He turned away from the house, landing those beautiful eyes on me. Where there might’ve been annoyance or fury for me going to the basement was now nothing more than a deep-resting sadness. It hurt my heart to see such an expression on his handsome face.
“I thought, foolishly, your addition here would change the very nature of this place, but now I see that this place cannot be changed. An angel could step foot here and be tainted just like the rest.”
Okay, now Victor spoke in riddles. Was I the angel here, or was he?
Victor sighed, saying, “I fear you are now stuck here just as I am. Just as we all are. And, in the end, I know it’s my fault. Your torture is of my own doing, just as theirs is.” The cool night breeze blew between us, and his voice grew so quiet I almost didn’t hear him.
Almost, but I did. “What do you mean by that, Victor?” Surely he wasn’t saying everything bad happening to those poor guys in that house was because of him? Because of something he’d done?
If that was the case, maybe Lucien was right. Victor was a bad man.
A bad man who, maybe, only did bad things to try to get to me.
“I’m sure you know this place used to be other things. A boarding house for lost children. A church. An asylum. Really, the list could go on and on. For so long, I’d been at the heart of it. I took in the lost kids whose parents did not want them. I opened Grimmstead doors to the children whose parents could no longer stand to look at them wither away and die. One of the first was a rather poor boy.”
Ian. He was talking about Ian. My heart nearly stopped when I realized it, my eyes widening. This little conversation between us had somehow turned into a morbid confession I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
“I took in the child who heard things in the night no one else did. They thought he was possessed, and I offered them a way out. I welcomed another’s grotesque fascination with blood—his parents were worried he’d graduate from killing animals to killing other men and women.”
Dagen and Payne. I did not like the turn this conversation took. Not one bit. I wanted to be sick.
Victor held my stare as he added, “And, of course, who can forget the twin boys who were born sharing the same body? Neither would’ve lived long if the other would’ve been removed. I helped them when the world would’ve simply killed them.”
I couldn’t listen to any more. My head spun, my mind racing a thousand miles per second as I put it all together. Victor really was older than he looked, if he’d been through all of the cycles Grimmstead had.
And the others…came to him as children? I didn’t know what to think.
How did they all get here? How were they all still alive? From what Victor said, they were brought years ago. Did Grimmstead grant some kind of twisted immortality? Were we all ageless as we lived under its roof? I didn’t understand, and I was kind of fearful to try to.
“Ironic that I thought I was helping myself by helping them,” he whispered. “In the end, I helped no one. I simply trapped us all here, put us at the mercy of this place and its strange, eerie powers.”
I shook my head, not understanding, and even though I was hesitant to ask, I still found myself needing clarification here: “How did you help them?” Looking at the guys now, you wouldn’t think they’d been helped at all. If anything, their peculiarities had only grown worse during their time at Grimmstead.
“I suppose I didn’t. I suppose, under the guise of help, I actually sentenced them to purgatory.” Victor had to turn away from me, angling his gaze at the silver moon in the sky. “This place told me exactly what I needed to hear, convinced me that if I did as it wanted, it would give me what I always desired…”
I knew the answer before he said it, and still, when he said it, a shiver coursed through me.
“You,” Victor’s voice was hardly audible, carried away by the wind. “For so long, I thought my reward was the image of you in that room, and yet here you are, trapped here just like me—and now I realize how foolish I truly was back then.” He was measured in turning to face me again, a frown tugging at his lips. He took a step towards me, and I was frozen in place, unable to move away. “You’re the last person I want trapped here.”
Though I should move away, put distance between us, it also felt like a wasted thought. What good was running from what I felt when what I felt was undeniable, practically written in the stars?
“It’s not so bad, being stuck here with you guys,” I whispered, closing my eyes when he reached a hand to my face, tucking some of my hair behind an ear. Just a light sweeping of his fingertips on my cheeks, and my whole body burst into flames.
It was true, though. There were a lot worse places to be. Home with my father, for one. He was…
Well, now wasn’t that the strangest of things? I could hardly remember his face. His face, his voice, everything about him. It was as if my memories were slowly fading away. Perhaps because, in the end, my father didn’t matter. My crimes didn’t matter. Nothing but Grimmstead and its wild, crazy, handsome inhabitants did.
Victor loomed closer, and though our chests didn’t touch, I could feel his breath on my face. So close, and yet so far. The fingers brushing against my cheek fell to my side, grazing my hip as he murmured, “I want a lot of things, but you forgetting yourself has never been one of them. I thought…I thought you bringing me back would change things, but now I’m starting to realize I never had a handle on them. I only knew what this place wanted me to know, did what it wanted me to do. I fear I haven’t been myself in so long…”
Hearing this man, who I knew was capable of flipping the switch and acting like a controlling, possessive alpha, sound so utterly broken nearly broke me.
“Maybe I can help you,” I offered, though in reality I had no idea what the heck I was offering him. I’d helped Payne and Koda, right? Ian was a work in progress, but I knew I made the noise stop for Dagen, at least temporarily. Surely I could help Victor, too.
“I fear not even God himself could help me.”
A pang filled my heart, and I leaned forward, pressing my chest against his, standing on my tiptoes to kiss him. My lips brushed his for only a moment before he pulled away, turning his head and denying me the one thing I wanted most right now.
“Do you believe in hell, Felice?”
Victor’s question caught me off-guard, and I was slow in taking a step back, away from him, though my body longed to feel his skin on mine. For a while, all I could do was stare at him and wonder why he was asking such a strange question. But in Grimmstead, nothing was strange. This I should know by now.
“Do you believe in the devil?”
My brows furrowed. “Are you asking if I’m religious?”
“No, I’m not talking about Heaven and Hell in the strictest sense—nor about the fallen angel many believe to be the devil. I’m talking about the personification of evil itself. The chaos and the destruction darkness brings along with it.”
After everything I’d seen here, everything I’d witnessed, I’d be stupid to tell him no. “Honestly, I don’t know what I believe anymore.” A bigger truth I’d never admitted. This place really did make me question everything.
“I believe there are some places on this earth that are inherently evil. I’ve had a lot of time to think, and I do believe this place is one of them. A place where pure darkness seeps through the cracks—quite literally, here.” Victor paused, his eyes dropping to the grass, slowly traveling back up as he checked me out in the moonlight. “A Hellmouth.”
A Hellmouth? The word didn’t sound right, and yet when he said it, the ground below trembled with a gentle quake. A warning, cautioning us we were getting too close to the truth? Was Victor not supposed to share this with me?
After the quake settled, Victor told me, confidence oozing out of his features once again: “I want everyone to meet me out here tomorrow. It’s time we are all on the same page here.”
“What about the kids?”
“Forget the children. T
hey’re not real.”
Not real? I just…what? I didn’t get it. I had no idea what Victor was trying to say here, nor what he meant by Hellmouth. But just as I thought that particular thought, my mind flashed back to the basement, to the giant crack in the floor.
Was that…
No, no, it couldn’t be.
All I could say was “Okay,” but as I followed Victor back inside, I couldn’t help but feel like he was right.
Chapter Eight – Felice
I stood before a mirror, nothing but white walls around me. My hands gripped the marble countertop, and I met my amber eyes in the reflection. I couldn’t exactly remember how I got here, but I knew I shouldn’t be here. This place, it wasn’t home to me.
This was the mirror I grew up staring at myself in. This was the mirror, the beautiful, flawless, spotless white bathroom along with it, I’d aged in. This was me.
But it shouldn’t be. I wasn’t home, under my father’s thumb. I was at Grimmstead, and no parlor trick was going to make me forget that.
I pushed away from the mirror, leaving the bathroom. I wore jeans and a t-shirt; a simple outfit I hadn’t worn in what felt like years, sneakers on my feet. Nothing at all about this was normal.
I headed into the hall, going down the stairs. Everything was both familiar to me and achingly strange. Like I knew I should recognize every little thing about this house—the pictures hanging on the walls, the worn railing in the stairs, how the air seemed to feel just a bit too heavy—but it felt wrong.
This wasn’t Grimmstead. Was this a dream?
My feet took me to the first floor. I was about to leave the house, hoping that I’d magically wind up at Grimmstead before seeing anything else from my past, but a woman’s voice stopped me. A voice that sounded jarring…only in that I should never have heard it coming from someone else.
Because the voice was mine.
“Why in such a hurry?”
The voice came from the living room, and I froze, goosebumps rising on my arms, the hair sticking straight up on the back of my neck. I closed my eyes, knowing I couldn’t run from it, whatever the heck it was. Nope; instead, I turned away from the front door and made my way under the arch that separated the living room from the hall.
A giant room, complete with a huge new sectional and a curved TV screen sitting on its mantle. An overabundance of natural light, long curtains drawn to the sides to reveal the blinding light of day.
Another me sat, her knees wide apart and her arms resting on the back of the couch. She wore the same clothes I did, although there was a key difference between us, other than her manly way of sitting.
Her eyes were not amber, nor were there any whites to speak of. Every bit of her stare was black.
I did not want to step any closer to my doppelganger—I’d seen enough Vampire Diaries to know that doppelgangers were bad news.
“What is this? Who are you?” The questions came tumbling from my mouth before I could stop them, and I felt my stomach drop when I watched my own face smirk at me. That mouth…seemed a bit larger than the one I remembered seeing in the mirror. It was like I stared at a grotesque, twisted version of my face.
“I thought that much would be obvious,” my doppelganger spoke, lifting her hands off the back cushions of the couch.
There was no way that thing was me.
“Stop playing with me,” I said. I glanced up, looked all around, my will hardening. “This is Grimmstead, and you’re not real.”
“Close, but wrong on both counts.” She got up, moving almost too easily, too fluidly. “Tell me, Miss Fairday—” She took on a rough, scratchy tone as she spoke my name, and I immediately recognized it as Lucien’s voice, though it instantaneously returned to mine soon after. “—do you think you’re special?”
That seemed like a trick question. “I’m not sure how I should answer that,” I replied quietly.
“Then let me,” my doppelganger spoke, cocking her head. “You think you’re special because you brought Payne back. You think you’re the answer to their prayers, able to make their agony stop. Perhaps you are something special.” She circled me like a vulture, and I could do nothing but remain in place, terrified of what she would say next.
Somehow, someway, I knew it wouldn’t be good.
I shivered when I felt a finger snake through my hair and touch the nape of my neck. “Let me ask you this, then: don’t you think it’s weird that they’re the only ones you see? Why would they be walking around Grimmstead if you were indeed their savior? Victor thought you were the answer to it all; he thought, idiotically, with you, he’d make the powers his own and take full control…but that’s the beauty of the chaos, isn’t it? You can never truly control it.”
Like fire. You could harness it, you could guide it, but you could never control its each and every tendril.
“Let me tell you a secret, Felice.” This time, she sounded like Victor, but only for a moment. “You might relieve their symptoms, but you cannot take away the sickness. You are not the antidote—you’re worse. You overpower their capacities and their demons because you are worse.”
I didn’t want to listen to it, to her, to me—whatever. I couldn’t let her fill my head with lies, even if said lies made no sense whatsoever. And yet, I could not move from my position, watching with wide eyes as she circled me yet again, stopping when she stood directly before me, her black eyes ebbing with an unnamed darkness.
“Let me put it this way,” she said. “They are sick with nothing more than a petty cold, but you are the plague. They believe they’re getting better, but they’re not. All it will take to make them crumble is for you to realize the truth.”
My heart scarcely beat in my chest. “And what’s the truth?”
“The dead cannot leave Grimmstead.”
I said nothing, because my words failed me. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. Did that mean each and every one of the guys was dead?
“The dead are only alive because they are here. Leaving is impossible. Escape is inevitable, but fear not, for change will come, and by then, you will all be husks of what you are now.” The lips that were just a tad creepier than my own curled into a smile. “You might complete these men, but when you are gone, they will be shattered once again.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” A promise to this thing, whatever, whoever it was.
“You will not have a choice.”
The world around me turned white, blinding me, and as I shut my eyes and felt myself enveloped by the coldness of the light, I heard my voice whisper one other thing to me.
“Find yourself in the darkness.”
And then, like a manic game of light and dark, my eyes shot open and I stared at the ceiling in my bedroom, my heart racing. Light flooded through the window, grey clouds blocking out most of the sun outside. A day set to be dreary, like the first day I’d come here.
I sat up, feeling chilly as I tossed the covers off me and hurriedly got dressed. I nearly tripped as I zipped on my boots, trying to get ready as quickly as possible to head downstairs—today was the day Victor wanted to talk to the others, to confess whatever it was he had to confess—and I had to tell them about that dream.
If…if they were all dead, there would be no point in any of this. No getting out of here. Assuming everything my doppelganger told me was true.
I went to the door, throwing it open, practically running out—and ramming myself into a thin but solid chest. Hands on my arms steadied me, and I blinked up at the dark-eyed gaze behind the glasses.
“Dagen,” I spoke, heaving out a sigh. I breathed out, and still, even with his hands on me, I felt so very cold. I was about to say more, but I found I couldn’t.
Why? Oh, no reason—only that he looked terrible. As in, the stubble on his face was the longest I’d ever seen it. Heavy bags sat under his eyes. His hair was greasy, unkempt, and he looked to be wearing the same clothes he had been yesterday.
And here I th
ought Dagen had been doing better, after we’d been together with Ian. Apparently not.
“I need to talk to you,” he spoke, his fingers curling around my upper arms a tad too hard to be kind, a tad too rough to be comfortable. I expected the roughness from Lucien, from Victor, and even from Koda, but Dagen? Something bad must’ve been on his mind for him to act so untoward.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s not me,” he muttered, still holding onto me a bit too tightly.
“The others—”
“The others are in the dining hall, but they can wait. I need…I need to talk to you, Felice. Without the others. They can’t…I don’t want them to know what I did.” Dagen’s face grew pained, and my heart ached to see him like this, so obviously torn-up. “Or what I didn’t do. Trust me, I did what I could, but it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough here.”
I was able to pull myself out of Dagen’s grasp, stepping around him in the hall. I could tell whatever it was really bothered him, but now was not the time for individual problems. Now was the time to tell the guys about what I’d heard in my dream—whether or not anything I’d been told by my doppelganger was trustworthy was beyond me, but we could decide that together.
Dagen would have to wait.
I made it to the first floor, rounding through the hall to the dining area, where the guys stood—all of them, minus Ian, for he was sitting. Luckily, the children were nowhere to be seen. Good. I had the feeling the children were merely agents of this house anyway.
Victor stood near Lucien at the head of the table, both Grimmsteads looking, well, grim. Koda leaned near the window, his black hair spiked up and his eyes gazing out into the dreary light of day. Payne had his arms crossed, the scar on his pale neck looking better than ever. Ian slouched at the foot of the table, a glass with amber liquid before him.
I froze before their eyes turned to me, tentatively reaching up to my neck, where I should feel a bandage. I forgot to change it this morning. I—
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