Accepting his hand, she followed him inside and found the smell even worse, making her feel like throwing up. Nothing looked untoward about the room at all, the enforcers having done a good job at cleaning. The host’s possessions remained in their place, and those were what she was most interested in.
“Do you think she’s been its host from the start?” Zari asked shakily.
“Most likely,” Alexandru answered grimly. “If you check the shower, you’ll see dozens of bottles of hair dye. Hosting a demon will take its toll on a body, even a vampire’s, and this one had to dye the hair black constantly to avoid unnecessary questions.”
Her gaze strayed towards the host’s ID, and she recited a quick prayer for the soul of the vampire whose life the demon had stolen. It had been the professor assigned to her class’ bus, and she had been the reason why the demon had been able to sink its claws into Zari. It only needed one touch, and the host had managed that when she took the consent form from Zari’s hands.
Now, the vampire was dead, the demon was dead, but the danger wasn’t over.
Zari’s orange-colored visions were proof of that.
Taking a deep breath, she touched the ID.
THE SCHOOL WAS BURNING. The hospital was burning.
People were dying all around her, but she had to be saved because she was the soul seer, and she hated it.
“Go!” It was Katarina, screaming at Zari to leave.
“Go!” It was her Master, desperate to see her out of harm’s way.
And both of them were being burned alive.
Chapter Nine
ZARI
I was alone when I stole out early in the evening. I had told Alexandru that I needed to talk to Katarina, and I wanted him to pretend he didn’t know anything about it. I told him it was to keep Katarina from feeling awkward even more, but it was all a lie of course. More and more, I was convinced that I could be the world’s best liar as long as the situation called for it.
And this one definitely did.
Zipping my jacket up to my neck, I quickened my pace and prayed to God that I wasn’t lost. Only the sound of my feet hitting the pavement broke the silence around me. Everything else was deadly still.
Fear enveloped me when I finally came to a stop at the foot of the stairs leading up to the hospital entrance. Still abandoned, old, and decrepit, but I saw the place with new eyes. Now, it was more terrifying because in my visions, this was where Alexandru and Katarina would both die.
For me.
Taking out the book I had borrowed from Rhapsody, I opened it to the page I had bookmarked and reread the passage about turning a demon into a familiar, a practice that offered an individual almost infinite power but required huge sacrifice in return.
Erou had told me that they had suspicions about the demon not working alone. It had been too methodical, he said, for a lower demon. It was either a high-ranking demon masking its powers or it had been working under the command of another being.
Tonight, I would know for sure which one of it was.
The hospital doors created an eerie sound as I pushed them open. Pulling the torch out of my pocket, I switched it on and beamed the light on my surroundings. It was still hard to see the place, but at least I could slowly find my way without having to bump into a lot of things.
Retracing my steps in my visions, I circled around the stairs and, bending down, I ran my hands over the asymmetric wall under the steps. Finally, I found it, a tiny button that vandalized drawings had caused to disappear.
Pressing the button had the concealed door under the stairs swinging open, and the silence of the motion unnerved me. I almost wished it had made the same eerie creaking sound as the other door. Silence was too terrifying because it could mean so many things.
Crouching, I stepped inside and, looking around, I made sure it was the same passageway I saw in my dreams. Straightening to my full height, I fumbled my way to another set of stairs, which should lead to the basement. I had already taken the first step down when I saw that someone was waiting for me below.
She was missing one eye, her lips were the same grisly shade of red in the photo I had seen of her, and patches of her vein-less skin had been burnt to a crisp.
Elsa.
Once, she was a mentally abused girl whose parents had killed her by encasing her in a wood, turning her into a doll, before burning her alive.
Now, she was a ghost who left her wooden shell every night, not understanding that her little games had turned the place she grew up in into a ghost town.