The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4) by Gregory Ashe

Author:Gregory Ashe [Ashe, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodgkin and Blount
Published: 2019-04-04T22:00:00+00:00

WHEN WE WERE CLEAR, when Emmett released the barrier holding up the debris, the rest of the building sagged and collapsed, tumbling down to fill the hollow space where Emmett had saved my life. Our lives. Dust sneezed out, a cloud that licked the wet pavement and stained my sneakers, and then it was over.

The only tally I could keep, the only tally that made sense, was the tally of the people I knew who had survived: Austin, Becca, Jake, Jim, Kaden, and Temple Mae. Jim was strapped to a gurney and unconscious; Kaden and Temple Mae were both out for the count, and to judge by the way Jake grabbed Temple Mae’s face and shouted for help, she wasn’t in a good way. Kaden didn’t look much better.

Austin and Becca stood on the edge of the parking lot. Austin’s face looked like steel in a blast furnace: a degree of white that was going to give me a screaming headache if I looked at it too long. Becca was holding him up, and when he saw us, he ran, and nothing ever felt better, ever, than when he hit me at twenty miles an hour and carried me a few yards, like some sort of romantic adaptation of one of his football moves. I wasn’t going to complain; aside from the battering my nose took, I liked it.

“Are we in a fight?” he managed to say, his whole body shaking, the words buried in my shoulder.

I shook my head and gripped him tighter. “No. No fight.”

Everything from the last day—the recording of him talking to Ginny, the conversation I had overheard with Kaden—popped like a soap bubble. He was here. He was warm. He was mine. He squeezed me until my spine cracked, and then he shook me, and he still hadn’t said anything.

Sometimes I think it’d be so much easier if he weren’t here.

The words slithered at the edge of my subconscious. Ok. Maybe everything from the last two days wasn’t gone completely.

When the kissing started transitioning into the shaking and the squeezing and the yelling about taking stupid risks, I grabbed his hand, and Becca, Austin, Emmett, and I moved away from the crowd, huddled against shock and the spring chill. The April sky was the color of a razor. The sun had disappeared behind steel clouds again.

The bigger tally—the tally that went beyond me and what I could hold in my head—was the number of the dead. My limited exposure with the Bible and religion had not impressed me, but the phrase wailing and gnashing of teeth came to mind, and it fit in the worst way. There was a lot of wailing. A lot of screaming and crying and moaning and weeping. There were firetrucks and ambulances. There were dazed men and women, some staff, some patients, some visitors, some passersby. I remember a man, he looked ancient, with his hospital johnny fluttering in the icy April air, his bare ass chapped and red in the cold, one slipper scuffing along the pavement, the other foot bare as he dragged an IV pole.

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