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“Are you ready?” Julia asks, brushing my hair from my face.
“No, but… we’ve got to go either way and the longer we put it off… the more likely it will all be for nothing.”
Julia goes to the frame first, peeking her head through and then climbing through the frame, not floating through the wall like she would normally and turns back to me, holding out her hand.
“The frame will be too hot to touch,” she warns. “I might burn you.”
“Okay…” I look around the room and snatch the sheet off the settee, folding it three times to give myself enough padding to help get me through the portal and across to her.
When my boots hit the floor, an unsettled feeling washes over my skin, like hundreds of ants racing across my flesh.
We’re in the same house… but nothing’s broken.
The floorboards are pristine. The lamp glass isn’t shattered. But everything is leached of its color.
Juliafitshere.
I shove that thought away. She doesn’t belong in hell. She belongs with me.
“Is this what it looked like… before?” I ask as Julia wanders to the opposite wall.
“Yes.” She touches a crystal dangling from a table-side lamp. “We can linger here. It’s safe inside these walls, but outside… If a demon finds us, they’ll shove you back through.”
The way she says it makes me think, “Just me?”
“You don’t belong here.”
It isn’t hard to guess that every moment she spends here puts her at risk.
I take her hand. “We’ll hurry.”
I walk down the stairs and skip the last one out of habit… even though I didn’t need to.
Julia follows me without a word.
I go to the drawing room first. The floor is clear of the sand circle. There are no remnants of the gathering I had tonight… And there are no bodies.
“I had hoped…”
“They left.” Julia says, and when I look back at her, her eyes are on the floor. “I can see their footprints.”
“I can’t.”
She looks at me with an apologetic smile. “There will be many things here that I can see which you cannot.”
I don’t belong here.
“Where did they go?”
“To find the entrance to their specific hells…” she looks from me to the front door and then back again. “This house is a havenfor us… but not for them. They would have been compelled to leave.”
And I have to go find them.
Julia doesn’t touch the doorknob and I hesitate. “The frame was too hot, will this be too?”
“No.” She smiles at me and I see… fear in the cant of her lips. “It’s been a very long time since I left this house… I just needed to take a moment.”
I understand, but, “I don’t think we have time.”
