The Wrong Side

Chapter 12

Something was running behind me.

I couldn't see it. The trees were too thick and the ground was too soft and every time I looked back there was nothing there but the dark catching up. My feet were bare. I could feel roots and wet leaves and something sharp that went into my heel and stayed.

Then the trees stopped.

The pit was in front of me. The clean stone floor, the iron railings, the crowd packed into three tiers like they'd been waiting the whole time, and every single face up there was turned toward me and none of them had eyes.

Don't run, a woman's voice said. He only kills the ones that run.

So I didn't run.

I walked out onto that stone floor and my bare feet made a sound, and the floor was wet, and I looked down and the wet was red.

I was standing in it. Up to the ankles.

And then the thing in the shadow stood up, and this time it didn't charge. This time it walked. Slow. Easy. Like it already knew how this ended.

I couldn't move.

It got close. Close enough that I could see the wet on its teeth. And it opened its mouth, and it spoke, and the voice was a man's voice and it was wrecked and it said:

"I'm sorry."

I woke up screaming.

---

I was sitting bolt upright with my hands out in front of me and my throat raw, and the scream was still going, and it took me a second to figure out it was me making it.

The candle had burned out. The room was gray-dark. The fire was down to nothing.

And there was a man standing in my doorway.

I scrambled backward so fast I hit my head on the headboard.

He didn't move. Didn't come in. Just stood there in the open door with his shirt untucked and his feet bare and his hand on the doorframe.

"It's me," he said.

"Get out."

"It's me."

"Get out of my room!"

He didn't get out.

I got my breath back in pieces. My heart was going like a rabbit. The sheet was twisted around my legs and my hands were shaking and I could feel the sweat going cold at the back of my neck.

"You screamed," he said.

"I know I screamed. I was there."

"Three floors down." He said it like it meant something. "I heard you three floors down."

I looked at him.

Then I looked past him.

The door was shut. It had been shut. I'd shut it. I'd locked it with that brass key and I'd pulled it hard to make sure the bolt caught, and then I'd gotten into bed.

I looked at the key.

It was on the nightstand, right where I'd put it, and the keyhole in the door was right there, four feet from where he was standing, and the door was still locked.

He was on the wrong side of a locked door.

"Hey." His voice changed. "Hey. Look at me."

"The door's locked."

"I know it's locked."

"So how are you standing in my room?"

He looked down. Looked at the door. Looked at the key on the nightstand, and I watched him do the math the exact same way I had, and I watched his face go pale.

"I don't know," he said.

"Don't lie to me—"

"I don't know." He stepped back into the hallway and then, weirdly, he turned around and looked at the door from the other side, and then came back to the threshold. "I heard you scream. I came up the stairs. I put my hand on the door and it opened."

"It's locked."

"Then it was unlocked when I got here."

"It was not." I grabbed the key off the nightstand. "Look at this. Look at it. It's still in the deadbolt position. The bolt's still out. The door's locked right now and you're standing there."

He looked at the doorframe.

Then he did something that scared me more than the scream had. He went quiet, and he took his hand off the doorframe, and he rubbed his thumb over his fingers the way you do when you've touched something that felt wrong.

"Get dressed," he said.

"What?"

"Get dressed. You're not sleeping up here tonight."

"Excuse me?"

"Get dressed. I'll be at the bottom of the stairs." He turned around.

"You just walked into my bedroom—"

"I'm aware."

"—in the middle of the night—"

"I'm aware of that too."

"And now you're telling me to get dressed and come with you?"

He stopped on the landing.

He turned his head. In the dark, half his face was gray and half of it wasn't there at all.

"Ella," he said. "There are claw marks in that doorframe. There are claw marks in the beam over your bed. I counted eleven of them before you woke up and then I stopped counting because I couldn't make myself look at another one."

I didn't say anything.

"You found them tonight, didn't you," he said.

"...Yeah."

"That's why you screamed."

"No, I screamed because a monster apologized to me in a dream." It came out before I could stop it, and he went very still. "It doesn't matter. It was a dream."

"Say that part again."

"What part?"

"The part where it apologized."

I sat there holding the key.

"I don't know," I said. "It talked to me. It's a dream. It was the pit. It was all mixed up."

"Did it sound like me?"

The room was dead quiet.

"Lucifer."

"Did it sound like me."

"...Yeah."

He stood there with his hand on the railing for a second, and then he said, so quietly I almost didn't catch it, "I don't sleep. Not really. Not since I was seventeen. I sit up in that room on the other side of the house and I listen to this castle breathe and I don't sleep, and tonight I heard a girl screaming three floors down, and I got up and I came up the stairs and I didn't think."

"And?"

"And I've never once been able to hear anything from my room." He lifted his head. "Not once. Not in eight years."

I got out of bed.

I didn't look at him while I did it. I pulled on the gray dress over my nightgown and I picked up the key and I shoved it in my pocket and I walked to the doorway and stopped.

He didn't move out of my way.

"There's an empty room next to mine," he said. "On the west stair. The one with the blue door."

"The one with the guard."

"The guard's not there anymore. I sent him to the gate." He stepped aside. "You'll sleep in it tonight and tomorrow we'll find out who's been cutting keys."

"Or we'll find out what I am."

"Same thing," he said.

I walked past him onto the landing and started down the stairwell.

Halfway down, I stopped.

"The dream," I said. "It said I'm sorry. And it said it in your voice. And then you showed up at a locked door and you didn't know how you got in."

He was above me on the stairs, looking down.

"I don't know what's happening to me in that room," he said. "I know it's not just the curse anymore. It's been just the curse for eight years and it's never once been this."

"This being what?"

He looked at me for a long moment.

"This being something I can't explain in the morning."

Chapter 12 Ends