Gabriella screamed, grabbing her face as the slice down her cheek began to bleed. The glass from the broken window had scattered on the rug all around her, this time not an illusion. One particularly large piece of green glass was coated in her blood and it took everything she had not to vomit. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to panic as her heart raced.

“Gabriella!” Graham was still on the line. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“She cut me!” Gabriella gasped as the blood seeped around her hand, dripping onto the floor. “She cut my face!”

“Shit, how bad is it?” Graham asked. “Is anyone else on the line? Bradley, Amelia, can you hear me?”

Her head was spinning, only the pain radiating from the gash on her face anchoring her to consciousness. Gabriella moaned, blood getting in her mouth. “I don’t…hang on.”

She spit out the blood pooling under her tongue, the movement tugging on the wound in a way that sent another bright, dizzying burst of pain through her. This was bad. The cut hadn’t split her mouth open, but the skin along her lip was just barely still intact. She closed her eyes tightly and took a deep breath, moving her face as little as possible.

“It’s my face,” she said again, her voice oddly stilted as she stayed frozen in place, hand pressed tightly to the cut but not keeping the torn skin in place.

“My comm is acting up,” Graham said over the comm, which was slick with blood as she fumbled for it. He sounded further away than he had before. “Try calling me, right now. I don’t want to lose contact with you and I don’t think it’ll connect if I call you. But last time you were trapped, it worked if you called out, right?”

She wasn’t sure that was true. But she had to focus, somehow get through the panic that was threatening to swallow her thoughts. She reached into her pocket for her phone and scrolled to Graham’s number, a drop of blood falling from her face and onto the screen as she went.

“Put me on speaker and just keep walking,” Graham said, his voice momentarily coming from both her phone and comm before the comm shorted out. “I’m texting everyone else right now, Bradley’s going to try to get you on the comms again and Amelia’s looking for you in the building. It’ll be okay, how bad are you hurt?”

The pain was hot and fierce and the wound still bled freely as she pressed a hand against it. “I caught glass on my cheek,” she said. “I can walk but there’s…there’s a lot of blood.”

“Are you wearing a sweater?”

“Yeah.”

“Take it off and press it against the cut. Keep pressure on it.”

She slid the phone into her pocket with the speaker up, then shrugged awkwardly out of her sweater. It was a light blue cardigan she’d picked up shopping with her mom last year, something cute she’d been excited to pull back out for spring a couple months back. The blood immediately started soaking into the fabric as she pressed it tightly against her face.

“Keep walking,” Graham ordered gently. “Amelia says to keep going toward the first room, just like you were doing. She’s looking for you, it’ll be alright.”

Her legs shook as she walked, but it didn’t matter because she only made it three steps before Sarah Morgan was looming over her, concern etched into the expression on her greenish pale face. Gabriella screamed and stumbled backward, dropping the sweater to the floor.

Sarah reached for her as Graham called out from the speaker in her pocket. Gabriella flinched away from Sarah’s grasping hands. “Leave me alone!” she snapped, stumbling as she reached for the bloody cardigan resting in the glass on the floor.

She picked it up, shaking out as many shards as she could, then pressed the sweater against her face again, trying not to think about glass and germs and the fact that her face was cut wide open right now. “Let me go!” she shouted, her face only inches from the spirit’s.

Love and anger and fear and grief. The feelings were back now, jumbled and overwhelming in her already dizzy mind. She was crying now, the tears stinging her face. She couldn’t let go, if she let go then it was all for nothing. Then she was giving up. And it was dark in the forest, and dark in her bedroom, with this man she loved and feared, and this other man chasing her down.

“No!”

She tore herself away from the memories and feelings that weren’t hers, an uneven split rather than gently untangling them. “Sarah Morgan, this has gone too far!” she shouted, her voice shaking. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. But you’re holding on too tightly and you hurt me!”

She wasn’t going to die here, even if it felt like she might. But Sarah wasn’t letting her go and the longer she waited, the worse this was going to be to fix when she did get out of this time bend. Gabriella felt oddly calm now as she stood up straight, looking directly into Sarah Morgan’s filmy eyes. This was it, direct contact with Sarah.

Sarah Morgan was still reaching for her, her frozen fingers drifting over above the gaping wound on Gabriella’s cheek, barely covered by ruined fabric. “You need to move on,” Gabriella continued. “And we want to help you find rest, but you can’t stay here. It’s harming you and you’re harming it.”

The feelings were back now, the same love and rage. But throughout it all there was an overpowering shame. And she knew only some of that was from Sarah. But that shame hadn’t been there before.

This was new. It wasn’t some other entity latching onto Sarah, this was the woman herself. A proud, scared woman with too much love and fear in her heart to leave her home behind. And too much anger to keep her from finding peace.

And now she’d hurt someone else.

“I forgive you,” Gabriella said, recognizing the familiar cold in her stomach, even if it didn’t belong to her.

Sarah continued to look at her, unblinking eyes focused on Gabriella’s face.

“I forgive you,” Gabriella repeated. “Just please go rest now. You’re holding on way too tightly. Please!”

The pleading note in her voice would either make things better or worse, she didn’t know which. But she couldn’t look away from the ghost either, even as the blood dripped down her cheek from behind the sodden sweater.

“The hotel will be alright,” she said. “I wish things could have been better for you while you were alive, but none of this is your problem anymore. Your anger is killing you. I mean…” She put a hand to the wound, flinching as she put pressure on it. “I know you’re dead. But you’re doing the same thing you did as a kid, you’re swallowing down all the anger and it’s all coming out anyway. Can you hear me?”

It hurt to talk, the movement tugging on the sliced skin on her face. Sarah Morgan continued to stare at her and she wasn’t sure the woman could hear her. Whatever, she and Amelia would deal with it once she was out of this hallway. The professional part of Gabriella, the part that wasn’t holding the side of her face together with her second favorite cardigan, was filing this new data away.

And if that part was actually more shock than professionalism, then whatever.

A tear rolled down Sarah’s face. And then another, curving over her own sunken cheek in the same pattern as the gash in Gabriella’s.

“Please, just let go,” Gabriella repeated. “It’s alright. You deserve to move on.”

She closed her eyes as a sharp pain pulsed through her head. As she opened them, Sarah was gone.

Gabriella didn’t know if that meant anything, but her face was still bleeding and she was still in the time-bending hallway. She glanced around, confirming she was alone. Then she took off down the hall, numbers flying past too quickly to read as she stumbled over her own feet over and over, staggering on the worn carpet as she kept forcing herself forward. She wasn’t going to look in any of the rooms, she was just going to keep moving until there was something else to see except for this hallway. She passed the broken window again as she gasped for breath, her cheek erupting in fresh pain with each exhale.

“Gabriella, what’s going on?”

Graham’s voice came from her pocket, nearly drowned out by static. He sounded afraid, but like he was trying to stay calm for her sake. “She disappeared,” Gabriella said. “I don’t…fuck. Graham, it hurts so bad.”

“Can you keep going?”

She didn’t have a choice, did she? She moved like she was back in the woods, navigating by the stars as she pushed her way through trees she’d hiked past since childhood. Graham stayed on the line with her as she moved.

“I’m getting off the highway, this is insane,” he muttered, and she heard his car speed up as he pulled into the breakdown lane. “The others know what’s happening and Amelia is trying to reach you. She says she’ll be in the garden when you get there.”

If she got there. She could almost feel Robin behind her and wondered vaguely if she bled out in this hallway, would they get more funding? No, the meeting James went to tonight was probably about how they’d now get less funding if someone died. She was shivering, it was so cold in this hallway. But her good sweater was pressed to her bleeding face.

And then, endless moments later, the door was ahead of her. It was the same exterior door she’d seen last time, the one that shouldn’t have been accessible from the first floor hallway. Gabriella broke into a run with about fifteen feet left to go. “I see the door!” she said to Graham. “I’m going for it now.”

“Don’t hang up.”

She wouldn’t, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to just collapse on top of her phone and break it the second she was outside. With a last burst of energy, Gabriella shoved the door open.

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CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 14