“Be careful.” I laid my hand on his arm. “Even a third or a fifth cousin is dangerous. Especially when they’re fighting for their lives.”
I wouldn’t tell him I wished he didn’t have to do this. There wasn’t any point in saying it.
“Just be careful.”
He shrugged off my hand and drew a stack of pancakes, jutting his chin toward the door. His stomach rumbled, and his eyes lit with humor.
He was masking whatever he was feeling. He didn’t want to talk about how much he feared conjurers and how the end of his last life was racing toward him.
It was easier to think about pancakes than the fact that in a few hours, he might be dead.
“You go ahead. I’ll be just a minute.”
As he turned, I grabbed his sleeve and tugged him back. He had a cowlick sticking straight in the air. I stood on my tiptoes and reached up to smooth it down. It sprang right back up. Stubborn. I licked my hand, brushed it down, and held it in place.
Griff snorted. When I pulled away, the cowlick popped back up.
“It was worth a try.” I rumpled Griff’s fluffy hair. “See you.”
He gave me a half-smile and then hurried out the door, leaving me alone in my room.
I quickly stripped and changed into a new pair of jeans and a T-shirt and tugged on my boots. I crouched next to the bed and wiped away the blood I’d smeared under the frame.
I hadn’t dreamed about the ghost train, but I’d had a dream that something was lurking under the bed, raging at the locked frame, shouting and pounding. Then the shadowed figure had bent down and found the pebble I’d thrown into the abyss under the bed. They’d clutched it in their hand and laughed.
I’d woken gasping and sweating, with that laughter echoing in my ears.
I had one mission. I needed to find the pebble Finn had given me. I’d thrown it into the abyss so no one would find it, but clearly, anyone walking the tunnels could stumble on it. Everyone knew some creatures could read the history of objects as easily as Jagger read ancestry in blood.
I knocked on the floor, chanting the rhyme to open the abyss.
There wasn’t anything but darkness. There wasn’t any sound. I sent up a prayer and then dropped down into the hole.
It wasn’t a dream.
Something or someone had been under my bed last night. Maybe it was the monster under the bed, but I didn’t think so. Harry had claimed the monster was a weak coward. He’d scoffed at him and hadn’t been afraid at all.
But Harry had died very, very afraid.
There was a burned-flesh stench. The bitter smell of singed hair and charred skin. Harry’s bowels had leaked, and my eyes watered as I held back a gag. There wasn’t a breeze or wind in the tunnel, so the death smell lingered heavily. Maybe it would sink permanently into the marrow-white, spongy walls.
I turned my face to the side, breathing shallowly through my mouth. The air stung. It was heavy with an acrid, biting smoke.
The rounded tunnel walls pulsed, letting off a dim reddish-white glow. The humming whoosh was still there, but today, the whoosh had twisted into a pained moan. The walls were riddled with long, beastlike gouges. Claw. Tooth. Fang.
Jackaltooth?
No.
There was fire too. Scorch marks singed the walls, and red liquid leaked from the black. A jackaltooth, no matter how violent, couldn’t shoot flame.
Looking up at the underside of my bed, I saw a massacre of deep scratches, claw marks, and fist-size indents. Some horror had been knocking on my door.
A cold chill brushed over my skin, and I felt the ghost of a claw trailing down my spine. I shivered and crouched next to Harry’s body.
My stomach churned. He was barely recognizable. It seemed to me that whatever had done this had abused him long after he was gone. Sometimes, animals played with their dead prey, scratching it, biting it, tossing it in the air, well after death. This was different. There was a twisted enjoyment here.
“What did this to you?” I whispered. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
