One Hundred Candles

I hoisted the box of candles into my arms. “Trust me, I’ve handled more sophisticated gear than this.”

I was walking past Marcus when my shoulder accidentally brushed against his. Before I could take another step I felt an intense pressure on my arm.

“Ow!” I dropped the box, sending the candles flying across the floor. Marcus was gripping my arm. It felt like he was trying to push his fingers all the way through my flesh. I was simply startled at first, but that feeling gave way to panic as the pain in my arm intensified.

“You have pushed back the curtain too far,” Marcus said.

Only, it wasn’t really Marcus. A voice was coming from his mouth, but it wasn’t his voice. In fact, my first thought was that it wasn’t even a human voice. It was something between a hiss and a whisper, neither male nor female.

It was, quite simply, otherworldly.

And not a good world.

Marcus’s gaze was fixed on me, but his eyes looked strange, like the blacks of his pupils had spread and swallowed the rest of his eyeball. I tried to pull away, but his grip was cement. If he squeezed any harder, my arm would break.

My legs gave out and I sank to the floor. Marcus was still clenching my arm, but now he was slowly twisting it as he dug his fingers into my flesh. I was fairly certain that the sensation would be similar to getting shot in the arm.

“You have pushed back the curtain too far,” Marcus repeated. “There is a price to be paid.”

www.miraink.co.uk

Thank you to my wonderful editor, Tara Parsons,

and everyone at Harlequin Teen.

Special thanks to John & Martha Lohrstorfer,

Margean Gladysz, Pam Mishowski, Maureen Warren Ray, Coleen Travers, and Cheri Warren.

As always, thanks to Robert Lettrick

for his awesome skills in technical creativity.

And no book is ever complete until I thank the home team: Joe, Henry, Quinn, and Elias. I love you—now let me get some sleep.

For more than one hundred reasons,

this one is for Tina Dubois Wexler

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Eeventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

I would never get used to spending Christmas in an insane asylum. My parents laughed and said that, after seventeen years, I should have looked forward to it, but I would much rather sit in front of a roaring fire with a mug of hot chocolate listening to Christmas carols instead of this year’s version of holiday cheer: roaming the barren hallways of an empty sanitarium in a quest for restless energy.

After opening presents in yet another beige-and-floral hotel room and wolfing down the hotel’s complimentary cinnamon rolls, my family piled into our van and drove nearly an hour west of Cleveland to Lake Sanitarium, a somber-looking brick monstrosity that was, despite its name, located nowhere near a lake. Dad opened the massive front doors by shoving against them with his entire body. My teeth chattered as the five of us climbed the stairs, our footsteps echoing until we reached a large, empty room on the third floor.

“It’s colder inside than it is outside,” I muttered to my sister when we reached our destination.

“Welcome to Ohio,” Annalise replied. “It’s supposed to be nearly seventy degrees back home today.”

I groaned and thought of our house in South Carolina. I could picture my best friend, Avery, taking her little dog for a warm winter walk, shading her eyes from the sunlight. Or Noah, who told me that he grilled steaks for his mom every Christmas. And Jared—well, I didn’t know what Jared did for the holidays. We were friends, but he was an intensely private person, and he rarely offered details about his life.

I glanced out one of the grimy, narrow windows onto the sprawling white lawn of the sanitarium. The perfectly undisturbed snow was lovely to look at, but I was too cold to enjoy it.

“How are we doing, girls?” Dad clapped his hands together and walked over to where Annalise and I stood huddled in the corner.

“We’re freezing.” I could see my breath, which was the same pale color as the cinder-block walls.

“Well, the best way to stay warm is to keep moving. How about helping Shane with the equipment?”

I sighed, sending another puff of white into the air, and hurried across the empty room. There was no furniture to offer a clue of what the space had once been used for, but I guessed it had served as a massive holding area for the insane people who had lived there decades earlier. I knew the building had housed thousands of dejected people. Many of them had died here, as well, earning it the nickname Last Stop Lake.

“Hey, kid, can you give me a hand?” Shane was struggling to sort through a nest of cables and camera wires. I knelt down next to him and began picking through the different cables.