A Drop of Night(58)

I scream. Shove him off. Hayden is behind him, holding the serrated hunting knife. The blade glints ruby in the light. His shirt is covered in blood. “Anouk?” he whispers. His eyes are wide.

I scrabble backward, falling into Lilly’s sleeping form. “What did you do?”

Hayden drops the knife and it slides across the floor, leaving a red smear. “He got free, I don’t know how, he charged you!” His voice is scared.

Blood is starting to pool under Perdu, dark, dark red. He’s still breathing, gurgling softly. Lilly’s sitting up, pushing me away.

“What happened?” Jules is sitting up, too. “What’s going on?”

“I heard him when he started crawling or you would be dead, too,” Hayden says. “We need to go.”

Lilly sees Perdu and lets out a shriek that quickly devolves into a tired, defeated moan. Hayden squeezes past them, starts grabbing things off the shelves, toppling my five careful piles. Food packets and batteries go spinning, falling to the floor. He’s got the flashlights. The batteries.

“Everybody up!” he bellows over his shoulder. “We’re getting out of here.”

“He’s bleeding,” Lilly says. “He’s dying!” She crawls to him, rolls him over. She’s trying to staunch the flow of blood from the wound in his back with her bare hands, but there’s too much of it, and there’s something weird about: it’s thick and gloopy, and something is swimming in it, strands of darkness––– Hayden shoves her away. “Don’t get close to him,” he growls, but she shoves him back, crying.

“Hayden, he’s going to die.” She slides around him. Starts looping the leftover gauze from Will over Perdu’s wound. It’s soaked through instantly.

I don’t know what to do. I feel sick. Will is sitting perfectly still, staring at the knife on the floor. The buzz is back, dark and low, pulsating in the air. Everything is pandemonium, everyone crawling over everyone else.

“We should never have let him in here,” Jules says. “This was your stupid idea, Hayden!”

Hayden practically throws the three flashlights at us. Now he’s snapping open the black, oblong box again. Inside is the handgun, encased in black foam. He takes it out and shoves it into his waistband.

“What about Perdu?” Jules asks, and Lilly starts smacking the metal arch of the wall, her eyes squeezed shut.

Hayden is unbarring the hatch, crawling out. “Leave him,” he says over his shoulder. “We’re not coming back.”

Lilly looks at me, her face streaked with tears. I meet her gaze for a fraction of a second. Shake my head and scramble out after Hayden.

Flashlights click on. The floor creaks under our feet. I catch one last glimpse of Perdu in the panic room. His head is tipped back, eyes wide as he watches us go. Hayden slams the hatch shut. Now it’s just us, the dark, our flashlight beams swooping along the walls.

We hurry east, the way we came, darting through the doors as quietly as we can. Hayden’s up front, then me, Will, Lilly, Jules. We’re drawn out in a line.

Will taps my shoulder with his good hand. I glance back at him. “Anouk?” he says under his breath.

“Yeah?”

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure.”

He starts talking, fast. “It’s Perdu. I don’t know if I was imagining things or what, but when he was in the panic room, he—”

Hayden doubles back. “Stay close,” he mutters. I recognize the bedroom we’re in. The ornate four-poster, tasseled ropes missing from the canopy. Somewhere up ahead I hear a dull rushing, crackling sound, like a distant waterfall.

I look over at Will, waiting for him to continue, hoping he’ll save it for later.

He sees my expression. Nods. “I don’t know what I saw,” he says, moving away from me again. “I’m going crazy.”

Join the club. We’re back in the antechamber to Jellyfish Hall, the cloakroom with its dozens of small drawers and cupboards. It seems smaller somehow. Our light beams bounce on something. Something that definitely wasn’t there before.

“What the—” Jules starts to say. My stomach drops.

A roiling mass hangs in the darkness. The doors to Jellyfish Hall are half gone. Blue fumes are creeping toward us in a hissing, bitter wall.



“Get out!” Will yells. “Out!”

We stumble backward, turn, run. Hayden’s screaming, raging, like the whole universe has conspired against him. We back into the bedroom, try the set of doors in the eastern wall. They lead into a room buzzing with magnets. It’s not the one we passed through earlier. This one is a billiards room, and the orbs are still in the walls, shimmering, ready to smash anyone who enters. Hayden is almost jerked in, the gun in his pants dragging him through the door. We all pull him back, clawing at his shoulders, trying to get him into the bedroom. Will slams the doors shut. We pile up against the bed, gasping.

“Now what?” Lilly whispers.

Now what, indeed. We can’t go back to the panic room. It’s Perdu’s tomb now. I think of him shut up in there, wheezing, almost dead, maybe all the way dead.

Hayden has his head in his hands, fingers working his scalp. “I want out,” he says, his voice awful, deep and grating. “I hate this. I hate them.”