Page 15 of The Ghost and the Graveyard (Knight Games 1)
"Are you the sorter?" she asked in a voice lined with static as if the air between us was causing a bad connection.
I stared, eyes wide and voice mute with shock.
"Do you seek the book and blade?"
Her tendrils wormed lower, onto the next stair. I still couldn't form words, so I shook my head.
"Are you the sorter?" she asked again.
Sorter? "N-no," I stuttered.
The parchment colored skin of her face began to glow above her high lace collar, then tightened like shrink-wrap to her skull. Her eyes became burning embers in their bony pits, and her teeth elongated.
"Get out of my house!" she bellowed.
What the fuck? A cold wind powered toward me, a whistling cyclone of fury that made the floor quake and the shutters bang against the walls from their place outside the windows. The pots and pans, hinged to the pot rack in the kitchen, crash-boom-banged in the mounting interior-tornado. My laptop crashed to the hardwood floor. Papers fluttered by, my notes and work forms, circling like misguided snowflakes. In the dining room, the chairs took turns pulling themselves out and then pushing themselves back in at the table.
Anyone in her right mind would have run, but I couldn't move. My muscles and vocal chords froze from fear, and my feet weighed two tons each. I couldn't even breathe.
The torso descended the stairs, weightless but menacing, piercing me with that monstrous gaze. "Get out!" she bellowed again.
This had to be a nightmare. I'd fallen asleep at the computer and was having a nightmare. Why weren't my muscles moving?
Closer, she drifted. I had to make a run for it. I had to move. My jaw sagged. I was still holding my breath.
A man stepped between the ghost and me. Where did he come from? He lifted two fingers over his shoulder, and the wind stopped, the pans clinked to a rest, the shutters halted their wicked cacophony.
"Oh thank God," I said and let the air rush out of my burning lungs.
He turned toward the ghost, held out his hand, and said, "Prudence, come on. Knock it off. You're scaring her."
"She doesn't belong here!" the old lady yelled.
The man turned a gentle smile and warm, green eyes toward me. His sandy brown hair was unkempt, and his chin was covered in stubble that somehow seemed to add to his character. He put his hands on the hips of his jeans, flipping the sides of his sport jacket back, arms akimbo like he didn't know what to make of me.
"She's not hurting anything, Prudence. Please. Go back to the attic." He waved his arm.
The spectral crone gave an exasperated sigh and dissolved into mist.
"Th-thank you," I stuttered.
"You're welcome."
I was about to ask who he was and where he had come from when I noticed smoke. After everything else, was the house on fire? I searched for the source.
Gray tendrils curled up from his feet.
"You're on fire!" I said.
It advanced up his limbs, to his knees, to his hips, until the man was nothing but a mist with two green orbs where his eyes had been.
It was the loudest scream of my life. "Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!"
I don't remember opening the door, and I didn't stop for my shoes. I ran into the cool night air, arms flailing, with an unyielding, high-pitched screech that was sure to wake any soul within a five-mile radius. Across the bridge and up the walkway, I raced to the stone cottage of the only other living person I knew in Red Grove-Rick Ordenes. I don't remember knocking, only that the door opened and there was Rick.
"It was awful," I whimpered. I grabbed his shoulders. My hands slapped bare flesh. My wild eyes roved down his body: bare shoulders, bare chest, bare stomach, and OH! He was ... naked.
But that wasn't the most disturbing thing. His once-gray eyes had turned black as onyx, and he didn't look happy to see me. Then I caught sight of what was behind him.
