But it was more than just idle curiosity that had lured her down that long hallway. She’d felt as if she were being lured to this chilled room.
Rotating slowly, anxiety tightening her muscles, she eyed the unmoving beds. Were they all occupied by the dead? Or were some alive? Were they even human? She didn’t want to find out, didn’t want to know. On quiet feet she quickly edged to the stairwell. All the while she was tense, feeling as if she were running out of time, that if she didn’t get out now, she might lose her opportunity.
She reached the stairwell and found another locked door with no release.
“Damn it,” she whispered through clenched teeth, and tried again, slamming her weight against the levers. Cold metal rattled loudly but didn’t give.
“Son of a—”
Scraape!
The horrid sound was right behind her.
She whirled.
There in the far corner the nurse in her white cap and uniform, her blue cape stark against the white walls, materialized as if from vapor. “She’s alive,” the nurse whispered in a low, raspy voice.
“Your sister is alive.”
Cassie backed up. Oh. Dear. God.
From the nurse’s earlobes, the red cross earrings glittered before turning into tiny red globules. The red drops splashed from her lobes to the shoulders of her uniform, running down her white dress, staining it red.
Shivering, Cassie swallowed hard and kept inching backward.
Scraape!
Wheels loose, one of the gurneys began rolling, hard metal casters scratching loudly against the tile. As it wheeled by, the draped body’s head and shoulders raised, the sheet sliding to the floor.
Allie’s bloodless face stared straight at her. “Cassie,” she hissed through blue lips that barely moved.
No!
“Help me . . .”
A scream echoed through the morgue.
Cassie blinked awake.
Her heart was trip-hammering. The scream she’d heard had come from her own lips. Sweating, nearly hyperventilating, she was lying on her own bed in her apartment in LA. Dear God, it was five-thirty in the morning, not quite dawn. The shadowed room slowly sharpened into view and she told herself to calm down. It was just a bad dream, a nightmare, nothing more.
But the vision had been so real and surreal.
She let out her breath slowly, her hands fisting in the sheets as she forced herself to think rationally, to not freak out, to take control and—
Scraape!
She shrieked, spinning on the bed as the sound seemed to reverberate through the walls. “What the hell?” Leaping from the mattress, she stared at the window positioned over her headboard and heard the sound again, but this time she saw the tree branch moving to scratch the glass.
Her shoulders slumped in relief.
That was all.
Nothing sinister.
Nothing evil.
Just a damned branch moving in the wind.