It’s this house. I never liked it as a child. I hated when Mom would stop here out of obligation to“check on your aunt.”Aunt Laura didn’t care if we checked on her. She didn’t care if we lived or died. Our intrusion into her life was unwanted and unappreciated. But Mom insisted.
“Kindness is free, Rina,”she always says.
Kindness only to people who understand kindness, I think miserably. Kindness to a woman who wouldn’t need her niece to go through her things after death because her own children couldn’t stomach her. I would think they would be thrilled to paw through her things and keep the spoils.
Though, there aren’t many spoils. The entire house is something that belongs on a murder documentary, or something about the occult.
I rub my arms. At the litter of goosebumps rising along my skin from the wisps of winter seeping through the cracks in thefront door. I scan the frame, searching for cracks and seeing none. Still, I hurry over, push against it and twist the lock. The tumbler rolls into place with a resounding crack.
Feeling slightly better, I turn.
And scream at the large set of pale blue eyes watching me from the shadows.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The pale face shrieks, too.
It distorts and elongates as the mouth tears away and the eyes roll back into black sockets. Gray film clouds across its ashen complexion, molting the flesh from the bone.
“Rina!”
I scream again and whirl just as Lukan thunders into the foyer with Kellen and Roan right on his heels. His dark eyes are pits of fury as he grabs my arm and pulls me to him. They sweep over the room, searching for the thing that has me clinging to him.
“What is it?” he demands, crushing me closer.
Trembling, I peer back over my shoulder to where I’d seen the face and blink.
The face blinks, too.
An enormous, ornate mirror hangs over the table in the foyer. The kind carved by hand with elaborate foliage borders and curving design. Its massive frame extends to claim the wall with a mocking command that momentarily distracts from its actual defect.
The glass is warped. It teeters and shifts, stretching and pulling our bodies like the mirrors in a funhouse. The crude scuff bleeding up the bottom to spread like spilled ink distorts our features to appear ghostly and haunted.
But it’s the very existence of the thing that sends my thoughts into a spiral. Even as I pull out of Lukan’s arms and face the thing properly, I know ...I knowit doesn’t belong.
“Where did this come from?” I rasp, daring a single step towards it and watching my features shift and pull along the bends. “This wasn’t here before.”
Was it?
I rifle through my thoughts to remember, but I can’t focus when my heart is still hammering. Even my finger trembles when I lift it to brush the glass.
Roan captures my wrist and tugs me away from it.
“Don’t touch that,” he murmurs, eyes fixed on the abomination.
“What is it?” I demand.
None of them seem to know, nor do they seem to like it. All three are studying the thing like they’re expecting it to attack.
“Doesn’t matter,” Lukan mutters at last. “It’s not for us.” He captures my other hand, the one not still clasped by Roan. “No more going anywhere without us. This place ... it’s not right.”
His narrowed eyes sweep over the foyer and drift up to the top of the stairs. A muscle coils in his cheek, but he says nothing.
“That wasn’t here when I did my walk through,” I state firmly, slightly more confident in that knowledge. “It was a painting.” I pinch the bridge of my nose and wrack my brain. “Dante’s Inferno, I think.”
“Get her back in the living room,” Kellen tells his brothers, attention fixed on the mirror. “Lukan’s right, little one. No more wandering off. Not until we can leave this place.”
I don’t argue.
