Sally Smirk.

Chapter Twenty-four

Sally rummaged through the cabinets, searching for the bottle of pills Frank had left her. Rayne was at work, and for the past week she had been seeing the boy on the stairs and the girl in the chandelier over and over, and Rayne had hidden the medicine from her after she managed to steal it from his back pocket. She never got to take it, he easily took it away from her and hid it.

"Jinxx! Where did he put it?"

The cat tilted his head and pounced on her shoulder.

"Not now cat!" She brushed him off and continued to rummage through the cabinets.

She gave up in the kitchen and moved to the other medicine cabinet in Rayne's room. There, she found several prescription bottles full of all different kinds of medication. Antidepressants, sleeping pills, COPD pills. But she couldn't find any of hers. She could hear the boy from the stairs run up and down the hall laughing.

"Rayne I am going to kill you when you get home." She whispered. She remembered the crawl space in the closet.

She peeled back the panel of the wall and found the treasure she had been searching for. 'Sally McKinnon. Take no more than three a day, at four hour intervals.' Was printed on the label.

She heard the door lock click. "Saaaaalllllyy! I'm baaaack!"

She fumbled to open the container, dropping it repeatedly.

"Sally, sweetie. I got you a thing. You'll like it." She could hear him running up the stairs.

As she finagled one into her hand, the closet door flung open.

"DON'T YOU EVEN DARE." Rayne shouted. He smacked the bottle away from her and forced her to let go of the one in her hand. "I thought I told you already that these are dangerous! That's why I hid them from you!"

"They aren't dangerous! They're supposed to help-"

"Sally, that's like a man telling you 'Get in my van I have candy.' Even if he does have candy you don't eat it. It could be drugged!" He waved his arms through the air frantically. Furious that Sally hadn't forgotten about the medicine.

"What if it's my favorite candy though?" She said, saucily.

"If you want fricken candy, I will get you candy. But medicine from a weird guy who found our house, is not candy. And there is no way in hell that I am going to let you have any of this. I don't care what you see." He crushed each bright blue pill beneath his heel.

"Are we having our first actual fight?" She whispered.

"I don't know, is fighting protecting someone? Because that's not what I was taught that it was."

"You aren't here to help! That sounds selfish, but I see these... These things! And there's nothing I can do about it! At this point I would rather die than have to see them again."

He grasped her arms and held them so that she couldn't escape. "Sally, don't you ever say anything like that ever again. Do you understand? I don't know what I would do with myself if you did die. Now stop, before you make me cry."

She was breathless. He was tearing up, and she couldn't say a word, she was so scared.

"R-Rayne... I-"

He let go of her and looked up.

"I- I... There's a girl and boy in the house. I never recovered. I faked it. I'm no better than I was before." She had gone into another trance. He hadn't seen her like this for months. Pale, trembling, with her eyes wide and unblinking.

"That's fine. Well, it's not fine but... I just don't want you to take any of that. It's not like they would help anyway if you never recovered. Let's go to look around. And I'm going to show you something."