"I feel like we've definitely walked past that window before," Amara said, her voice thin and uncertain.
"All the windows look the same," Priya shot back, irritation bleeding through her usual composure. "Same expensive frames, same pretentious craftsmanship. Besides, the place is huge."
"But this is only the first floor," Diego said, looking back and forth down the hallway. "We've been walking for way too long. Is the house sending us in circles again, or is this hallway actually built in a loop?"
I opened my mouth to respond but another cough tore through me instead, wet and rattling. I bent forward, tasting copper, feeling that now-familiar warmth of blood on my tongue. I swallowed it down rather than spit it out—I didn't want to see how much there was this time, didn't want to acknowledge how much worse it was getting.
My arm throbbed in rhythm with my heartbeat. The makeshift bandage Zara had made was already soaked through, blood seeping down to my elbow. Every step sent fresh waves of pain radiating up my shoulder. And beneath that, deeper, was the wrongness in my chest—that feeling of something growing, spreading, rotting me from the inside out.
Priya had convinced us to search for an exit again. "Maybe we missed it while we were running for our lives," she'd argued, that desperate edge in her voice betraying her logic. Even though Zadkiel had made it crystal clear—there was no escape from Enoch's Mansion—we'd spent the last however-long trying anyway.
But the hallways just kept going. Same windows. Same doors. Same oppressive wallpaper with its pattern of thorns and roses that seemed to writhe when I wasn't looking directly at it.
"Let's just find a room to rest in," Zara said, exhaustion making her words slur together. "We still need to properly treat Ethan's arm."
"Right." Priya sighed, the defeat clear in the way her shoulders sagged. She walked to the nearest door—brown lacquered wood with a round golden handle that gleamed in the dim light.
Before opening it, she pressed her ear against the surface and held up her other hand. "Diego, you still have the candlestick?"
"Yeah." He hefted the golden pole, our pathetic excuse for a weapon. As if a candlestick could do anything against the monsters in this place.
Priya turned the handle.
The door didn't budge.
She tried again, harder, throwing her weight against it. Nothing. The door remained sealed, immovable.
"Fuck," she breathed, stepping back.
"Didn't Zadkiel say we should leave locked doors locked?" Zara offered quietly.
"You really believe that bastard?" Priya whirled on her, and I could see the wild edge of panic in her eyes. "He only wanted Levi. He didn't save us out of kindness—he wanted a soul for his collection or whatever fucked-up reason. And when he got it, he abandoned us. Gave us some cryptic rules and disappeared."
"Let's just move on. Please." Diego's voice cut through the tension, tired and pleading. He didn't want conflict. Not now. Not when we were barely holding together.
I nodded and turned to follow them down the hallway.
That's when I realized someone was missing.
The sound of cracking glass echoed through the corridor, sharp and violent.
"What the hell?" I spun around. "Amara?!"
She stood in front of one of the tall windows, her arm raised high. As we watched, she brought her elbow down against the glass.
CRACK!
A spiderweb of fractures spread across the surface.
"Amara?! What the hell are you doing?!" Zara started running back toward her.
But Amara didn't respond. She raised her arm again.
CRACK!
Another impact. More fractures spreading like veins.
"Of course," Priya breathed beside me, and I could hear the manic edge creeping into her voice. "Why didn't I think of that? If we can't find the door, we go through the window."
The idea sparked something in my chest—hope, maybe, or just the same desperation that was driving Amara to destroy the glass. But immediately, Zadkiel's words came flooding back: No one can escape this house. Don't even try. Any entity that promises you escape is lying.
If it was really that simple—if we could just smash a window and climb out—why had he sounded so certain? So absolute? Had no one in the mansion's entire existence thought to try the windows?
A bad feeling crawled down my spine like cold fingers.
I started moving toward Amara, intending to stop her, when I noticed something that made my blood turn to ice.
The sound of the storm had stopped.
No thunder. No rain hammering against the glass. Now that I thought about it, I hadn't heard the storm since we'd first entered this nightmare. How long had it been silent? Hours? Minutes? Time felt like liquid here, impossible to measure.
Either the storm had passed naturally, or something was very, very wrong.
I moved closer, changing my angle, and saw what lay beyond the glass.
Sunlight. Golden afternoon sunlight pouring through the window, illuminating a pale blue sky.
That was impossible. It had been afternoon when the storm hit—dark, violent afternoon. There was no way enough time had passed for another day. Unless we'd been in here longer than I thought. Unless time itself moved differently in Enoch's Mansion.
"Amara," Zara said softly, reaching out. "Amara, are you okay?"
Amara had stopped hitting the glass. She stood perfectly still, staring out the window with an intensity that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Her body was rigid, her breathing shallow.
She looked transfixed. Hypnotized.
Like she was seeing something we couldn't.
"Amara?" Zara's voice cracked with worry. "Can you hear me?"
I opened my mouth to call out a warning, to tell everyone to get back, but I never got the chance.
The window exploded.
Glass erupted inward in a thousand glittering shards, and something came through. Multiple somethings. They poured through the broken window like oil, like smoke, like living nightmares.
"Shit! Run!" Diego's voice cut through my shock.
One of the creatures slammed into the wall inches from where Diego had been standing. It screeched—a sound like nails on chalkboard mixed with breaking glass—and snapped at him. Diego dodged, his athletic reflexes saving him by a hair's breadth.
I couldn't stop staring at them.
They were serpentine, as thick as tree trunks, with bodies that undulated through the air as if swimming through water. Their scales were an oily mixture of black and purple, reflecting the light in nauseating patterns. But it was the eyes that made my stomach turn, that made rational thought slip away.
Eyes. Massive eyes grafted onto their bodies at irregular intervals—some near what might be a head, others along their sides, their backs. Human eyes. Or they had been once. The whites were yellowed and threaded with bulging black veins. The irises were faded, colorless. And the pupils—tiny pinpricks that rotated independently of each other, tracking movement with impossible precision.
One of those eyes locked onto me.
The pupil dilated suddenly, expanding like a drop of ink in water, and I was falling. Falling into that black void. I couldn't look away. Couldn't think. Couldn't breathe. There was only the eye and the darkness within it and the certainty that if I stared long enough, I would understand something terrible—
"C'mon, goddammit, move, Ethan!" Diego slammed into me, his shoulder hitting my chest, and the spell broke.
Pain exploded through my injured arm where he'd jostled it. The creature smashed into the floor where I'd been standing, its mouth opening to reveal too-human teeth—molars and incisors scaled up to monstrous size—that tore into the marble, gouging downward toward whatever hell lay beneath the mansion.
"Move!" Diego roared, already running.
My legs finally obeyed. I ran, clutching my injured arm to my chest, feeling hot blood seep between my fingers. My lungs burned with every breath. That wrongness in my chest seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat, making each inhale feel like dragging razor blades through my throat.
Priya and Zara were already ahead, sprinting down the hallway. Diego ran beside me, and I noticed with growing horror that Amara was slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain, completely limp.
No—not limp. She was laughing.
High, broken sounds that barely sounded human. Her head lolled against Diego's back, and when it turned toward me, I saw her eyes—pupils blown so wide like she was high, leaving only black. Her mouth hung open, drool running down her chin, and she just kept laughing. That horrible, empty laughter.
"Amara?" I tried to call out, but my voice was lost in another coughing fit.
She didn't respond. Didn't even seem to see me. She just stared at nothing with those bottomless eyes and laughed and laughed.
Whatever she'd seen through that window—whatever had been waiting on the other side—had broken something fundamental inside her mind.
Behind us, I could hear them. At least four of the eye-serpents, maybe more, their bodies making wet sliding sounds as they pursued us through the air. The sound of dozens of eyes blinking in unison—a noise I hadn't known eyes could make until now.
My vision started to tunnel. Blood loss, probably. Or the sickness. Or both. The floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
"Keep going!" Priya's voice, sharp with panic. "Don't stop!"
But I was stopping. My body was giving out. My legs felt like they were made of water, my lungs full of broken glass. Another cough tore through me, this one violent enough to double me over mid-stride.
Blood sprayed through my fingers. More than before. So much more.
My vision went dark at the edges.
The floor rushed up to meet me—
And that's when I saw it.
Time seemed to slow as I fell. One of the creatures swooped over me, its body passing through the space where my head had been a second ago. And hanging from its neck, suspended on a thin chain that looked like it was made of braided hair or sinew, was a key.
It was a simple thing. Tarnished metal, maybe brass or bronze. But the moment I saw it, I felt it.
Energy radiated from the key—cold, wrong energy that made my teeth ache and my injured arm throb in sympathetic rhythm. It felt like touching something that had been buried too long, like rot given physical form, like staring into an open grave. Every instinct I had screamed to look away, to stay away from it.
But I couldn't.
Something about that wrongness called to me. Drew me in like gravity, like magnetism, like inevitability.
My hand shot out before I could think. My fingers closed around the key and pulled.
The chain snapped.
The creature's screech was deafening—that nail-on-chalkboard shriek amplified a hundredfold. It thrashed in the air, all its eyes rotating wildly, tracking the key's movement, the loss of something precious.
But I had it. The key was in my hand, cold and pulsing with that terrible energy, and somehow—somehow—strength flowed into my legs. Not much. Not enough. But sufficient to get me moving again.
I ran, the key clutched in my fist, feeling its wrongness seep into my skin.
Behind me, the creatures had slowed. Not stopped, but slowed, as if losing the key had weakened them somehow.
We rounded a corner. Diego in the lead, carrying Amara's laughing, broken body. Zara and Priya just behind. Me bringing up the rear, barely conscious, the key burning cold in my hand.
A door appeared ahead. Priya reached it first and yanked it open without hesitation—no time to check if it was safe, no time for anything but survival.
We burst through into—
A room. A large room with a high ceiling and symbols carved into the floor. And standing in the center of an elaborate ritual circle, looking genuinely surprised to see us, was Zadkiel.