The Guest House Hauntings Boxset by Hazel Holmes (novel books to read txt) 📕

Her breathing still escalated, Sarah frowned, but then she slowly walked toward the dresser. She opened the bottom drawer, finding old pajama pants, and felt something hard wrapped in cloth. She wrapped her fingers around it and then removed the bundled object from the drawer.

Sarah fingered the object, making sure it wasn’t a gun, and then peeked inside. Surprised, she turned back to Iris.

“I wasn’t always like this,” Iris said.

Sarah wrapped the object back up, and then walked over to Iris and gently rested it on her chest, where the old woman clutched it with both hands. She turned to leave, but Iris grabbed her wrist.

“My daughter,” Iris said, longing in her voice. “You saw her?”

Sarah faced Iris once more. “I did.”

Tears fell from the old woman’s eyes. “How was she?”

Sarah shook her head, unsure of how to describe it. “She wanted to help you. She wanted to make you understand that you didn’t have to do this.”

Iris nodded and wiped the tears away. “Thank you for doing this.”

“I’m not doing it for you.” Quickly, Sarah stood and returned to the door. She slipped out just as she heard more footsteps coming down the stairs. She darted into the room across from Iris’s to hide just when Kegan and the witch stepped into the hall.

“She’s still in the house,” the witch said. “She has to be.”

“She might be hiding until the ceremony tonight,” Kegan said. “Maybe she thinks she can stop it.”

“If she’s waiting until the ceremony, then she’ll be too late.” The witch scoffed and headed farther down the hall. “I’ll check downstairs again, and—” The witch’s footsteps ended. “I shut your grandmother’s door when I left her room.”

Sarah held her breath, listening to the witch walk back toward Iris’s room, which ended with the slow groan of the door opening. Their voices grew softer when the witch entered the room, and Sarah slowly opened the door to the room where she was hiding.

The hallway appeared in the slivered crack, and she saw Kegan’s body in Iris’s doorway. His back was turned to her, and she couldn’t see beyond his shoulders or the back of his head. She knew that the west wing staircase was close, only two doors down. She might be able to make it without tipping off the witch, but that was only if Kegan and Iris chose to stay true in their change of hearts.

Sarah hesitated, her muscles flinching and spasming as she struggled to go or stay. It could be a trick, a ploy to lure her out when they were all together, but it just didn’t make any sense. None of it made sense. But knowing that she was short on time, Sarah bolted from the door, her footsteps soundless as she passed Kegan and reached the stairwell, thankful that its door was still open.

She paused at the doorway, looking back for a split second. It happened quickly, but Sarah was confident that Kegan flicked his eyes at her from the door before disappearing into Iris’s room and shutting the door behind him.

Still flabbergasted by the turn of events, Sarah ascended the stairs toward the fifth floor.

Sarah couldn’t find the answers to the questions swirling in her mind, and she wasn’t sure she would ever understand, but when she returned to the fifth floor, she pushed all of it from her mind.

The door was closed, the old wood and dust that comprised the entrance just as ugly and terrifying as she remembered from her first visit. She took three soft steps and then placed her hand on the faded brass knob. It was the first real moment of trepidation, because a part of her understood that this was the last real opportunity to run for it. Once she had the orb, there wasn’t any going back.

But she couldn’t abandon Dell. She couldn’t allow him to suffer the same fate as she after he’d done so much to help her. And even if she did run, she knew she couldn’t get far, because after everything she’d seen and experienced, she knew that the apocalypse was real, and if she didn’t attempt to save one life now, then the rest of the world would burn.

Sarah shut her eyes, focusing on that one life. She could save one. That much she was sure of.

The old brass wiggled loosely against the rest of the door when Sarah opened it, and she looked behind her to ensure that she was still alone. The witch had a tendency to sneak up on folks, and she didn’t want to find herself on the wrong side of a surprise.

But Sarah was still alone, and she walked on the balls of her feet down the hall, still able to hear Kegan and the witch’s conversation below. It was nothing but muffled nonsense, though Sarah recognized the cadence of the conversation. They were arguing.

Realizing that she had stopped to listen, Sarah restarted the slow and methodical walk toward the door at the end of the hall. Her throat dried, and the closer she moved toward it, the more nervous she became. She didn’t understand why, especially since everything looked to be going her way. But when she placed her hand on the door knob, she froze.

Never had she felt such trepidation for one room since she was an orphan, and that’s when she realized that’s what was bothering her so much.

Somehow, at twenty-three, Sarah had returned to the same state of mind as when she was an orphan. She was sneaking around a house where she wasn’t welcome, with people she barely knew, and struggling to stay alive.

Despite her efforts, despite trying to claw her way out of a system that did nothing but try and keep her pressed down and weak, and after thinking that she had finally made it out, she discovered that she had never really left. She was still that lost little girl after her parents had