“I’m here, little one.”
I’m taken aback when she brushes out of my arms. But rather than go to him like I expect, she staggers past him and out into the bedroom.
“Lenora?”
She ignores him and ambles to the door. It’s tugged open and she shuffles out into the corridor.
“What is wrong with her?” The demon rounds on me like I had something to do with this.
I bite back the outrage hot on my tongue and answer, “I think she’s sleepwalking.”
Whatever response he has is pushed aside as he hurries after her only to smack into an invisible wall at the threshold. His entire body jerks back at the force.
“What is it?” I ask, wondering what fresh hell this was if we are trapped in this room with Lenora out there wandering around alone.
“I can only go where there are mirrors,” he snarls. His eyes are no longer pools of black, but an ocean of crimson. They blazeagainst the contours of his twisted face. Over the serrated lines of his bared fangs. “Get her!”
I don’t need to be told twice.
I bolt past him and sprint down the corridor. Lenora is no longer on the second floor. I catch a subtle hint of her dress as she rounds the corner and disappears down the stairs.
“I counted,” she’s mumbling as she hits the bottom landing and veers left. “Tomorrow.”
I thunder down the stairs after her and reach her as she reaches to take a candlestick off a nearby table. A fresh, long stem candle already lit. I don’t pause to ask how or who would have lit it.
“Maybe,” she says, taking the light and moving slowly down the hall leading to the solarium. “Where it rains.”
Her words are nonsense.
A jumble of phrases that can’t be pieced together even as I try.
Overhead, I hear the demon roar and beat his fist, and I understand his frustration even while a part of me relishes it. Still, Lenora is more important than my satisfaction and I need to get her back upstairs.
“The box.” She suddenly stops and turns to me. In the shadows, she has no eyes, only the hollow sockets of a skeleton with dark, shiny pinpricks of light at their center. “It’s in the box.”
A chill scuttles down my spine at the echoing hiss. At the hollow gauntness of her features.
“What is?” I ask.
“Destroy the box.”
The urgency in the statement, the grating scrape of steel over stone has every instinct in my body begging to step back. But I can’t leave her.
“What box?”
Her head snaps to the side, a jerking twitch that snaps the bones of her neck. And I flinch.
“Kill him.”
I’m trying to piece it together, but none of it makes sense.
“Julen Duval?”
“Destroy the box.”
The candlestick slips from her fingers and slams into the marble with a resounding clatter that — even while I watched it plummet to the ground — causes me to jump. The flame sputters out, but I have only a second to notice when Lenora collapses. Her knees fold beneath her and I barely manage to catch her.
Overhead, the demon is waging a full war in my bedroom. His fury echoes with violence across every wall, filling the manor with a sound that I will never unhear.
