Mathias shifted closer, his eyes moving over my face, “You made a deal with a god, Raine.” His head shook and his mouth moved as if he had more to say, but the words never came. He just stilled, closing his mouth, and stared at me with deep, heavy eyes.
“Why am I healed then? Someone—” I stopped instantly, a thought slamming in my brain like a freight train. Was it that darkness thing that blacked out the room before? “There are more monsters here than you dead people, right?”
“Monsters?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “I’m not following.”
“The blackness, the pitch black shadow that eats the room…it was just here. It comes out of the shadows like you do.”
“Raine, there’s nothing here in Ravenswood but lost souls. There’s no one here but us…” His words trailed off into a defeated grimace.
“But I saw it. It was just here. I saw—” But I couldn’t explain what I had seen. It was darkness with eyes, or something to that effect. “Okay, maybe it doesn’t matter. I don’t know. All I do know is, your father promised me my mother and you, and he didn’t follow through on his end of the bargain.”
He traced his phantom fingertips over my cheek, sending pinpricks of goose bumps down my neck and an explosion of warmth across my chest. “You tried to save my soul?” His question pulsed through me like a heartbeat. “Why, why couldn’t you have stayed there and forgotten about this place?”
“I…I told you.” His eyes drew me in closer, so blue and clear and deep, my thoughts drowned inside them. The sensation frightened me. The intensity of it. The way his eyes fixed on mine and saw me,really saw me. I could barely look away. “He was there. In my apartment. On the street. He even chased me into a church.”
He said nothing in response. His gaze just locked onto mine. A flood of helplessness rushed over me, like I was sinking or being pulled out into a dark ocean by an uncontrollable tide. Suddenly, I was very aware of the air and space between us. It pulsed as if alive—shimmered and glistened with static charge that snapped and crackled. A pocket of warmth in an arctic land. My fingers and arms tingled with sparks of numbness, and my knees tickled with weakness. And, somewhere in the middle of all of it, my heart raced to a terrifying speed.
Mathias’s eyes dropped to the small area that separated us as if it were something tangible and real. It was like the moment just before lightning strikes, the charge that makes the air come alive, then the sudden explosion of electricity and the thunder that follows, all of it condensed in the small breath of space between us. My skin, every inch of it, heated and ached, and my lungs felt wrung out and dry. But the more intense the feeling became the more Mathias seemed to become translucent.
“What is that? Do you feel that?” he whispered. He was nothing more than a thin outline now, like the projection of an old movie against a dark screen.
I stepped back, my skin suddenly too cold, the room suddenly spinning too fast. My eyes snapped up to his, “You’re fading.”
He nodded with a pained expression.
“Wait, wait, don’t go yet. Please,” I begged. I needed to tell him about the darkness thing and what it said. “Erebus,” I called out, quickly. “Do you know who that is? And, what…wait, please don’t go yet.” His image became lighter and lighter. I tried to grab at him, but my hand just passed through him, and all I felt was a tingly sensation like I touched a cobweb. “What was your deal with your father? Mathias? Mathias!”
But he didn’t answer. He just vanished, disappearing in a glittering of ash and darkness.
That’s about the time I realized I was still utterly topless.
Chapter 5
When the spirits slept, Ravenswood was beautiful in its own macabre way. Even in my wildest imagination, I would have never been able to think up a place such as this, with its grave, bleak beauty. Narrow stone hallways lit by dozens of candles, which flickered with the eeriest, colorless flame. Paintings, worn and dull, covered the walls, each one a strange oddity of pale-faced people with dead flat eyes. And hovering over the floor, a mist of silvery coiling fog crept throughout the entirety of it. Shadows shifted and flickered at the edges of my vision, seeping into corners and lingering in the darkness.
“There, look. It’s her.”
“Yes, it is. Listen. Listen to it. Her heart beating, beating, beating.”
“Yes. And the blood that rushes through her veins.”
“Look, there, just above her lips. The deep red bloom of her cheeks.”
“Oh, yes. Her heart is racing. I hear it, whoosh-whoosh-whooshing.”
“It won’t be for much longer.”
“She’ll end up just like her mother.”
Whispers followed me everywhere I went. Echoes of voices, and long shadowy arms stretching out to touch me, yet somehow never did. I walked quickly, with my back firmly pressed against the wall, not wanting it to be exposed to the murmuring darkness of the walkways. The feeling of eyes watching me from everywhere was unsettling, raising the small hairs along my arms to stand on end.
I quickened my pace through the passageways of the castle, through long mist-filled corridors where footfalls echoed distantly and far-off doors slammed shut, and the low hum of weeping resonated around each and every corner.
There were dozens of doors I ran past: tall, narrow wooden ones; metal, gated ones; and then there were doors that weren’t truly doors, but door-shaped holes that contained the utter blackness that crept into the halls with claw-like tendrils.
I ran up a sweeping stone staircase that spiraled up and up into thick gray fog. Murmurs and dark figures I glimpsed only in the corner of my eye chased after me. The closer they came, the faster I ran.
At the top of the stairs I leaned back against the frigid wall, breathing heavily. “Stop following me,” my voice croaked out, still dry and parched from before. I swallowed hard and the noises from the steps below me quieted instantly.
