.”
Something in the way he said my name made me halt. So hushed and gentle, like he didn’t want to startle me. There was no aggression, no bite to his words.
I turned, following the dusty path of the light through the blackness. Stacks of greyish white objects littered the floor. At first it looked like rubble. Weird, elongated rubble. Some were more rounded, with uneven holes in the middle.
My stomach dropped.
Not sticks and stones. Skulls and bones. These were bodies.
I looked down where I imagined I had been sprawled out moments before. A man, or what used to be a man lay propped against God knows what else. Chunks of his rotten flesh were missing, like they had been bitten out. Distinct holes marred his torso, torn clean through the blood-encrusted overalls and flannel shirt. His arms were stripped clean of flesh and tendons. Hisheadwas missing.
