Page 80 of When Bones Whisper
Chapter Twenty-Two
The hex wound its way through Charlotte’s mind, eclipsing the fringes of her every thought as she walked toward Katherine’s room.
The shadowy corridors closed in around her, the air thickening with each hurried step. Her breath fogged in front of her, her fingers turning to ice.
A waft of sulfur lingered when she turned left, expecting to find the corridor to Katherine’s room, but instead found a steep stairway descending into darkness.
Wide-eyed, Charlotte stumbled back, shaking her head when she saw something moving in the black depths.
Join us. Death iseasier. You will see.
She stepped back, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment before slowly peeling back her eyelids to discover the corridor was back to normal, gas lamps flickering light over portraits that watched her with sentience behind their eyes.
The demon was playing tricks on her, and she wondered if that’s who she had been hearing in her mind that whole time. The one she’d mistaken for an inner monologue.
A chill passed deep into the marrow of her bones.
Swallowing hard to remove the lump that formed in her throat, she picked up her pace and ran to Katherine’s door, pushing it open before tumbling into the heavily jasmine-fragranced bedroom.
With her hands on her knees, she bent over, catching her breath before glancing up at the window.
“Christ!”
Her palm slapped to her mouth when she saw the demon watching her in the reflections, its grin wide, but eyes darkening.
She quickly closed the drapes. Was that also what her father had ensured in his last days? Being stalked by the Smiling Woman in every reflective surface, taunting him in his mind until he went mad.
With shaky lips, she forced back the sob quaking her chest. Her father had never said that’s what was happening, but no one could understand much of what was happening in the end.
He suffered greatly.
The demon’s voice screeched in her mind, the words wrapped in a building headache.
“Get out of my head!”
You can always be with him.The demon responded.You fight to survive, yet there is nothing left for you here. Everyone you love is dead.
“Go away!” she hissed, trying to keep her voice low so not to alert anyone to her whereabouts.
She had to get rid of that hex once and for all.
If only she could focus.
Unclenching her jaw, she steadied her breathing until her heart rate slowed, ignoring the brush of cold whisking over her neck.
With a glance around, Charlotte noted how neat everything was. The bed was made, linens crisp, fresh flowers were in a glass vase on her dresser, and her herbs and tonics were lined up. Nothing was out of place. Which should have made it easier to find her grimoires, in theory.
After rummaging through the bedside tables and dressers and finding nothing, Charlotte looked under the four-post bed and in the writing desk where she found a hand mirror inside one drawer.
She knew better than to turn it over, aware of what she would see behind her in the reflection, so left it in its place and turned her attention to the wardrobe. Behind it, she spotted the leather-bound grimoires stuffed between the wooden back and the paneled wall. “There you are,” she whispered and wrenched them from their hiding spot.
A gnawing sense of urgency stayed with Charlotte as she retreated with the oldest of her family’s grimoires in her hands,the heavy books weighing desperately against her aching forearms.
She hurried back to her bedroom, ignoring the shadows that moved in her periphery vision on her way back, or the voice that desperately tried to crack back into her mind.
Once she’d returned, she shoved a wooden chair under the door handle. Not that it would stop a vampire from getting in, but it would give her enough warning to hide the grimoires.
Duke mewled softly from her bed.
