AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Jace
Istood on the old Victorian’s sagging front porch, prepared to knock, when a lurid scream raced through the empty rooms and hallways of Richmond House like poisonous gas.
Greer?
One of the massive front doors was ajar, allowing the never-ending scream to seep out the crack. Rather than risk a time-consuming fight with the warped frame, I took a few steps back before slamming my two hundred twenty pounds into the wood and was inside in seconds. I saw Marina standing at the top of the main staircase, her face white, her short fingers latticed over her open mouth, working to contain the scream that had by now devolved into a series of hollow-sounding shrieks, her eyes locked on whatever was happening at the other end of the hallway.
I took the stairs two, three at a time. At the top, I passed Marina—still shrieking and clawing at her face in horror—without a word. Eugenia stood still as a statue at the end of the long hallway. Dressed in head-to-toe red, her back to me, she didn’t notice me. Her gaze never wavered from whatever was happening beyond the shattered staircase window. Glass littered the faded carpet runner beneath her. The wicked-long shards left behind curled up into the empty pane. And there was no sign of Greer anywhere.
“Eugenia!” I called.
Eugenia’s chin snapped to her shoulder, her eyes apologetic as she wrung her hands beneath her chin. I noted the sorrow, the guilt in her expression, but she’d chosen not to intervene in whatever was happening outside the window. In her hand was a strip of white fabric she moved back and forth through her fingers like a rosary, the white a sharp contrast to the red of her dress. A brief flash of matching white on the other side of the window drew my eyes.
Is that…? Fuck. Greer!
I sprinted down the hall to the staircase before carefully stepping around the open hole to the window, trading places with Eugenia. I shrugged out of my jacket and wrapped it around my fist to clear the stubborn shards from the bottom of the frame.
Greer looked drunk as she stumbled from one side of the poorly erected scaffolding to the other before falling to her knees.
I braced myself in the window frame and placed one foot onto the sheet of plywood to keep it steady. I looked down. It was at least thirty feet to the ground. If she fell from this height, there’s no doubt she’d be seriously injured. Or die.
I opened my mouth to call to her but shut it as she rose to her feet once more. If I startled her—if I was the reason she lost her balance and fell—I didn’t think I’d be able to live with myself.
Greer shuffled out to the edge of the scaffolding, scanning the tree line back and forth, back and forth like she was in a trance, before raising her face to the sky. I needed to get to her, but I was afraid my added weight would make things worse. Seconds later, I no longer had a choice. Her body pitched forward. It was too late to reach the edge, too late to do anything but take a big step and stretch my arms as far as I could, grasping at her, trying to hold on.
I grabbed for her dress, her hair—anything—and managed to catch a handful of fabric and the thin, gold chain she wore around her neck. It snapped as I yanked her back onto the scaffolding, where she crumpled to the plywood.
There was no time. No time to rationalize what the fuck just happened. I dragged Greer’s lifeless body back through the window, avoiding the open stairwell, and stepped past Eugenia, who must have been in shock earlier because it was only now that she snapped into action.
“I’ll call the doctor,” she said, clearly and calmly, as I carried Greer in my arms to her bedroom. Now Marina was crying, her loud sobbing puncturing the fragile thoughts I tried stringing together.
“Shut the fuck up, Marina,” I yelled to her before passing through Greer’s door and kicking it shut behind me. It was a dick move, but she was involved in this—whatever it was—and I was pissed. In the span of five minutes, my emotions had swung from happiness to fear, to panic, to relief. And now I was suddenly furious. Furious at Marina. Furious at Eugenia. Even irrationally furious at the pale, clammy, unconscious woman I placed gently on top of her duvet. I checked to make sure she was breathing, and she was, her pulse strong in her neck. She was alive. I told myself that’s all that mattered.
In the end, Marina’s scream was a blessing in disguise. Without it, Greer would have plunged headfirst to her death. I scrubbed a hand down my face. Just the thought turned my stomach. But what sickened me more was the one that followed—that I might have jumped right off after her.
The door clicked open, and a repentant Marina stood in the hall, peering into the room.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
“No.”
“Is she okay?” Marina’s barely-there voice cracked before releasing a shuddering sigh, the sigh of a person who’d recently been crying their eyes out. I couldn’t stand her. She’d just stood there, crying, instead of trying to help.
“Does she look okay? She’s not even conscious.”
“Maybe we should try to wake her up.”
“We? We? There’s no ‘we’ here, Marina.”
“I know, Jace. Of course I know. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends—”
“Yes, it does. I want you to look at this woman very carefully and ask yourself how she came to be in this state. Was it you? Was this one of your stupid, crazy-ass ideas? Why are you here, Marina? What the fuck happened?”
“I…I was invited. We were on a spiritual quest.”
“Not only do I not know what the fuck that means, I don’t care,” I said, raising my voice to a full-throated yell. “You and your spiritual quest can fuck off—why was Greer up on that scaffolding?”
“I honestly don’t know.” Marina seemed to shrink away under the intensity of the confrontation. The louder I got, the more her voice resembled a whisper. “She felt something in her soul and was moved to come upstairs and connect with it, I guess.”
