Chapter Thirty-Eight

Lucianne's back shot from the bed as she screamed aloud. Her breath was gone and her heart blaring in her ears. She choked on her own breath, trying to get short bursts of air into her lungs.

That tower…

Her hair was matted to her forehead and her skin was cold. She calmed down, her breath slowing down. She wiped the perspiration falling down the sides of her face away as her lips trembled.

She still remembered that woman. She was trapped in that dreadful tower with her, lighting up the room with flash after flash from the camera when out of nowhere, she fell to the ground, and her arm separated from her to skid across the floor.

It was a mannequin.

She couldn't describe the relief that overtook her in that instant. But in the next split second, a hand from behind reached out to graze her shoulder blades and she had screamed aloud, running out of the room and out of the tower.

In hindsight, it was probably a curtain that had touched her, not some ghost.

I mean, could you blame her? A thunderstorm was raging, and after she had found those questionable wisps of smoke on the photos of Gabriel pointing towards the tower that faced hers -

Yeah, her reaction was only natural. Very natural.

She huffed in frustration, brushing her hair away from her face. She brought her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them. Another bead of perspiration rolled down her face, past her thighs to the bed. She inhaled and exhaled slowly, her mind blocking out the nightmare she had just woken up from. She sighed, and went to wash up. She was about to climb back onto bed to lie on it for a short rest when it happened.

The siren.

Her eyes widened. What now? She rushed to her room door, threw it open and descended the stairs of her tower. Running to Ravenspire, she saw a group of students huddling around something, or someone.

She stopped before them. Did she even want to know? She was getting nowhere with her search and -

A student turned around to stare at her. She whispered to the student next to her behind her hand and that student stared at her too, whispering back.

"What?" Lucianne asked them.

"You're really cursed," she said, then the crowd stepped aside to reveal the body.

Lucianne couldn't see it clearly from where she was standing, so she approached it. As she came nearer, her heart sank to her stomach, fear overtaking her.

It was Jonas.

Jonas was dead.

But that wasn't all - Lucianne bent down to stare at his neck. Jutting out of it was a pair of scissors.

A pair of silver scissors with a peculiar golden flourish etched into the handles.

The same pair of scissors she had seen in Gabriel's room as he cut her hair for her.

What the fuck was happening? Jonas' fingers were in the holes of the pair of scissors, and it looked as if he had stuck it into his own neck. But there was no way he did that to himself. He loved himself way too much.

Blood trickled out of the wound that the blade had caused. Red, bright red blood. It collected around the corpse, staining the ground with dark red.

His eyes were wide open. Fear immortalised in them. His mouth gaped open, as if he was still crying for help. This was no accidental death. The rest, maybe. But never someone like Jonas. He was killed.

His white shirt was also stained with red. It bloomed across the front of it, the edges of the red darker. It was such a stark contrast to the white. Like a curse against the innocent. A blight against the holy.

It was somehow… enchanting.

The black blazer that was on top of the shirt, it was also darkened by the blinding red. Blood that was life itself. Life now drained from a body. Life, forever gone.

Sublime.

"Lucianne?" a student beside her nudged her.

She blinked fast, her body dragged back to earth. "What?"

"Do you know what happened to Jonas?"

"No," she stated.

"It's already past November, but the murders are still happening…"

"So they are," Lucianne said.

"You've been investigating them. What are your leads?"

"Well," she only said.

Her leads were now pointing towards Gabriel himself.