Read Online Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters - Free Book Online Page B

trying—”
    â€œNot now, please. Let it go, okay?”
    Her mother’s lips pursed as she speared a piece of lettuce with her fork, but she said, “Okay. I’ll let it go.”
    Alison toyed with her own salad, her appetite gone. Even if her mother didn’t think she was moving forward fast enough, she was trying. She was.

    Alison closed and locked the door behind her mom and brought the photo album back downstairs. When she set it on the coffee table, the room filled with the sweetness of roses. Her mother’s voice echoed in her ears.
    Do you smell flowers?
    But the scent vanished in the span of a heartbeat, as though it had never been there at all. Alison sank down on the sofa, grimacing at the knot of pain below her hipbone. After she kicked off her slippers, she traced her fingers over the illegible print.
    Leave it alone.
    She turned past George’s photo and stared at the house, imagining the walls blackened and charred, the wood scorched, the windows shattered, the roof caved in. She tried to turn the page again, but of course it didn’t budge.
    She pressed her fingertips to her temple. She should throw it out before her
    obsession
    fascination with it grew any stronger.
    But it took the scars away…or maybe she only thought it did. Maybe everything was in her imagination, another way to keep herself from facing what needed to be faced. That was far more like—
    The curtain in the top window of the turret twitched. Alison sat back. Took a deep breath. Craned her neck forward, ignoring the pull of scar tissue.
    A face peeked out from behind the lace curtain, a sepia flash of eyes and open mouth. The curtain shifted and the face disappeared. Alison pressed both hands to her mouth.
    Not real. It couldn’t be real. It was some sort of trick, that’s all. She needed to leave it alone, to close it up and throw it away.
    The face appeared again, a doll-like face with dark eyes and round cheeks—a child, holding the curtain back with one pudgy hand. The little girl lifted her free hand, and opened and closed her fingers. Alison raised her hand and waved back even as the voice shouted alarm inside her head.
    â€œIt’s just a little girl,” she muttered, her voice thick at the edges.
    A gust of rose-scented wind carried her voice away. The breeze rifled through her hair. An insect flitted across the page, a quick blur of fluttering wings. The little girl giggled a tiny, musical trill. Piano notes played in the background.
    A woman’s voice called out, “Mary? Are you in there, Mary?”
    Shoes tapped across a wood floor. The little girl peered back over her shoulder and dropped the curtain. The lace edge brushed against the other panel before it fell back into place. The girl’s shadow darted behind the lace, a quick flash of dark against light, two sets of clicking footsteps, one lighter and quicker than the other, faded back into the paper, and then all was still.
    A silhouette remained, frozen in time, behind the curtain. A flash of color flew past, the vibrant orange and black of a Monarch butterfly. It spiraled down and lit on the rosebush, its wings slowly opening and closing. Then it melted into the photograph, growingsmaller and smaller, its colors changing from brilliant to dull. Alison bent close until her nose was mere inches away. Yes, there on a rosebush, the butterfly sat motionless. She pressed the tip of her finger on the photo, covering the butterfly.
    â€œCome in,” a man’s voice said.
    Her finger slipped into the picture, disappearing through both butterfly and rosebush. Then her hand, all the way to her wrist. An unseen hand wrapped around hers, the fingers holding tight with an iron grip, hard enough to crush her bones together. She cried out. The hand tugged, pulling her down. Pulling her in. The world turned shades of brown and ivory. A sensation of spinning, of vertigo turned upside down and inside out. Pain. Heat