Nightmare Hunt, page 36
Clutching her jackhammering heart, she answered, “Yes. I-I’m talking about a friend.”
“In crime?”
“No, I mean, he’s helping me solve a problem. For school. It was just a figure of speech.”
A pause. “Goodnight, Belle.”
“‘Night, Uncle.”
Taking a deep breath, she whispered aloud, “One more time.” She focused on repeating what Eddie had showed her in the West Wing about reaching him. She tried to just focus on seeing a rope tied around his waist.
Maybe if she used his real name.... “Edward Rawlins,” she whispered. “Edward Rawlins.”
After a moment, her mind cleared into a smoky blackness, and she saw the edge of a brown braided rope appear. Jubilation flooded her. She picked up the end of the rope and gave it a tug. Something solid was at the end of it, but she couldn’t see it. The darkness was thick and obscured the other end. She followed the rope, one hand over the other, the anticipation of seeing Eddie mounting with each step forward.
She collided with a solid wall. She tugged at the rope, but it disappeared into this wall obscured by the smoky darkness. Shivering at the icy coldness of the air, she slid her hands over the wall, its surface perfectly smooth and cool to the touch.
She banged the side of her fist on it. Eddie! She banged twice more. Harder.
An invisible force expulsed her whole body backward. She flew back like a rag doll, until another black void swallowed her whole.
Chapter 31: Hellcat
Loud scratching noises woke her up from sleep. Just in time, too. She’d been burning at the stake in her dream again. Another failed attempt to reach her mother. She’d tried to disguise herself as a villager with a hooded cloak and then approach from the fringes, but Violet had shrieked wordless accusations while pointing her out, and then pitchforks had surrounded Belle in an instant.
Scratch. Scratch.
Her bleary eyes focused on the ceiling. Why does it look wrong? She sat up and realized she had fallen asleep on the wrong end of the bed and hadn’t bothered to get under the covers—she looked down at herself—or change into pj’s. A heavy daze lay over her and the sense that something was off. She glanced at the time on her phone: 1:02 a.m.
A loud hiss came from the other side of her door followed by more scratching.
She slid out of bed and answered the door. Just as expected. Lady sat there, blinking up at her.
“We need to work on your knocking,” Belle said.
Instead of dashing in as usual and curling up at the foot of Belle’s bed to sleep, Lady’s response was to saunter away into the living room and then sit back on her haunches again, watching Belle.
“What in the world....” Her head still shrouded in sleep, Belle grabbed her shawl off her desk chair and wrapped herself with it. It was criminally cold outside of her toasty bed.
Her gaze landed on the two open books on her desk: Hunger Games and Edward Rawlins’s journal.
The recollection slammed into her, just like whatever had knocked her out of there, straight into that nightmare in old Elmridge. Her thoughts raced back down that track, recovering what she couldn’t believe had just slipped her mind. Eddie was Edward Rawlins, and when she’d tried to reach him, he’d been completely walled off. Was he in danger? Imprisoned?
A loud hiss came from the living room.
Feeling like a basketcase with worry over Eddie’s safety now, she met Lady in the living room, and the cat did the same thing again—walked away and stopped at the door to the stairs. Belle opened it, and Lady sped down the stairs, stopping and waiting at the landing.
“I guess you’ve got an emergency, huh? You’ve never needed my help before.” She descended the steps and was surprised Lady didn’t shoot for the door, but, instead, disappeared into the museum space. “Wait, so you don’t want to be let out?”
Belle followed, tightening the shawl around her shoulders to fend off the shivers from the cold or this strange situation, or probably both. She found Lady sitting in front of an old desk with a leather top and small drawers galore. She knew from the history plaque affixed on top that it belonged to “the Prynn sisters, most notably Abigail, the more prolific writer of the two.”
She wagged her finger at the cat. “You are not allowed to do your business in here.”
Lady narrowed her eyes, and if Belle didn’t know any better, she’d say that was a glare. The cat retreated into the leg space of the desk and scratched upward.
“What do you want? Do you want to sleep here? That’s fine. You can sleep here, but not pee. Got it?”
Lady stood on her back haunches and scratched furiously at the bottom of the long drawer.
“Hey, stop that! That’s my mom’s desk.” Thinking there must be a fossilized mouse or something in there, Belle pulled the drawer out. She looked at Lady. “There’s nothing here.”
Lady narrowed her eyes into slits and pounced upward with her front feet against the bottom of the drawer. It popped up.
“Why, you—” But Belle stopped just short of swatting the cat when she saw that the bottom of the drawer was now askew, revealing another bottom. A secret false bottom. And there were papers in there. She could see the yellowed corners peeking out.
Excitement prickled at her skin at this Nancy Drew turn of events, she reached in and pulled out the top bottom of the drawer and lifted four very familiar looking pages. They were in her mother’s handwriting.
“The missing pages from my mom’s dairy!” She held them aloft like a prize. “Good job, Lady!”
But when she looked at Lady, intent to scoop it into her arms and give it a grateful squeeze, or at least a hardy scratch behind the ears, the cat sprung toward her hand and snatched the papers with its teeth. It dashed out of sight, and just as Belle’s reflexes overcame her shock and she moved to give it chase, she heard the window with the broken latch creak up and then slam shut.
“No.” She sank to her knees, feeling utterly stupefied. “I just got robbed by a cat.”
This was all very unnatural. She was being blocked, purposely kept in the dark. She finally found missing answers from her mother’s diary, and they were snatched right out of her hand. And just before that, she’d managed to reach Eddie—she was sure of it—and then she’d been thoroughly expelled.
This had to be the work of the Fae. They were twisting her path, adding stumbling blocks for their entertainment, imprisoning Eddie, even manipulating poor cats to do their bidding, allowing all manner of violence in the name of money-grubbing stories....
She climbed slowly to her feet, feeling the rage churning in waves beneath her skin. Pinpricks of electricity snapped from every pore, joining together in a web of blue crackling light that expanded the more her thoughts fell over the edge into fury.
And then, in what felt like three cool drops of water hitting her fevered mind, she heard three chimes. Somehow, her brain interpreted them as words.
Look behind you.
So she did. And there on the floor, at the spot where the hoodlum-cat had berefted her, was one page. A corner torn off, but intact, nonetheless.
And just like that, the storm passed. Cool air washed over the lightning heat on her skin, and curiosity swallowed her anger.
Gingerly, she picked up the ancient page and pored over it. It looked like the last page and only about half-a-page long.
“...made sure he paid for what he did to me. To my friends. In the little time I spent in Whitechapel, burying my misery in the squalor of this place, drinking myself into oblivion to numb the pain of my dead William, I discovered another life. A seedy, dark underbelly of where I hid myself, immersed myself, and found glimmers of goodness in this filth worth fighting for. My dear friends, Polly and Annie, were each a light in this darkness that is the East End of London, until they were both slaughtered by that butcher. It took me too long to shake off the drunken haze, too long for me to do anything about the others...but when he finally got to me, I was the last one. I was caught unawares. Too weak in my state to defend myself. But when I felt the cold blade of the knife slice deep into my skin, I came alive. My senses exploded, and I could feel everything clearly for the first time in a long time. Including the cold steel buried in my body.
“I surprised him then. I fried him. Fried him senseless.
“Last I heard, he was rotting away in a mental asylum. And the butcher of Whitechapel still undiscovered. I must keep it that way...a secret forever. My son must never know his father was a monster.”
The page fluttered to the floor from Belle’s hands, and to the shocked silence that held like bated breath, she whispered, “Oh no...James’s father was Jack the Ripper.”
Chapter 32: Beauty and the Beast
Belle pounced on the mass of brilliant plumage. One quick tear with her razor-teethed mouth and the peacock’s terrified squawk was silenced. She spat out the mound of flesh and feathers. With the rest of the peafowls frightened off, she moved unimpeded now at a brisk trot, only the full moon’s watchful eye on her back.
She was on a mission, the enchanted words repeating in her mind like a haunting jingle stuck in a loop.
Before long, gravel crunched beneath her paws, and she slowed her pace to a silent stalk as she passed by the Historical Society of Elmridge signage-post. At the foot of the front porch’s steps, she went still, gazing up at the dark windows, listening for any sounds of movement inside.
She sniffed. There was a strange scent of another creature, of feline fur and human sweat. Odd. Cat-like, but not.
No matter. The enchantment drove her forward, and she crept up the steps, her talons clicking against the wood. The next part was easy. The window to the left of the door, she knew, had a broken latch. She stood up to her full height and with a snarling grunt slid the window all the way up. It had made a long, creaking whine, and after pushing aside the bookcase that stood in its way, she quickly climbed inside and crouched in the shadows, listening and waiting for any response from the humans in the home.
Her instincts were correct. Lights flicked on, flooding the museum space, but not the wide shadow of the bookcase she was in. She remained motionless. Through a long, antique mirror, she could see the man standing by the light switch halfway down the stairs. How she had missed the sounds of his approach, she could not fathom.
She heard a tell-tale click, and her suspicion was confirmed by the sight of the raised black barrel gleaming in his hand.
They both waited. As long as that gun remained in the man’s hand, he was the hunter and she merely the prey. So, she waited.
Finally, finally, the lights switched off, and she heard the sounds of steps receding on the staircase. She waited to hear the door close at the top of the stairs, but it never came. Had the man left it open then? Prudence told her to wait it out some more, but the enchantment propelled her to step out and finish her mission.
She padded as slowly, as quietly as ever, not even letting the tips of her talons touch the floor. She emerged from the furniture space, and just as she reached the foot of the stairs, the lights flew on and she found herself staring at the end of a barrel, pointed right at her face. In that nanosecond of shock, she froze, eyes wide.
The man’s own eyes mirrored her surprise, and he lowered the gun a fraction. “Your eyes...” he murmured.
That was her chance.
With a snarl, she launched herself at him, and the deafening shot sliced through her.
BELLE AWOKE WITH A shout of agony, gripping the front of her shoulder. She looked at her hand, her shoulder, but there was no blood, no injury. Her mind reeled from the scene she had just dreamt. She didn’t know what it was about this night, but the nightmares just kept coming.
“Oh, Jesus! Ernesto!” She tore the bedspread off and raced out of her room to her uncle’s.
I have to warn him! Her mind raced on as fast as her feet. First, the revelations about Eddie and my mom, and now this?!
She banged on the door. “Ernesto! The beast is coming here! We have to hurry!” She took a grain of comfort in the fact that she dreamt these sorts of events before they happened.
A gunshot rang out downstairs. Belle instinctively cowered with her hands over her ears. Horrified, she turned towards the staircase door. It was open, and the lights were on downstairs. She’d had more time the last time something like this had happened, but it was happening much sooner, almost in real-time.
“Belle, stay there!” came Ernesto’s warning cry.
A cacophonous crash erupted, mixed with ferocious snarls and her uncle’s grunts. The long, rolling smashes and cracks told her the museum was being torn apart.
And possibly Ernesto!
With that, she scrambled for the stairs.
Belle halted on the last step. There was an eerie quiet now. A path of destruction carved through the museum displays, leading toward the back.
A human moan of pain reached her ears. She ran toward the sound, scattering through the debris.
Ernesto lay at an odd angle on his back. A bookcase she knew to be solid oak lay crushing his legs.
“No!” She flew to his side, flipping the bookcase off him like a cardboard box.
His eyes flew wide at the act. “H-How?”
“Something new.” Her hands hovered frantically over him. “Are you hurt? Where does it hurt? Tell me how to help.”
“G-Get my phone. On my night table.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“Hurry, please. I can’t feel anything beneath my chest.” He coughed and blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth.
In a mad scramble that felt like forever, she returned with the phone. She pointed the screen at his face and unlocked it. “Who do I call?”
“Dr. X.”
“Okay.” She opened his contacts list and searched. “Is he the same one who came here and helped Emily?”
He nodded, grimacing from the pain.
“Found it. It’s going to be okay, Uncle.” She tapped the contact button.
On the second ring, the call was connected, but no hello came from the other end.
“Hello?” Belle called into it. “Hello? My uncle, Ernesto, needs help. He’s been hurt. He told me to call you.”
“Password,” the voice whispered.
“He wants a password,” she told her uncle.
Ernesto nodded, and when he opened his mouth to speak, Belle brought the phone closer to his mouth. “Comenzó en Tunguska.”
When he’d turned his face toward the phone, she noticed a long, bloody scratch along the side of his neck.
“Hurry,” she said into the phone. “He’s getting pale, and he’s not looking too good.” She dropped it after ending the call and grabbed Ernesto’s hand, pressing it to her face. Not too long ago, she was in this very situation with her dying father.
She couldn’t believe the universe was doing this to her again.
“You’re going to be okay. Just stay with me. Help is coming.”
“M-My gun. Take it.” He had tried to reach for the barrel, lying just inches from his fingers.
“No.” She shook her head feverishly. “No. I don’t need it.”
“I heard something when you went upstairs for my phone.”
“What was it?”
He exhaled a ragged breath. “It never left.”
“The beast?”
Any remaining color fled his face, and just before his features went slack, one word left his mouth, “Liam.”
“Uncle?” She grabbed his shoulders and gave him a shake. “Ernesto?!” But it was like shaking a bag of flour. He remained unconscious, eyes closed. “Oh God, please don’t be dead.” She lowered her ear to his chest. A strong heart beat steadily.
Coma. Like the others. Her mind chased the dots, stringing them together. Lisa had the bloody scratches on her thigh similar to Ernesto’s scratch on his neck. Maybe Nieves also had a scratch, but an inconspicuous one. And they’re all comatose right now.
And Liam. Ernesto implied it was Liam who’d attacked him. Violet was using Liam to sideline the competition for the Homecoming crown...and he was still here.
Liam had come for me. Ernesto had just gotten in the way.
Her senses fired to life on their own. The danger felt tangible, like an icy, cold caress making her hairs stand on end. She rose slowly to her feet, her keen ears dissecting the various sounds: the chittering insects in the walls, the ticking of the grandfather clock upstairs, the wailing squawks of the peafowls in the nearby field, Ernesto’s beating heart and shallow breathing, and there was another beating heart close by....
She forced herself to take a deep breath, and she caught the heavy musk of a large animal. There was another scent in the mix, very faint. Evergreen and spice. Liam’s cologne.
“Liam?” she called out in a shaky voice.
There was a creak, as if a pause in step on the floorboards.
“You don’t have to do this.” She moved slowly, silently away from Ernesto, hopefully drawing any danger away from her uncle. “You’re stronger than this, Liam. Don’t let Violet control you. Don’t let her keep hurting you.”
Dr. X was on his way. Maybe if she kept talking, stalling, Liam would run off before another witness showed up. Or maybe, come to his human senses.
There was a low growl.
She paused. She was right next to the desk that Lady had led her to. The growl had come from somewhere by the bookcase next to the open window. She could dive for the staircase and lock herself upstairs, but she wasn’t going to leave Ernesto alone with the beast.
Electricity flared in her palms. She was going to have to keep it busy. Just long enough for Dr. X to get here.
The beast emerged slowly from the shadows on all fours. It looked like a cross between a starved, blonde bear and a lanky wolf on steroids. It stalked toward her, its head low to the ground, eyes pinned on her. They were the stark, unblinking eyes of a predator.
Belle gasped. But the eyes...they were unmistakable. The clear green with yellow flecks.
