If You Dare by Jessica Lemmon Page B

surprised she hadn’t fainted dead away. Her teeth chattered behind her numb lips. Marcus wasn’t the least bit shaky, but the arm around her had turned to steel.
    “What the hell was that?” he grated.
    Her teeth clicked together again. “It’s Essie,” she said, the shake working its way over her entire body. Lily couldn’t see her, could barely hear her, but she felt her. She could no more deny Essie Mae’s presence than she could deny Marcus’s.
    And for the first time, Lily recognized the desperation in Essie’s voice laced beneath the command for them to leave.
    Essie was afraid.
    …
    Lily’s claim that a dead woman had spoken to her may have sounded a bit loony-tunes a few hours ago, but her claims had since become warranted.
    As sure as every dark hair stood at attention on his epidermis, Marcus had heard Essie Mae speak.
    “Over there.” He gestured with the lantern toward the sound of the voice, his arm lifting on its own. Since entering the freaking Twilight Zone seconds ago, his brain had disconnected from his body. He could no longer make sense of what, before now, he’d thought of as impossible.
    He put one leaden foot in front of the other and advanced toward the sound of the bells, now coming from the moonlit room at the end of the hall. Each step grew heavier than the last, more reluctant. Yet a morbid curiosity nudged him forward.
    The sound stopped when they reached a large room on their left. He took a steadying breath, half lifting Lily off the floor with one arm. She limped alongside him, trying to keep her sock-clad foot off the floor. He still wanted to carry her, but her argument that the rotted floorboards might not hold both of them and they’d go crashing to their demise was warranted. He said a silent prayer he didn’t have a heart attack and die, leaving her at the mercy of whatever lurked these halls.
    They were in what looked like the master bedroom. Blue-and-silver-flowered wallpaper covered in dirt and graffiti decorated the walls. A worn mattress rested on the floor, the splintered remains of a four-poster bed scattered around it. Tattered lace curtains hung prone in front of screen-less windows. Excrement from whatever vermin made the room their temporary shelter dotted the floor.
    “I wonder if this is Essie’s bedroom,” Lily said, slipping her arm from around his back and stepping deeper into the room.
    “Watch it.” He held out a hand, his heart lurching at the memory of Lily’s near-plummet moments ago. The moment her foot had cracked through the floor and her eyes had gone wide, his heart ceased beating. In that split second, he had nearly watched his future slip from his hands. Losing her wasn’t something he could even contemplate. He never wanted to feel that afraid again. Not as long as he lived.
    “She’s here,” Lily said.
    “How do you know it’s her?” He followed her, eyes taking in the empty room, his senses on high alert.
    Ethereal moonlight blanketed Lily’s face from the window as she took in the grounds outside the house. Her mouth pulled into a sad smile. “According to the newspaper, this is where she jumped.”
    The contents of his stomach lurched. Or maybe fear had replaced his internal organs. Marcus didn’t think of himself as timid, but the idea of a specter skulking around her final resting place made him want to make a mad dash for his childhood church and say a hundred Hail Marys.
    He stood next to Lily. Her pallor had gone pasty white in the filtering moonbeams. “Lil?”
    She turned eyes on him. Eyes so empty, he shuddered.
    “Go before he kills you.” Her voice was low, threatening. And not her own.
    Marcus retreated one step. “That’s not funny.”
    She tilted her head, focusing on nothing. “And he will kill you.”
    “Dammit, Lily.” Heart jackhammering in his rib cage, he grasped her arm with his free hand, determined to shake her from her trancelike state. “Snap out of it. Lily!” The windows kicked open,