Rhyker turned his gaze away from the case and rested it firmly on me. “That is, until today.”
The lump in my throat grew bigger and bigger, and my heart banged in my ribcage. “You mean… That is actually Pandora’s box?”
I couldn’t explain why, but I believed him.
Every fiber of my being believed he was telling the truth. As impossible, as crazy, as it sounded, this was Pandora’s box, and I had opened it.
“Yes,” Rhyker said. “For thousands of years, the descendants of Pandora inherited her powers. One by one, they were raised to hunt down monsters and put them back where they belonged. Then, you came along, and… Well, you undid all their hard work, centuries of hunting down monsters, in the blink of an eye.”
“No.” I shook my head. “That can’t be true. I didn’t mean to do that!”
“But you did. There’s a reason the box said, ‘do not open’,” Rhyker told me. “And admit it, you can feel it in your bones. The world has changed. Something has been unleashed.”
“How do you know all this?” I shoved the trinket toward him. “I don’t want this. You take it. You seem to know all about it, so it’s better if this box stays with you.”
“Sorry, princess.” Rhyker shoved the box of horrors back toward me. “You opened it, and it’s yours now. Your responsibility. I can help you, but I can’t take the burden from you. We need to get the box back to where it belongs. To the very place you took it from.”
Ash House.
The crumbling mansion in the forest, with the creepy statues and cabinets filled with memorabilia straight from hell.
“I’m not going back there.” I shook my head. “And definitely not tonight.” Risking a glance outside, the sun had already crawled behind the horizon, and the last thing I wanted to think about was being inside the Ash House after dark.
The house had been terrifying in the light of day, and I had zero desire to face its menacing presence in the dead of night.
“You don’t understand.” Rhyker held up the box while he stood up from the bed. “This thing draws monsters to it like moths to a flame. Every monster creeping around on the face of the earth will want this box. The only place we can keep this safe is at Ash House—a house designed for the very purpose of protecting this little trinket.”
“That makes no sense.” I frowned. “Why would all monsters on earth want the very thing that can lock them up forever?”
“Because, my silly human,” Rhyker replied, “if they destroy the one prison that can hold them, then there’s nothing left that can lock them up.”
Chapter 7
Ash House looked about twenty times as terrifying at night than it did during the day.
Pale moonlight shone over the dilapidated building, casting an eerie glow through the few windows that hadn’t been boarded up.
I shivered all over, despite having zipped up my hoodie to the top. If this was a horror movie, no doubt the audience would be screaming at the heroine—in this case, me—right now to turn on her heel and head back before she stood face to face with a horrifying specter.
Real life wasn’t a horror movie, though. I had done something horrible, and I had to make things right, even if it meant following a stranger into a haunted mansion in the dead of night.
Although the whole story about the box of Pandora sounded like it came straight from a fantasy story and not real life, and although I had zero indication on whether I could trust this Rhyker guy or not, besides that he somehow seemed to know more about the box and he hadn’t made a move to kill me yet, I had no doubt that what he told me was the truth.
It was like, somehow, I had known this all along, on a deeper level, in a memory I couldn’t quite access.
“Do you know what happened to the Ash family? How they passed away?” Rhyker asked me suddenly. We had already crossed the fence and were now making our way through the front garden of the mansion.
“I don’t know much,” I admitted. “They died in a fire, but on one knows how it started, or why no one called 911 after it did. The house has sat empty for over a decade.”
“Hm.” Rhyker remained silent, about the first time since we had climbed out of the room of my window and snuck outside, heading toward the woods. I had hoped that Rhyker’s sudden appearance in my room meant he had teleporting skills that could transport us directly to Ash House, but apparently, that was not the case.
Sneaking out of my house after nightfall was probably the worst act of teenage defiance I had done in my entire life.
I was the good girl, who did what my parents asked me, who never broke curfew. Mom would have a heart attack if she ever found out.
Especially if she discovered I was with a strange guy, who was obviously a few years older than me, and whom I had never met before in my life. Oh, and not to mention, who had suddenly turned up in my bedroom out of the blue.
“Do we really have to go inside?” I asked Rhyker. “I mean, can’t we drop the box at the door?”
Rhyker stopped in front of the door. “No. The box needs to be brought inside for any of the charms to still work. And that’s a big ‘if’, because the fire might have destroyed the barriers.”
“How do you know all this?”
It was the third time I had asked him, and the third time he downright ignored my question. Instead, he crossed the two stairs leading to the front door and pushed it open.
The door squeaked, the noise magnified in the silence of the night.
My hands trembled, causing my flashlight to cast ominous shadows
