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“What the hell?” he growls, pulling on the door again, opening it fast, stepping inside the room and looking around. “There’s nothing fucking in here.”
We step toward the room, and my eyebrows furrow when I notice what’s in there.
“Malik, aren’t those things freezers where they put dead bodies?” I point behind him, and he turns around, his eyes going to the ancient, dented, dusty cubbies for human bodies.
“Shit, I—” He gets cut off when the handle to one of the cubbies starts shaking the entire cabinet.
“Malik, get out of there!” Vera snaps, taking a step away.
He backs up when the cabinets on the other side of the room start shaking too, and then all of them are shaking, metal on metal, rattling against the walls and the floor, making so much commotion I have to bring my hands up to my ears.
I let out a scream, just as Malik runs out of the small closet, and we race toward the door of the main room, but it whips against the air, slamming shut with such force the frame cracks all the way up to the ceiling.
“Ah!” Blaire lets out a scream, jumping nearly a foot into the air. I race up to her, grabbing her wrist as I pull her toward the door. I’m not stopping, not today. No one else is going to get hurt in here.
Felix rushes to the door before I get there, pulling it open, but it doesn’t budge. It’s like it’s cemented as he pulls as hard as he can, the muscles in his back flexing and tensing as he strains. My mouth nearly waters until I realize this isnot the fucking time.
Get it together, Hazel.
His face turns red, his eyes screwing up in anger. “Fuck!” he roars, a boom echoing through the room as his fist flies through the door, wood splintering around his wrist. He pulls back, shaking the shard off his arm as he bends down, looking through the hole.
“What the fuck?” I whisper.
Felix’s hand goes to the knob again, and he pulls the door open. This time, it slides open with ease.
“I’m done with this shit, and I’m not coming back here again!” Piper shouts, her finger pointing directly at me, fear apparent in her wide eyes. She whips through the door, and I’m quick to follow after her, not wanting us to split up.
“Wait, Piper!” I race after her, her black shorts and crop top a blur as she sprints down the hall.
“Hazel, stop!” Vera screams at me as we make our way to the main lobby.
I ram straight into Piper’s back. My hands go to her shoulders, and I squeeze them as I walk around her. “What’s going on?”
She points up, and I see the orange moon glowing from the top of the windows, with a dark shadow standing on the ledge, watching us, still as stone.
“What’s going on?” Felix asks from behind me.
The black shadow lifts his hands, and my body becomes surrounded by a dark energy as I’m torn from the ground, ripped into the air, and thrust against the wall behind me.
“Shit!”
“What the fuck!”
“Oh my God!”
My eyes flash around the room, each one of my friends hanging in the air, our backs pinned against the walls around the lobby.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” I whisper, glancing toward the shadow, his hands in the air as he watches us from outside.
I don’t know what it is, but it feels like pure malevolence. My feet dangle in the air, and I can’t move my arms, or my hands, or even my fingers. My entire body remains frozen.
“Malik, do something,” Vera whines, her toes pointed toward the ground.
Malik fights against the invisible restraint, though nothing works, because he’s stuck.
We’reallstuck.
The glass shatters where the shadow was, and my eyes widen, a scream breaking from my throat as a body crawls through the glass. A woman in a white dress—a hospital gown—another patient of the asylum. Her body contorts as she slides through the broken window, her fingers sharp, her eyes black as she watches us with an oversized smile on her face.
