Page 16 of Don’t Let Him In

Cracked lips part, my throat bobbing around words I can’t seem to dredge up.

Something is terribly, terribly wrong.

The tremor in my hands increases, snaking through my arms and sinking into my legs until it’s nearly impossible to maintain a steady step. A moment later, the toe of my shoe snags on a loose floorboard, sending me stumbling sideways with a hiss as my shoulder clips the utility closet, something inside crashing to the ground.

That’s what finally makes him react.

Dax gasps, his deep, smoky baritone carrying from somewhere ahead.

For a split second, everything inside me stills. I squint into the diminished moonlight stretching across the long corridor.

“Who’s there?”

Foolishly enough, the pinpricks of anxiety ebb in my chest, if only by a fraction. He’s heard me.

Wordlessly nodding to myself, I latch onto the instant reassurances my mind spins up, weaving every event into something plausible and chalking up the parts that make no sense to anxiety and overwhelm.

That’s it. It’s dark and I’m exhausted. A trick of the mind is all.

The longer I stare, the more my eyes adjust to the oppressive dark, chest tight as he takes one long, hesitant step toward me.

Two shiny, ice-blue eyes materialize before me, mildly bloodshot as they blink at uneven intervals while fixing on me through the dark. He doesn’t say anything. We lapse into a tense silence.

Barbed wire laces my throat. Despite my best effort to ground myself, I shrink inward the longer he stares without uttering a word, his eyes fixed on me with terrifying precision. Then he pivots around as though I’m not even there.

My lips part, wobbling, but the words fail me. I try again. “Dax?”

The name comes out thin and uncertain, my muscles jerking with a sensation I can’t place.

He doesn’t hear me. Or can’t hear me.

Whatever fear floods my mind is immediately smothered beneath another rush of tears, and I pitch forward, desperately following him.

This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t…it just couldn’t…

I’m not crazy.

Something inside me cracks, a sharp, quick snap that leaves me disoriented, fumbling over my feet before my body gives out entirely and sends me plunging into Dax. My hands glitch and blur in front of my face, my throat scraping raw with a petrified shout at the sight of them.

Unable to break the fall, I topple into an open room ahead, scraping my knee hard against the heaved floorboards. Pain tears through me, but it barely registers against the pressure clasped around my throat.

I don’t understand.

How is this happening?

My hands keep flickering apart at the edges before smoothing back into place whenever I blink. I shake my head rapidly, disbelief clawing its way higher no matter how hard I try to force it down.

Panic sends me skittering backward across the floor, my eyes jerking back to Dax just a couple inches away. A raging headache spikes behind my eyes, warping his familiar smile into a fuzzy, swarming haze until it appears almost wolfish.

Bile writhes in my stomach as a brisk draft slips through the broken windows upstairs, stirring a high, almost human-like whine in the air before muffled laughter intercepts it.

The sound yanks my attention from the entryway to Blair, tucked behind the slightly wedged door, obscured just enough to avoid being noticed.

Desperate, I scramble toward her, still sprawled across the soot-covered ground, the cuts under my sheer tights stinging along the way. Lips trembling, my fingers hook around her ankle. “H-help.”

The skin over my hand thins.

Flickers.