final girl. { violet ; hero }

"Coralie?!"

I hear a creak from above the open window, rushing toward the banging panes as they fight with the stormy winds of the night. A shadow casts across a flash of lightning, enough to scare a yelp out of me - ice gathered up in my hands meant for Indigo's wounds clattering to the floor. Outside, the storm rages. Pellets of rain fall from the sky to the ground, desperate to touch the concrete below.

Coralie leans out of the sill above, all pale skin and wild red hair and a hollow gaze. I have a terrible feeling she wants to follow the rain.

"What are you doing?!"

"I didn't mean to kill them."

Her fifth word makes me shudder, but the weight of them all together causes the gasp to escape my chest. Whitney, my heart clenches with my fists now wrapped around the edge of the wooden windowsill as I lean forward, neck twisted up to catch the profile of the girl above me. I can see the scuffed soles of her shoes peeking out, strands of matted orange dancing in the storm, the way the wind whips at her beautiful clothes freckled with blood.

She doesn't care. It's not the fact that she's standing there that worries me, nor the words she uses. It's that she doesn't care.

So unlike her. So unlike Coralie, who only ever cared about silly things like clothes and hair and the soles of her shoes.

"They’ve been haunting me ever since, begging me to pay the price."

They've been haunting me too, I want to confess. Lightning cracks at the sky like the way Amrin's skull hit porcelain china. The sky groans and weeps, the wind howls. This place mourns them. Blaine. Amrin. Poppy. Whitney-

Her hand around mine in the dark. Her beautiful face blinking in torchlight. 

Her hands bound and lifeless in the dark. The whites of her eyes, deathly still, in the dim light of another room.

Whitney would give her a chance. Whitney would forgive her. 

"It’s finally time I give them what I owe.”

"You don't owe them anything!" I try, voice hoarse against my dry throat, swallowed up by the howling wind. Whitney, her spirit, I owe her that. To be more like her. To get out of this place whole, and to lead as many people back with me as possible. She found me there, down in the dark, tears and bones and a blunt kitchen knife - and she took my hand and led me to safety. Coralie doesn't owe her ghosts her life. But I do. I owe it to Whitney to try.

Coralie looks down at me, eyes hollow, and my heart sinks. She's already dead. I know it, and she knows it.

"I'm sorry."

"CORALIE NO!" I cry, beg, but she's already falling past me by the time I get a chance to s c r e a m - 

Another crack, this time from below. I can't even look. Can't even watch her die. Cowardly, I scurry back into the dark with my shaking hands pressed firmly against my mouth, eyes squeezed tightly shut, trembling in the shadows of the kitchen. I have to stop myself from screaming too loud. I have to stop myself from vomiting. I have to stop myself from becoming one of them - damned, dead, both. I have to stop myself from swallowing whole the ghosts that follow me, for I know if I let them in I won't ever be able to get them out of my head.

And when that happens, well. Now I know.