Page 37 of A Heart So Haunted
Haddy yanked away in a flurry of splayed arms. He scrambled backward, toward the same room he’d come from, and vanished, as if he’d never existed. Thensomethingcame forward from the shadows the boy entered.
I froze.
A creature slunk into the doorway. Taloned, reedy fingers hooked into the floorboards. Filth shuffled around its claws.
I fell back with a gasp, so quickly that my hand slipped beneath me. My teeth snapped down, sending a hot wash of metal through my mouth.
“Get away from me,” I blurted, eyes wide.
The thing crawled forward on all fours, a red, forked tongue flitting against the air. An unhinged, gaping set of fangs dripped spittleonto the wood floors. A couple teeth were missing in its lower jaw, the holes visible, as if the roots had been pulled, too.
Its head tilted. A growl rumbled from its throat.
“Get back,” I choked. Saliva fell from the corner of my mouth.
Citrine yellow eyes tracked me. It tilted its head to the other side, muscle coiling. Its skull wasn’t sunken, but it wasn’t healthily fattened, either. Protruding cheekbones, browbones, and a chin poked violently against its grayed, slick flesh. Two curved horns, longer than my forearms, jutted from its head.
“You,” the creature said. Its voice gravelly, otherworldly.
I clutched every pearl of self-control to keep from bolting. Predators tracked prey like this thing was tracking me. If I ran, it would likely give chase.
As if to taunt me, the same dainty laughter from before bounced distantly in the house followed by Haddy’s soft cries. This thing—was it keeping this child here?
A snarl, like a crocodile’s growl before it hissed, rippled from its maw. “Are you deaf?” it sneered.
“N-no.”
Those slitted yellow eyes didn’t blink. It slunk forward. If upright, it might have very well resembled something human-like, but the angle it crawled—
“Why are you here,” it snapped.
“The door,” I blurted. I pointed, as if that would help me. “The door won’t open.”
Those slits flitted to the parlor behind me. Its nose wrinkled. “Liar.”
“I’m not,” I urged. I tried to scoot back, but the fabric of my shorts picked along the floor. My elbows shook as I tried to keep myself from falling flat on my back. “I had to come, I heard him crying.”
A slick, saccharine smile pulled at the creature’s lips.
“You find it alluring, to save a child?” it purred. “How did you find this place, dearest?”
I swallowed. My tongue felt fat, and so, so dry. “I-It was covered. We found it renovating and—”
It feigned a lunge at my feet. “You opened it.”
I scrambled upright—and the thingchuckled. I stepped back, chest heaving, body near a constant tremble, without letting my eyes leave the creature.
“I did,” I admitted. There was no point in lying. I couldn’t have gotten here if I hadn’t.
Blood leeched from my face as it stopped in the middle of the foyer beside the broken chandelier. The creature’s shoulders rolled as it pushed to stand. A waft of heat, of dried ash and earth—not quite metallic, but almost—followed, as if it had emerged from a cavern in search of sunlight after years of hiding.
“Something brought you,” the creature grunted. “Did you feel it? Hear it? Tell me, what have you seen?What did you do?”
It wasn’t the words that alarmed me, but the way its body moved. The angle of its head. Every inhale, its eyes dropped to my chest, then flickered to my feet, my hands. It was calculating my next move.
Without a second thought, I bolted through the parlor, the child forgotten.
I couldn’t believe I’d done this—I needed to leave, right now. Fight or flight took hold of my body with the terrifying realization that a creature standing nearly seven feet tall would rip me to shreds. What if it wanted to keep me, too, like the boy? What if this was a mistake? What if Aunt Cadence had been right, and now I’d ruined it, and that door was covered for a reason—
