Bleeding Roses

Chapter 23

~Bleeding Roses~

Chapter 23

“Jace? Jace, is that you?” I spoke to him softly. 

He came towards me silently, swiftly, reaching his arms around my neck and pulling me to his chest. 

“Do you love me?” he whispered, his breath brushing against my ear and blowing back my hair. I gripped his shirt more tightly in my tense fists. 

“Jace...”

His arms tightened. “Do you love me?” 

“Yes!” I gasped, “Oh, yes. I do.” 

“Good.” He started to chuckle, his chest rumbling under my cheek. I tried to pull back, but he only held me all the more tightly. 

His laughter was booming now, echoing off the walls and settling deep into my bones. I clawed at his hands around my neck, then froze in terror. 

They were bone hands, a skeleton’s hands with all the joints attached. 

“Jace!” I yelled. 

“Oh, darling Annie, how can you be so stupid?” Stupid? He thinks I’m stupid? 

I was momentarily distracted by that, and I faltered in my attack. Sensing this, he too relaxed. 

I took this chance to push against his chest with all my might, tumbling back on the floor. 

Behind Jace’s head the stars twinkled, the night sky seeming so far away and so unable to help. The soft grass pressing against my mostly bare legs tickled, and I unconsciously reached down to pull my white, barely there nightgown more under my body. Behind Jace the plain stretched for what seemed like miles, and I knew no help would be coming any time soon. But that was not the most frightening thing. 

It was his face, but it wasn’t. It was what was under his face. The black holes were his eyes should have been seemed to be staring at me, and his lip-less mouth gaped open just a bit. His two nostril holes seemed black and endless, hopeless, just like the rest of his precious, once gorgeous face. 

I sat there stunned for a moment, knowing I should scream, should run. But my body was frozen. I couldn’t move one muscle even if I tried with as much force as my body contained. 

“Jace...” I murmured, “what happened to you?” 

He seemed to grin, but I couldn’t be sure since his plush, full, cherry red lips were nowhere to be found. 

“Oh, daaaarling, I am not Jace.”

My eyes widened. “Who are you?” 

Then the laughter was back in sweeping waves, pounding into my eardrums and making my head hurt. 

Out of nowhere it appeared. A simple, brown, wooden chair with even more horrors sitting atop of it. 

Jace’s mouth was taped shut, ropes crisscrossing his body and a stream of blood dripping from his temple.

The skeleton turned, a machete suddenly in his grasp. 

“NO!!” I screamed, reaching towards the skeleton. 

It turned. “This is what you wanted isn’t it?” 

Before I could even open my mouth to reply, the skeleton had plunged the knife straight through his Jace’s chest, and at the same time, the skeleton and Jace both slumped forward, dead.