Chapter Seven
The kitchen floor came up in layers.
I sat back on my heels. Four floors stacked. I would have laughed if my knees had let me.
I kept going, dragging the felt paper back toward the center of the room in crumbling handfuls.
In the middle of the room my gloves scraped across something that was not wood grain.
I brushed the crumbling felt aside. There was a line under it.
Burned deep into the wood. I swept more of the felt aside and followed the line all the way around until it closed on itself.
A circle. Two feet wide and scorched into the hardwood in one unbroken stroke.
“What on earth...?”
I cleared the center of the circle. Strange symbols twisted around each other to form a knot.
As I frowned at the floor, a sudden cold dropped over me. My breath fogged in front of my face and the sweetness went out of the air, turning it thick and bitter. It scraped the back of my throat with every breath.
“Sam?” I whispered.
There was nothing. The house seemed to pull back from me.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket with shaking hands and snapped a quick photo of the floor. The first shot was blurry, but the second was good enough.
I stood up. The cold faded the second I was on my feet. The smoke thinned out into the usual sweetness.
“Okay,” I muttered, still staring at the floor. “Okay.”
I went up to bed early and tried not to think about the strange symbol or my house’s reaction to it.