She begun to fear that her parasol had skewered too deep and penetrated him, too, but as she started to feel around his body for any other wounds, fingers ghosting over the chaffed scars of his throat and wrists, he gasped violently, eyes snapping open as his lungs swallowed a desperate breath of air.
It startled Jane at first, but then she captured his face in her hands, pleading for his eyes to meet hers. Her thumbs rubbed over his lips, peeling them back just enough to show that his teeth were, blessedly, blunt and human.
But he didn’t look at her. He instead gawked at the skyabove. He didn’t even blink as the rain splattered across his face.
“W-We… We are outside?” he rasped, throat bobbing in harsh a swallow.
For some reason she couldn’t quite place, Jane chuffed out an exasperated laugh. “Yes, quite an astute observation—”
“And it… it is dark. Is it nighttime?” His eyes widened as panic seemingly took hold of him. A hand reached up to take hers that had now rested on his shoulder. His grip turned his knuckles white.
“Well, I was hoping it may be nearly dawn by now—”
“Outside…at night…Jane—”
She pressed a palm to his mouth, silencing him.
“Yes, yes, Terence,” she breathed. Her eyes blinked rapidly, against the heat of tears and the chill of rain. “We are outside.”
He continued to urgently search the sky, perhaps for an answer, or something to calm himself, but after a long time, as the rain began to quiet, his eyes finally flittered to look up at Jane. A hand, still slick with the beast’s meaty bits, reached up to skim across her cheek. It left a streak of brown gore in its wake. Jane already felt it seeping deep into her skin, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
His brows furrowed as he brushed her face again, perhaps convinced that what he was living now wasn’t reality at all, but instead a nightmare.
Jane huffed out another small laugh, tears now in her eyes as she leaned into his touch, using her hand to keep it there, and she briefly kissed his knuckles. He was alive—that much she could celebrate, at least, even if there was the chance that it may have been minute and pointless.
“Jane…” Terence started, but Jane silenced him with another kiss, gentle, chaste, cherishing. She didn’t care that he tasted ofmud, blood, and brimstone, for he also tasted of freedom.
CHAPTER
Twenty
Following a day of uneasy quiet, everyone seemingly too apprehensive to speak on what just transpired the night before, Terence insisted that he stay in the cellar as evening began to fall upon the Drowning House. As much as Jane wished to plead with him to stay with her upstairs and to join her in her hopes that she, somehow, slain the beast, banished Claunek, and freed him of whatever curse that had been put upon him, she let him go down to the cellar with a heavy heart and bated breath. She then went up to the washroom, locking it behind her.
Instead of going to bed, Jane huddled herself in the tub stuffed with quilts and a throw pillow. She hugged her knees to her chest and held her breath as she waited. She listened for any sort of screams or roars or the clanking of chains. But as none of thosecame, the creeping silence made her afraid. Perhaps something worse had come to happen.
What if Claunek had clawed its way up from Hell to possess Terence itself? Would it find a way to turn perhaps a Wolf’s Run villager into another one of its beasts to hunt them down out of revenge?
She shuddered and resisted the urge to vomit. She’d lost the knife in the marsh, and the Winchester, likely now clogged with mud, still rested in the stone angel’s arms. She’d no defenses left.
A week ago, Jane wouldn’t ever have entertained the idea of such a thing happening, for demons weren’t real to her and subjects of the occult were merely party tricks. She firmly believed in science, not magic! But now, the idea made her feel sick. Magic, in some form, did exist. And she would be content if she never even heard a murmuring of it ever again.
She didn’t know how much time passed before the silence became unbearable and she hauled herself from the tub. She tiptoed down the stairs, each step as tentative as the last; she feared that a sound as simple as a creaking floorboard could trigger some sort of horrific event. But as she reached the bottom of the steps, she paused to listen, and, upon hearing no disconcerting sounds nor encountering any beast or demon, she hesitantly released a breath through her lips.
But when she stepped into the sitting room and saw Terence looming at the windows, she practically leaped out of her skin with a yelp. Her cry startled him as well and he whirled around to meet her.
He stared at her with that dazed expression again, as if he were looking upon a dream rather than something of flesh and blood. He wore only a robe, the front of which opened to exposea triangle of bare chest and the pink slant of his throat’s scar. His hair came to possess some semblance of grooming, his face clean, his form silhouetted by a hazy silver light filtering in through the windows. Shadows deepened the hollows of his face, his cheeks, his eyes, and starlight highlighted the silver at his temples.
Jane couldn’t help but find the scene utterly attractive, nearly romantic, in its own sort of way—though she couldn’t decide if it was because of how… lasciviously he was dressed or if it was the fact she was seeinghimstanding here rather than a beast ready to pounce on her to tear her to shreds.
His mouth nearly toyed into a smile, eyes glittering briefly, but then a worried pinch creased their corners as his lips fell slack.
“What time of day is it, Jane?” He whispered, hoarse. “Is it still nighttime?”
“Yes,” she said. “Shouldn’t be any later than nine, I reckon.”
Too eagerly, she joined him by the open window. A gust of cool air—as well as her own nerves and selfish cravings—pressed her against him.
The sky was utterly clear. No clouds, no rain. Jane wanted to cry.
