AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He looked like a kicked puppy, but I ignored it.
"We used to keep a key under one of these bricks," I mused, crouching down and beginning to pull at the bricks in the wall.
“The Demon had a hide-a-key?” Stellan sounded disbelieving.
The Demon sometimes had guests he wanted to allow into the house… terrible guests. “Yeah, I know. But everything looked normal in the house. He even said I could have friends over… Not that I ever would have.”
The fourth one was the charm, and with a little tugging I pulled off the brick face, revealing a small hollow where a spare house key still sat. Dread flinched through me as I grabbed it, replacing the brick before standing up.
I realized I was standing in the bushes outside my house where Sophia might’ve stood, because from here I could see partially into my old window. The thought made me shiver with sudden cold as if a ghost had just walked through me.
"Ready?" I asked, a hint of a quiver in my voice. Although I didn't know why I was asking him if he was ready; he wouldn't have any bad memories of this house. I never would have wanted them to come in.
Because there was a good chance that they never would've made it out.
Stellan and I walked into the living room. The house was empty. The Demon always had all of our furniture disposed of when we moved, getting rid of any possible evidence. For a second, I couldn't remember what the house had looked like when it was furnished.
And then I remembered, coming in the front door with my backpack over my shoulder. I'd heard Sophia’s voice right behind me, high and laughing, and I had spun around, panic welling in my chest.
She had been standing in the doorway, trying to follow me in. “I just wanted to see where the mysterious Delilah lived.”
It had been weird that I never invited her over even though I practically lived at her house. Now I could imagine the scene clearly. Sophia with a big, mischievous, innocent smile on her face and no idea how much danger she was in. The living room with its bland tan sectional and coffee table. The art on the walls that my father had picked up at a garage sale, including photos of some random woman that wasn't my mother. Everything was staged to look normal.
And then the Demon had been in the opposite doorway. He was still drying his hands with a towel. I was pretty sure he’d just come from the basement. “Delilah, why don't you introduce me to your friend?” he'd asked with his most charming smile.
That was before Sophia had known anything about what he really was, going off her journal entries.
“Are you alright?” Stellan asked.
“Super,” I managed. “Just taking a little walk down memory lane. It's... a good thing. Maybe it will jog some memory that we need.”
I couldn't be sure how much I had forgotten. Because my whole life had been one trauma after another, and they all blurred together. I knew Sophia had left the house that day, alive and well after making small talk with the Demon. My father had warned me I needed to be careful, but he hadn't been angry then. He worried sometimes that I lacked his charisma. He didn't want me to get close to anyone, but he wanted me to be popular. I always worried that if I became too popular, he'd start using me to draw girls into his web. He usually said it was important to hunt far from where we lived but I didn't trust he'd remain dedicated to that philosophy.
I walked through the house to the kitchen, which looked the same way it always had, and into the dining room where we'd sometimes dined with those who were about to be dead. The dining table was long gone, but I remembered sitting down with spaghetti Bolognese and a nice green salad and a man whose screams would stay with me for a long time.
“Do you want to go upstairs or down?” Stellan asked me, breaking open my reveries.
“We might as well go downstairs. It’s not going to get any easier.”
He hesitated, as if he wanted to tell me it was all right, we could just leave. But we couldn’t. We’d come this far and we needed to find answers. So he just rested his hand on my shoulder, as if to say he’d be with me the whole way.
And I shrugged his hand off.
Because he couldn’t be with me where I was going. No one would ever understand the dark memories that plagued me.
Chapter13
Aurora
The door to the basement stood in the hall. It had once been locked too, with a keypad lock, but that had been busted open by the police. Now the door stood slightly ajar. I still couldn’t shake the feeling it might lock behind us and trap us down there forever, leaving us to die in the dark.
And I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Stellan might be turning tender now to make sure I didn’t run, that I felt safe before he murdered me. After all, he’d thought I might have helped the Demon kill Sophia. He might still believe that, and he’d just lied and pretended he didn’t. And even if he knew I hadn’t hurt Sophia… he knew I was the reason she was dead. She’d come here to help me, and she’d never returned home.
I flicked on the lights, revealing the bare wooden stairs and a glimpse of gray concrete at the bottom. I started down the stairs with a creeping feeling traveling up my spine. My fingers wrapped the banister tightly, afraid Stellan might shove me from behind at any moment.
But I reached the hard tile floor. Stellan stopped next to me.
The basement had been methodically stripped of any reminder of what happened here. My father’s apprentice and I had worked long hours making sure no trace of blood and misery remained, and my back had ached and my hands had bled from the bleach.
