The Box Omnibus #1 (The Box, The Journal, The Sword) by Christina G. Gaudet Read Free Book Online

I open my eyes, Cindy stands off balance with her hand clutching her face. She moves her hand away and looks down at it, eyes widening at the blood on her shaking fingers.
    “Son of a bitch,” she says, but there’s no force behind her voice. “Real manly, hitting a girl.”
    “Enough.”
    He grabs her arm and easily tosses her toward the post he’s been telling us to sit against. Since she was already off balance, she stumbles and falls hard on the wooden floor. She tries to pull herself up, but his foot strikes her stomach with a thud. Her face twists in anger and pain as she doubles over, clutching the spot where he’d kicked.
    I want to kill him for hurting my sister, but I can’t move. I can only stare with tear-blurred eyes as he forces her back against the pole and starts tying her hands behind her.
    “You too,” he says with a glance up at me.
    I want to refuse and fight him, I can’t remember how. The only thing I can think of is a balançoire. Real useful, if this was a stage fight in a ballet. I must have hesitated for too long because he stomps over to me and grabs my wrist the same way he grabbed Cindy’s and tosses me to the ground next to her. Cindy’s keys are forced out of my hand and thrown onto the worktable beside the chimera.
    While he starts to tie us up, Cindy first, I rub my wrist where he’s touched me. His grip had been tight, sure, but again there’s something else about his touch. It makes my entire arm go numb and itch and ache all at the same time. It’s like my skin is allergic to his.
    Using the grimy rope he’d been wrapping around his arm, he ties my hands behind by back and then binds us both to the post. I’m positive it’s covered in old spider webs and dead bugs, maybe even some living ones, but it’s all nice compared to the feeling of his skin against mine.
    “It didn’t work,” Cindy says so quietly at first I’m not sure I hear her right. “How could it not work? It always works.”
    I want to say something to calm her down, or make her feel better, or simply ask her if she’s okay, but I can’t find the words. I feel like crying. Every part of my body wants the release of full out gasping sobs, but for some reason, the tears don’t come.
    “Hey Al,” I say while barely moving my lips. It’s a miracle he wasn’t noticed before; I’m not about to give him away now. “You still alive?”
    Nothing.
    “Al?”
    Still nothing.
    Despite the fact I don’t want to draw attention to him, I have to look down to see if he’s still in his container. He’s not. His warning at the door was the last time I’d heard from him? Had he fallen out when I’d been forced to the floor? Had he been stepped on?
    My heart beats faster and faster as I picture his tiny flattened body on the bottom of my shoe. I couldn’t have. I would have noticed. I would have seen him fall or heard him crunch.
    Imagining the sound of him under the weight of my heel makes my stomach turn. I need to move. I need to check my sole even though if I see him there, or what’s left of him, I’ll definitely puke. I need to not be sitting here anymore.
    My muscles all tense and instantly begin to cramp and shoot pain. I need out! I need out now! I pull at my bindings, yanking harder than I mean to.
    The ropes give way more easily than I expect and I have to scramble to pretend nothing’s wrong. The chimera turns its second head to stare at me, but it doesn’t attack. Even our captor turns to look curiously at what grabbed the creature’s attention. I drop my head and shoulders to appear defeated and more importantly, still tied up.
    It doesn’t work.
    Trench coat guy starts toward me and I desperately think through the attacks I can remember.
    Before he reaches me, the door to the barn slams open causing bits of hay and who-knows-what-else to fall from the loft onto my head. I shrink in on myself and wait for the whole building to collapse. Doesn’t whoever entered realize how old the barn