AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The locked door to Laura and Heidi’s room was open. Whether it had just happened, or I’d been too distracted to notice, I wasn’t sure, but I knew what it meant.
Gamigan was free.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Get out of the house.” Even screaming it at the top of my lungs no one seemed to hear what I was saying. The music played on, the party continued with its mess of drinking and dancing and fucking. I was taking the steps down two and three at a time, sidestepping to avoid the jumble of people who had made their way as far as the half-point landing on the stairs. “Go.”
“Wilder.” We could worry about the others later. Right now all I cared about was finding Wilder and getting the two of us as far from this place as humanly possible.
Through the house’s open front door I could see his motorcycle parked on the curb waiting for us. How could salvation be so close and so very, very far away?
Somehow the crowd seemed to have doubled in size in the few minutes I’d been upstairs, and even more people were coming across the front lawn, ready to join the fun.
He was calling to them. Gamigan was doing something to draw them in, and once it had them here, it was manipulating their minds and destroying them with the same uninhibited desire it was creating inside them.
No one ever said demons were nice guys, but this was all kinds of fucked up. Was its goal to turn everyone into a version of the thing I’d seen upstairs?
The strobes flashed, and shadows skittered across the ceiling, but this time I was watching them carefully, tracking each sudden motion. It was here somewhere, and the minute I stopped being prepared was when this would all go to shit.
I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, hoping Wilder might feel his buzz since he couldn’t hear me yell. I found an open place against the wall where I could keep one eye on the ceiling and went to unlock my screen, but found the phone was already ringing.
Cash.
I swiped to ignore it, but before I was able to get a text message open, he was calling me again.
“I don’t have time for this,” I snapped into the mouthpiece.
A beat. “Are you at a party?”
Jay-Z was rapping about having ninety-nine problems, and I was thinking Jay and I might want to swap trouble-lists one day.
Ninety-nine problems sounded like a bargain.
“Oh yeah, I’m having the time of my life.”
“Tansy was hoping—”
“I’m going to stop you right there, because I have a thing or two I’d like to discuss with her when she has a moment to spare.”
“Why do you sound so pissed off?” His reply was peevish in and of itself.
“Are you kidding me?” I sucked in a breath and prepared to read him the riot act, when I spotted her.
Tansy stood in the middle of the living room, staring right at me. She looked polished and poised, like she’d just rolled out of a Lilly Pulitzer store and was on her way to the annual Stepford Wives convention in Connecticut.
The gyrating partiers were spread out around her, maintaining an untouched circle on the dance floor, and as she moved, so did they, parting like a fleshy Red Sea in her wake.
My brain was screaming at me to run, but I already had my back against the wall. There was nowhere else to go.
“She must have wanted to talk to me pretty damn bad, because she couldn’t wait for you to pass on the message. I see her now. I’ll just talk to her myself.” Talk to. Punch in the face. Both sounded like good options.
“What are you talking about?” Cash asked. “She’s right here. Hold on, let me get her.”
I went stock-still, experiencing the sensation of being totally shell-shocked. “Cash, what did you say?”
“I said I’ll get her.”
“Who?”
