AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m going to do a quick check, okay? Peek into the bedrooms and see if she’s up there. If you find her first, grab her and leave. Text me. Don’t look for me, just take her and get free of the house.”
I didn’t ask him if he understood. I phrased it as a command and left it like that. This was the exact and only type of situation where I would throw my Alpha weight in his face, because we didn’t have the luxury of time anymore.
“Okay.” Wilder gave my hand one final squeeze, and something about the look he gave me damn near gutted me. I was planning to be gone five minutes tops, but he had the expression of a man who was trying to memorize a face he might be seeing for the last time. Not the best vote of confidence to part ways on.
I let go of him and elbowed my way back towards the front entrance where the stairs to the second floor were located. People were everywhere now, some dancing, more on the floor, others up against the walls. I didn’t let my gaze stay any one place too long, knowing I wasn’t going to like what I saw if I took the chance to decipher what each tangle of skin and limbs really were.
Every once in awhile, though, I’d make eye contact with someone inadvertently. Their features would be twisted into masks of pure pleasure, but their eyes were dark black, as if they’d been covered in thick smoke.
They’d stare and stare, and behind the smiles something deeply unpleasant lingered. Something helpless.
I jogged up the stairs two at a time, getting to the second floor and finding a slight reprieve from the throbbing bass. The music was still loud up here, but it no longer felt like someone was trying to jam a hot iron into my brain through my ears.
Without the music to mask the other sounds I was able to hear more moans, these ones borderline comical they were so loud. Someone was screaming in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
All the bedroom doors were closed, and the hall light had been shut off, leaving the entire corridor cloaked in darkness except for the strobes bouncing off the walls from the main floor. Each time a bit of light snuck up, it was like a ghost flitting across the ceiling and vanishing again before it was able to take form
I swallowed a huge lump of uncertainty that had wedged itself in my throat and allowed myself one small, shuddering sigh to acknowledge this was scary as hell, and I honestly didn’t know if I had what it took to get through it.
I took one step down the hall, and suddenly all the moaning stopped, leaving only the sound of the bass and my own throbbing heartbeat. All the rest was silence, and its onset left me feeling even more freaked out than the obscene sexual noises had.
I stopped and listened, breathed, waited.
Downstairs, people were shouting, laughing, such boisterously alive war cries of youth. Now it felt like I was the only thing with a pulse on the second fl
oor, when a moment earlier it had sounded like an Old West brothel during the gold rush.
Approaching the first door, I felt the lump of fear rising back to its home in my esophagus. There would be no chasing it away now. The icy hand of uncertainty that had gripped me downstairs had returned as well, tightening around my neck with each new step I took.
Go back. Go back. Runrunrunrunrunrun.
I couldn’t tell if these were my own thoughts or an actual psychic warning.
I grabbed the door handle of the first bedroom and pushed it open. It yielded easily with no lock in place.
I took one look at what was inside the bedroom and shut the door again, holding it closed tightly with the knob in both hands as I tried desperately to catch my breath.
A group of twentysomethings had been naked together in bed, but unlike the mess of humping bodies downstairs, they had all melded together. Literally. Arms were fused to torsos, legs were joined double at the knee, a woman’s mouth was moving noiselessly out of the middle of a man’s chest.
The freakish living human quilt hadn’t been what made me shut the door.
It was the naked girl on the ceiling with her head on backwards, tendrils of sweat-dampened hair trailing down from where her face should have been as she stared up at the ceiling, perched like a pale human crab next to the light fixture.
My hand was shaking so hard I thought I might crush the doorknob and inadvertently release the catch.
I let go and recoiled two steps, trying to think of a spell. Any spell. Something to make me disappear, something to seal a lock. Anything.
I edged towards the stairs, ready to say fuck it and get the hell out of here with some sliver of my sanity still in check. Screw this place. Screw Tansy, and Cash, and whatever fucked-up nonsense was happening in the Delta Phi house. This was so far out of my league I didn’t even know what playbook we were using anymore.
Keeping one eye on the bedroom door, I felt for the top step with my toes.
Creeeeeeak.
I froze, daring not move an inch. I couldn’t bring myself to look. The door in front of me was still shut tight. The other doors along the wall remained closed as well, probably housing their own horror shows.
Creeeak.
The soft whine of unoiled hinges stopped, and I glanced, darting my eyes the smallest fraction of an inch towards the end of the hall. I knew what I’d see, knew it deep in the petrified recesses of my soul, knew it in my quivering gut. But I looked anyway.
