Chapter 28
Thelaughingmanwasa shell of a person.
Ghostly pale skin stretched tight over his bones and organs, odd wrinkles making him look hundreds of years old. Every vein and blood vessel shone through his thin skin. A button up tunic and trousers hung off his frame, covered in dust and moth holes and tailored for a person five sizes bigger than he was. Hollow eyes were a deep enough brown to be black, sunken into his face with thick dark circles beneath them. He had hair, but it was stringy and barely there, falling out in clumps even as he stood in front of us.
The colour of his hair gave me pause.
Strawberry blonde, the signature colour of my family.
A bad feeling settled into the pit of my stomach, worse than before I’d done the spell. If this was my uncle, he was on the verge of death but not at all dead yet. He’d lied to me, and the woman who’d spoken had been right.
But I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. This laughing man may be some other crazy person, coincidentally showing up here at exactly the time I freed us from the house.
He was still laughing, the sound carrying through the graveyard loud enough to wake the dead. With how frail he was, a sound so deep and weighty shouldn’t be possible coming from his body. When he finally stopped laughing and looked at us, his smile showed yellow and rotting teeth, half missing.
“Oh, my dear Hadley. You’ve done such a good job. I felt your doubts, child, but I’m so glad you overcame all that and trusted your dearest uncle.”
The conclusion I’d jumped to had been correct after all. I pressed back against the wall, not willing to retreat into the house but wanting to get as far from this horrible man as physically possible. “Uncle Felix. I didn’t think I’d be meeting you, because you’re supposed to be dead,” I said.
I tried not to sound antagonistic, but hints of irritation slipped into my tone. My annoyance only made him laugh again. The five men standing around me on the porch gave me a sense of comfort, but only until I realized none of them seemed surprised to see Felix standing in front of us. My uneasiness grew.
“I was as good as dead in that house,” he said. “You’ve saved my life.”
He smirked. I blinked, then blinked again and glanced over my shoulder into the depths of Hadley House. There was no way he was in the house. I’d scoured every floor, every room, including his secret basement. I would have found some hint of him or what was hiding his presence. Runes or an artifact.Something.
Unless… he had another basement, or he’d been behind the door I hadn’t broken through. “What do you mean?” I asked after a pause.
“You’re surprised because you didn’t find me, aren’t you?” he asked. “Well, you weren’t supposed to. Hadley House holds many secrets you’ll never discover, and the other residents were tasked with keeping you in the dark.”
My head snapped to the side. The only one who would make eye contact with me was Zan. He still looked sad and panicked, and now I knew why. This was what he’d been hiding when I’d confronted him. There was a reason none of them had responded when I’d asked if they’d trusted Felix. They all trusted him enough to help him.
Felix was in the house, alive, hiding. He’d known they were going to betray me in the end, because that’s what this was. A betrayal. I’d gotten them out of a prison they’d been in for years, and they were going to help my uncle with whatever plan he had.
I doubted the plan ended well for me.
All I could picture were the journals in the basement, filled to the brim with experiments. The locked door to a secondary room, where I predicted the bodies would be. Some of them, anyway. He’d done too many experiments to keep all the bodies. There was no longer any doubt in my mind Felix was the one who’d conducted those human trials. Did they know? How could they know and willingly subject another person to that? Someone who’d helped them?
Down the driveway, gentle light glowed from lights on a carriage. I was no longer so naïve as to think they were coming to save me. No, they were here to pick up Felix. I couldn’t imagine how he’d planned this jailbreak down to the letter, but he hadn’t left himself without an escape route. Not that I could stop him, even if he had to walk off the property. If I hadn’t been leaning heavily against the wall, I would have been on the ground, my muscles too weak to hold me.
Everyone left the porch except me, moving to stand with Felix. Even Zan. He mouthed something at me behind Kirin’s back, the words vaguely looking like ‘I’m sorry’. I shook my head.
An apology wouldn’t fix whatever happened next. Uncle Felix had a plan for me.
I’d gotten him out, but he wouldn’t have revealed himself if he was planning on letting me go free.
“You got friendly with them, didn’t you?” Felix asked, injecting a healthy dose of fake sympathy into the words. “I don’t know what happened with them because Zan’s time manipulation affects me the same as everyone else, but I can see it written all over your face. You thought you were friends. Not the best call, child. They’ve known you for under twenty-four hours.”
Kirin showed guilt for a second, but it vanished quickly. Waylon was haughty as usual; Abraxas expressionless. Bennett stood closest to Felix, arms crossed over his chest. He was angry. Seeing that made me grit my teeth, wishing my body was fit enough to scream and yell and punch him in the face before he caught it with his stupid reflexes. He had no right to be angry. I’d done nothing to him, and he’d broken me without knowing how much power he held over my heart.
“I was clearly wrong.”
“Choose your friends carefully, dear. That Solstice girl is a wonderful friend. Very powerful. She might be able to help you through what I have planned for you. Then again, maybe not.”
“Don’t talk about Solstice.”
My nails bit into my palms hard enough to draw blood, and I wanted desperately to stand on my own. The spell had taken so much out of me I would sway, and I no longer had anyone on my side to catch me.
“She has a part to play, but I suppose I can avoid the topic for now. So, my lovely niece, I’m sure you have questions.”
