~Rain~

Chapter Sixteen

Authors Note  - I just updated this chapter, if you have already read it I cut out the fight scene and replaced it with another scene that you need to read for the story to work. So, read that!

Chapter sixteen

 

Chapter Sixteen

 

Alice’s eyes flew open once more, even though they had been closed for less than a minute.

‘Tyron?’ she whispered, twirling a damp lock of hair around her numb finger and staring up at the water stained ceiling.

For a second, Tyron was silent, and then he spoke in little more than a whisper. ‘Yes?’

‘Would you say it was after midnight?’ Alice watched as crystals of ice grew on her clothes as the water froze over.

Tyron hesitated, and then stood up and looked back down at the hard wooden floor they had been laying on. Any heat that it had once held was long gone. He walked to the window, where he rested his hands on the ledge and looked out into the street. If he leaned far enough, he could just about track the movement of the stars in between the tall grey buildings.

‘Yes…why?’

‘It was my birthday yesterday.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, it sucked.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t think I like being thirteen,’ Alice mused, flicking specs of ice from her hair.

‘You didn’t much like being twelve, either,’ Tyron pointed out.

Alice shivered, and then sat up, releasing that trying to sleep was pointless. She began to pace the room, listening to the slow and high creak of the floorboards beneath her bare feet.

‘We can’t stay here!’ she finally exclaimed, pushing a thin dusting of ice from the windowsill and onto the floor. ‘We will freeze to death.’

Tyron looked as though he was about to argue, and then clamped his chattering teeth down determinedly. Nodding, he made his was to the door and looked around the corner. Turning back, her addressed Alice, ‘Fine. You’re probably right. We need to find a fireplace or something…but promise me that if I tell you to run, you’ll run. No arguing.’

Looking down at her feet, Alice’s cheeks went red, ‘I don’t-‘

‘Yes you do.’

‘Fine.’

The door was wide and old fashioned, with delicate engravings around the edges that Tyron thought might have dated back to before the great drought began. Hundreds of years before. It was weird – all of the old buildings had been demolished after the last war.

 It felt as though they were walking through the halls of a haunted house – high ceilings, rich rugs and dark, creaking floorboards lined with spider weds. Alice was on edge, as though she felt something was about to jump out at her at any second.

The great, ornate windows were all boarded up, but not as though they had been done in a hurry. Precise squares of metal were screwed into place, blocking out any view of the outside.

A great sweeping staircase invited them up, where suddenly everything looked cleaner, polished, and somehow brighter despite the fact that everything was still immersed in darkness.

Alice placed her bare foot on the soft, flowing carpet. The floor beneath did not creak. Somewhere at the top of the stairs, a lone, one eyed teddy lay, discarded on the floor.