GHOST PORTAL (#1 GHOST PORTAL series)

THIRTEEN

After wiping off the drool from her floor—where she'd passed out after throwing up her guts in the toilet—Jessamine got to bed and didn't wake again until sometime in the middle of the night. She was shivering, goosebumps prickling along her skin, her clothes clinging to her. Remnants of her nightmarish visions vibrated through her; so incessant, her head throbbed with every pulse of her heart.

She'd been talking with that blue-faced thing she'd seen in the picture on her phone, and though she still couldn't understand what it was saying, the emotions it conveyed—panic, fear—shattered through Jessamine with such ferocity that she'd woken with a scream curling out her mouth. It resonated within her, crashing up and down her bones. As she hugged herself and slithered back under the covers, she prayed to the gods she didn't believe in to help her through this.

She vowed to not to look at those pictures or watch those videos again anytime soon. Not until Avery came back to her with answers, and with the assistance she needed.

But days passed, and there was no sign of Avery. The nightmares didn't stop, though Jessamine steered clear of anything involving the house, or anything stimulating in general. Still, the visions intensified every night, becoming more vivid, more real. She had flashes of herself in the house—or so she imagined, since she had no notion what this house's interior looked like—conversing with the blue being, walking from room to room while dragging her feet, zombie-like, her throat burning, aching for water.

The third night after seeing all her footage, she dreamt of blood. Splashed on dusty, dirty floors, splattered over walls with peeled wallpaper, dripping from door-frames, caking onto rusty banisters. She had no idea if it was her blood or someone else's, but she was startled by screams screeching into her ears, and that clinking sound of chains being tugged along the floor. When she woke from this nightmare, she checked herself, on instinct, for any weird wounds and shined her phone's flashlight onto the ground to make sure there was no blood.

Then came the bright red door glowing in the dark, whispering at her to open it. The growls emanating from the other side, freakishly enticing as they almost seemed to say her name. Like little devils dancing on her shoulder and urging her towards the doorknob, desperate for her to twist it, to descend into whatever danger lurked behind.

With the darkening circles growing under her eyes, Jessamine deduced that with how strong these nightmares were, she likely wasn't sleeping much at all.

She couldn't focus on simple tasks. Her coworkers had taken her off coffee-making duty after the second day, when she couldn't seem to find the right button to even turn the machine on. She fidgeted, fighting fatigue with pronounced yawns and suppressing sudden chills. She was cold; not her outside body temperature, but inside, too, as if her heart had iced over and there was no way to thaw it. Even the hottest of showers did nothing to shake her funk, and no amount of running on the foldable treadmill her mom had gifted her would help her wake up, snap out of it.

It was the problem—this creepy, crawling feeling that something wasn't right within her. Avery had mentioned it, but slowly, small things started to nudge her towards, thinking he'd been right. Her regular patrons pointed out her distress, and when they pointed out that she needed a vacation, she waved them off with a grunt or rolled her eyes or told them to take it up with Chad. The aggression others had noticed before was growing, making a comfortable home inside her gut, swelling whenever any interaction irritated her. And nearly everything irritated her.

Her dance class that week was chaotic, too. All her steps were flimsy. She fumbled too many times to count, and she had no doubt several of the girls would report to their parents that she'd been drunk and shouldn't have been teaching at all.