The Secret of Spellshadow Manor 4 by Bella Forrest (best e book reader android TXT) 📗

in fright. Natalie was in the room, though he hadn’t seen her at first. She crouched on the floor by the rotting remnants of a four-poster bed, moving unnaturally around a bottle in the center of a ruby-red rug. She was singing something quietly in an alarming, throaty whisper, her eyes entirely focused on the small, smoky black bottle that Alex recognized as a bottle of essence, though he didn’t have a clue where she’d found it, nor was she in a state to tell him.

“All my friends are dead, now to kill the Head,” she sang over and over, her voice low and disturbing, her eyes like saucers.

The others watched her in silent horror, but Alex’s eye was caught instead by the sight of a slim, wooden door at the very far side of the room, half-tucked away behind a velvet curtain. His gaze flitted back toward Natalie, remembering what Caius had said about the harmful nature of the essence here; if the warden was right, it wasn’t safe for Natalie to be so close to it. Tentatively, he walked toward her, bolstering himself with a protective layer of anti-magic as he neared.

In a split second, she turned on him, lunging up from her haunches, trying to grasp his head in her hands, her nails raking at the soft flesh of his face.

“You will pay, pay, pay!” Natalie screeched.

Alex managed to twist out from under her grip, some of his hair ripping away in her clenched fist. “You have to snap out of this—” he began.

Lunging again, she screamed in his face, clutching her hands to her chest as if they were burned, making Alex glad of the layer of protection around him that was keeping her slightly at arm’s length.

The others edged closer, taking Alex’s lead.

“Natalie, it’s us—your friends,” Ellabell said calmly.

“You know us, Natalie. Come on, come back to us,” Aamir added, holding out his hand to her.

“Natalie, buddy, come on! There aren’t any monsters. It’s just us,” Jari soothed.

Natalie wasn’t having any of it. With each reassuring utterance, she charged toward them, leaping uncomfortably close, her face twisting into a feverish grimace, only to pull away at the very last moment. Her teeth gnashed together with a loud snap, her eyes flashing wildly, and she looked both terrified and terrifying, her hands moving quickly, creating something strange beneath her palms. Alex could feel that, whatever it was she was making, it wasn’t natural. She was as far from herself as he had ever seen her. This was worse than any curse.

With a knowing look, he signaled for the others to try to distract her while he crept around the back of the room. Keeping to the walls, he moved slowly, stepping up onto the four-poster bed and moving forward, so he could try to grab her from behind.

Meanwhile, Jari broke into a dance that looked like a cross between Saturday Night Fever and Riverdance, but even the blond-haired boy’s absurdity couldn’t keep Natalie’s eyes from flitting about the room, her limbs bent at odd angles as she crawled across the floor, rushing toward them like an angry insect. Seeing that Jari’s dancing wasn’t working, Aamir tried reasoning with her instead, speaking to her as if he were bargaining with a small child.

“Natalie, sweetheart, you need to calm down and come back to us. There are no demons, and nobody is dead. It is all in your imagination,” he said.

This seemed to intrigue the changeling version of Natalie. With a sharp hiss that prickled the hairs on the back of Alex’s neck, she scuttled half-crouched, half-upright toward Aamir. Her eyes turned white, a milky sheen sliding across them. Behind her, standing between Alex and his quarry, wispy specters appeared from thin air, conjured by the words her mouth was still muttering and the twist and turn of skillful hands. The whole room went cold, everything suddenly feeling surreal. The gaseous shapes had hollow eyes and gaping mouths, their bodies wispy, blurry bones that bore the dangling strands of ancient cloth. Or so Alex thought—peering closer, he saw the scraps clinging to the translucent bones were not cloth at all, but the final hanging strips of flesh. They stared vacantly from skull faces, their empty mouths yawning in silent screams.

Shivers of fear shot through Alex, and he tried to get closer to her, sliding down over the musty edge of the bed and creeping toward where she had scuttled back to, a short distance from Aamir’s legs. Moving stealthily, he pushed away the horror of the ghosts’ presence, turning sideways to avoid touching them as he slipped through a narrow gap between two of their kind.

He was almost upon her when she whirled around, glowering at him with the milky white of her ghostly eyes. With unexpected agility, she jumped at him, the impact almost knocking him off his feet. Somehow, he managed to hold his ground as she lashed out at him, her teeth coming too close to his skin for comfort. She backed away again, preparing for a second strike.

This time, Alex was ready for her. She leapt toward him, but he ducked just in time, grasping her shoulders tightly as she overshot her mark, pulling her toward him in a rough headlock. She writhed, struggling to get free, but he managed to hold her with enough strength that he was able to steady her, giving him the chance to press his palms to her temples and run his anti-magic into her mind. She froze instantly in his arms.

Flashes of her history surged into his mind—all involving her loving family. The image of her little sister, in particular, served to spur him on, to complete the promise he had made to all of his friends—to get them home. If that slim doorway held what he thought it held, in a room behind it, Alex knew they might be able to meet the tight portal deadline after all.

Alex sent good thoughts to the forefront of Natalie’s mind,