Crown of Faeries

21 | Zenith

Emma's hands dug into my side as Grant's body collapsed on the ground with a sickening crunch.

I looked at Reighton with fear as his sparkling grey night eyes gleamed in the shadows of the hallway. Freya was pressed against Max as her tears ran in dark black streaks down her cheeks. Her upper arm was bleeding downwards in threads of vibrant sunburnt red. Max's hand was clasped tightly around her gagging wound.

Emma's sniffle brought my attention back to the little girl. Her head stuffed against my chest and her hands scrambling for a tighter grip against my shirt as she scooted closer to me.

I was about to say something to Reighton about Emma when a sound of a whip cracking through the air, splintering the powerful boom of a thunderous strike, echoed all around us in a flash of crawling darkness.

Freya gasped just before the wall behind Grant's body melted away in a show of dribbling black steaming wax. My eyes widened as my arms wrapped around little Emma.

"Reighton." I hissed as the wall revealed the tingling body of the black abyss that made up the Pit.

Reighton's eyes met mine but he didn't have a chance to talk. In a silent rising clicking of multiple tongues and rattles, the darkness rose in a swoop of Raven blue wings with fingers, sharpened to the tip, stretching out forward and towards us.

"Run!" Reighton managed to get out before in a graceful fall, like water in a stream, the body of the darkness plummeted towards the ground to eat away what flooring we had.

The Pit housing began to rumble as the walls shook and the roof broke away in flying chunks that drifted upwards in swinging arcs and crackling debris.

Reighton took two large lunges towards Emma and I, and in a matter of three seconds, he forced us up and took Emma from my arms. He swung the little girl around his back until her hands were wrapped around his throat in a choke hold that could kill any ordinary man. But Reighton was never just the ordinary, not even with him being human.

Freya and Max shouted as they dodged a plank of the wall in the nick of time before it could crush them. Scooting backwards, Freya and Max appeared at Reighton, Emma, and I, in shock as the giant chunk of wall crashed to the floor. Dust and black smoke rose into the air as the outstretched hands moved eerily slow down the long hallway.

We all took one last glance at one another before Reighton grabbed onto Emma's legs and held them close as we all simultaneously bolted down the hallway.

Leaping and dodging over and under fallen pieces of the house, all five of us careened down the hallway as fast as we could. It appeared to me that the fast my legs pumped for speed, the longer the hallway got as the dark figure behind us chuckled and moved like a snake in hunt, straight forward and determined to eat us alive.

Fragments of the wall peeled away like hot lava dipped in the awful smelling black wax as the figures fingertips got closer and closer to us. Poor little Emma was crying as she had her face stuff in the nook of Reighton's neck. His eyes met mine and I could have sworn they mirrored mine.

Freya and Max were just besides us, and maybe a couple steps ahead. Freya's leather pants stretching as she saw fit as her thin legs churred up the air like it was her destiny to do so. And Max, throwing and tossing pieces of the walls with a hissing curse each time, cleared as much of a path as he could as he ran ahead a fraction of a second.

My chest was getting tighter every second I saw the darkness whither closer and closer in shards of rippling abyss. The rattles and clicking noises getting louder and more frantic the more we ran faster down the narrowing hallway.