Pure Hell (Seventh Level Book 1) by Charity Parkerson, Regina Puckett Page A

her baby sister for the sweet, seventeen-year-old girl, she really was. The photo caught the moment Kylie was walking her into the house. Arm in arm, they were both smiling at one another for the first time in years.
    How had they grown so far apart? The sad truth was, she knew the answer. For years, she had blamed her baby sister for their parents’ deaths. Even though she knew Kylie couldn’t have been responsible. Anne needed to blame someone and Kylie was an easy target. After all, how could she blame God? Wouldn’t such a thing have been sacrilegious? So instead, she placed the blame on the only person who had been with them when the fire broke out. The truth was in the dead of the night, Anne wondered if she had stayed home instead of staying over at her girlfriend’s house, if she could have done something to save their lives?
    Spending all her time being angry with her sister for something totally out of her control had cost Anne everything. Now she had no one.
    “I wonder why someone did this.” Anne held up the photo and looked at its other half glued to the wall next to the headboard. Above Anne’s smiling face, carved into the wall were the words, Anne Trace wins second place . Without thinking about what she was doing, she slipped her hand into Mark’s.
    He squeezed her fingers and she found her voice. “Did the man who killed Kylie do this?”
    Before Mark could answer, there was a loud crash in the next room. They both jumped but Mark was the first to react. She could only guess it was his police training which had him moving toward the danger instead of away from it, because he took off in a fast but controlled run out of the bedroom. Not wanting to be left alone, Anne took off after him. He was opening the second bedroom door by the time she finally caught up with him.
    Mark made a chopping motion to let her know she was to stay outside the room this time. She might have done as he wanted, but just as he entered the room, it felt as if someone ran a finger down the side of her face. She didn’t squeal the same as a little girl would but she did slap at the empty air even though there was nothing there to hit.
    She didn’t get very far into the room when she stopped dead in her tracks. There were pieces of glass and plastic dolls everywhere. Heads had been separated from their bodies and it left all types of eyes staring at grotesque angles from every corner of the room. The only doll that had not been torn up was a creepy clown doll sitting in a rocking chair in the corner of the room. What made it worse was the chair was moving as if someone was sitting in it.
    Anne must have made a sound this time, because Mark walked up to her and grabbed her by the shoulders. He forced her to look at him before he whispered, “Are you okay?”
    She shook her head even though she meant to nod. She whispered back, “What’s with the rocking chair? Why is it moving by itself?”
    Mark’s face was covered in a thin layer of sweat and he looked as if he wanted to be any place other than Kylie’s apartment. “I don’t know, but there is some creepy shit going on here. Even as a kid, I never did care for clowns.”
    He took her arm and tried to pull her out of the bedroom. She might have gone with him but she froze when she spotted the writing covering the bedroom walls. He tugged at her arm again but she refused to budge. Her heart was beating so hard it felt as if it was trying to escape her chest. She pointed at the wall nearest them even though she could have just as easily pointed at any of them. “It’s my name again. It looks the same as if someone took a hot torch and burned my name into every square inch of this room. What’s going on?”
    Since Mark wasn’t having any success at being gentle, he finally picked her up and carried her out. She might have protested if she hadn’t been in so much shock but his brute strength was comforting. It was nice to know at least someone could still think and