“Rose?” I whispered, my grip tight on the knife as I inched forward, resisting the urge to outstretch my hand toward the darkness. While the thought of warding off the darkness with my hand was enticing, the idea also brought images of heroines reaching out, calling into the abyss, and finding themselves dragged to the bottom without any hopes of escaping. I was already calling into the darkness. I was not going to reach for it as well.
Something rustled to my left.
I froze, eyes narrowing as I tried to see clearly. But the darkness was everlasting. It wasn’t actually everlasting, of course, seeing how I was staring into what appeared to be a shallow closet (one that you could barely walk into before hitting the wall), but as cold sweat trickled down the back of my neck I could truly believe that this darkness had no end.
The question “Hello?” sprang to my lips, but I swallowed it down before it could escape. “Rose?” I whispered instead. It wasn’t much different from saying hello, but it made me feel a little less like the girls in the movies and more like the girl who was on a fervent search for her comrades. It would have been better to say nothing, but with no light to help me see, I didn’t have much of a choice. “Valarie?”
I bit back a yelp as a figure shot forward. Their hand raked the side of my cheek, and I stumbled backward, barely regaining my balance before I fell to the floor. The person disappeared as soon as they appeared, enveloping completely in the darkness. My hand flew up to my cheek, and I winced. Their nails had drawn blood.
“Serenity?” Coden whispered from behind me. I spun around to see a concerned expression on his face. “What happened?”
“Someone—someone scratched me,” I replied, sparing one last glance at the closet before moving toward Coden. I pulled my fingers away from my face, wincing again as my eyes landed on the blood coating them. It wasn’t much, especially compared to the amount I’d seen tonight, but it still hurt my stomach to see it. After tonight, if I survived, I had a feeling that even just a dot of blood would be enough to make me sick.
Coden’s eyebrows furrowed, and he glanced toward the closet. “Let’s get out of here,” he said after a short moment. “They’re not in here.”
I nodded and, without another word, followed Coden out of the room. In the back of my mind I knew that whoever had scratched me was just trying to defend themselves, but for the most part I was just shocked that of all things I’d gotten scratched. In here, I could expect to be chased, stabbed, or shot. But scratched?
○
“Are you okay?” Coden asked softly as we emerged from the room.
My eyes reached for his and then fell down toward his cheeks, where Al’s cuts remained. His response to that same question rang through my head. I’ll live. He’d been cut with a knife and he’d shaken it off as though it was nothing. To think that I’d be anything but okay with something as trivial as getting scratched on the cheek seemed ridiculous and comical at the same time. “Yeah,” I said softly, shaking my head. “It was just a scratch.”
Coden nodded, frowning as he rubbed his eye with the palm of his hand. It was then that I noticed just how truly exhausted he was. Though he tried to hide it—or maybe he just didn’t notice—I could tell. How badly was his body begging for him to lay down, to rest just for a little while? Could he even register the fact that his body was tired, or was he so pumped up on adrenaline that it didn’t cross his mind? My eyebrows creased as I asked those same questions to myself. Honestly, I didn’t know for sure.
We fell quiet for a little while after that. I continued to grip the knife securely in my hand, my heartbeat and our steady breathing the only background noise as we searched fervently for any sign of Rosalie and Valarie. Sometimes a scream or a gunshot would join in with the dysfunctional melody, but other than that, it was almost silent. And that set me on edge. This wasn’t the closet, where Coden and I had completely closed off the world around us. We were out in the open. Not that there weren’t periods of time when it went quiet like this, but just a little while ago it felt like the world was nothing but cries and screeches of terror and pounding footsteps on the floor. Or maybe it wasn’t a little while ago at all. Who the hell knew anymore?
