Eternal [HS]

Chapter Eighteen

JO'S HEART MIGHT HAVE STOPPED, and her face is ashen when she whips around to face the direction they entered the room from only to find a closed door.

The bookshelf stands in the way of their route through the garden, back over the fence, and to the car two blocks away...What the fuck are they going to do if they're trapped here? Surely, once they've been trapped for longer than they said the task would take, Niall and Mitch will come to rescue them, but what does it mean for them if Adeline knows?

They shouldn't have been naive enough to think she didn't hear it when they opened the secret door. She's a vampire who doesn't sleep, of course she heard them. And, thanks to what she has said about being able to scent Harry on her after he feeds from her, she must have known it was them as soon as she unlocked the door.

As if it weren't bad enough, the words Adeline screams through the bookshelf ruin any illusion that they've gone unidentified, "Just wait until they get here, you human piece of trash, you'll wish you were never born!"

She looks frantically between the closed door and Harry, clueless. Meanwhile, he's trying to see his way out of this.

It's not lost on him that his worst fears have come true. Adeline and, subsequently, everyone in the group he's hunting down now know he's after them. It will lead to chaos beyond his capability of comprehending. And, he can't help but think as he looks throughout the room, that Jo is now in more danger than she has been since Issac almost murdered her.

The way Adeline screamed at her a few seconds ago makes him tremble with rage. If he weren't forcing himself to scour the room for something, anything, that can lead them to freedom, he'd be trying to get through that bookshelf and kill her for threatening his human with rape and murder. They know what those people are capable of, so the fact that she knows the torture these people inflict on humans and went as far as to taunt her with it...Harry knows that it'll be hard to refrain from ripping her throat out if they get out of this.

But, as per usual, while he was too busy searching the room and wanting to murder Adeline, she was thinking about how different the floor beneath the carpet felt compared to where she was standing before.

All she could think to do was flip up the end of the carpet that she was standing on in search of an exit because she has zero experience with people who built secret rooms and passageways into their houses, but it always seemed to work in movies.

Much to her shock, there's a hatch door underneath it, and she starts to question the intelligence of this woman's dead husband since a stupid human who flipped the carpet up on the off chance that it'd be there found his secret room's escape route.

Harry's dumbfounded reaction at the sight of her lifting the hatch and jumping nearly ten feet down into the kitchen below would make her laugh if the situation weren't so dire. His head is poking out from the edge of the open square hatch door she just jumped out of.

"Pick your jaw up off the floor and follow me!" she whisper-shouts in hopes that it'll take Adeline a second or two to catch on, "Come on!"

It doesn't take him much convincing once she breaks him out of his surprised stupor.

The sound of him landing clean on the tiled floor echoes through the high-ceiling of the grand kitchen she stumbled upon two weeks ago on her first visit here.

On the counter, it's clear to see that Adeline must have been enjoying herself with a glass of deep red liquid she can only imagine is blood. It takes her back, only for the split-second she has to spare it a passing glance, to the night that she eavesdropped on Harry and Liam back home. The wine glass he dropped wasn't wine, it was blood. She was too distracted by the conversation she heard and cutting her hand on the broken glass to look closely enough to see the difference. It was one of the many clues to his true identity she saw and missed.

The night breeze whips the hair that peeks out from the bottom of her ski around her shoulders, wrapping the strands around the front of her neck, on her first step out of the back door. She doesn't mind it though. Fresh air feels better when you've gone through something that makes you believe you'll never feel it again.

Gravel crunches beneath their feet as they run together through the garden pathways, banking left and then right in pursuit of the fence at the farthest end of the yard from the house. But he starts to look at her with frustration seeping into his eyes. If they keep running as slowly as they do now, as fast as she's ever ran in her life, then they'll be caught in a matter of minutes. The only reason they haven't been already is because of the delay between them leaving through the hatch door and Adeline realizing that they were gone.

After another few strides, he murmurs, "Fuck it," and scoops her up in his arms faster than she knew any creature could move. Up until now, she had yet to witness him doing anything other than drink her blood that revealed his supernatural gifts, but now she's experiencing it right with him.

If she thought the wind was whipping against her face before, she was in for a surprise.

Everything around her passes by in a haze she can't begin to deconstruct. Things she passed by on trips to this area of Westbrook multiple times are turned unrecognizable by the speed at which they move, and she clings to him desperately for stability.

It's like how it once felt when she used to ride on the back of Arabella's motorcycle, only twenty times as fast. At least she had a pair of riding glasses to protect her eyes from the wind back then, right now she has to squint and blink against the rushing air through the holes of her mask to catch a glimpse of the blurred night around her. With her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, she keeps her head propped on his shoulder, only looking up every so often.

There's no telling how far they've gone or where they are, but she can tell that Adeline is not anywhere close to keeping up with them. At first, in the garden, she thought she heard the back door slam shut just when he picked her up, but it was too late. He is way too fast to catch, even for a vampire, and as long as they make it back to the house before she can track them down, there's no way she could find them. The only people who know where he lives are his friends.

Despite the discomfort of having to fight to open her eyes against the wind, it's actually quite beautiful to see things from his perspective. All she sees is the blur of streetlights, trees, cars, and—She doesn't think she's seeing things straight when she sees Niall running with them, which means Mitch is close too. They must have seen them scrambling out of the back door and followed without asking questions.

It takes ages of holding onto him for dear life and watching the world pass by her unrecognizably, but they eventually come to a stop abrupt enough to send her flying out of his arms if he weren't holding onto her so tightly. His hands dig into her legs and back with the effortless act of keeping her upright, and she still feels as though the world is spinning in the security of his arms.

The warmth of her steady exhales clouding down his neck reminds him that she's alive, safe, and that what happened back in Westbrook didn't end in the tragedy he thought it would.

Before any of them can acknowledge the situation, she hastily wiggles out of his arms, collapses onto her knees in the front yard of his house—it now occurs to her that he ran all the way home with her in his arms and abandoned the car—and rips off her mask to throw up into the grass.

Niall's voice pierced through the night after an hour of complete silence, "What the fuck happened in there?"