Fable: An Unfortunate Fairy Tale Book 3 Read Online Free PDF Page B

room and closed the door with a soft click.
    The hallway had never looked more foreboding
than it did in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm. Mina
didn’t care who owned the place or what the utilities would cost;
she was going to bring light to the darkened mansion. She felt
along the walls until she found a light switch and clicked it on.
The electric candelabras on the wall flickered on, and nothing
jumped out at her.
    Phew , she thought, one down, only a
hundred more to go.
    She turned the corner in the wing and was
once again greeted with another darkened hallway. She repeated the
process and almost panicked when she couldn’t find the switch,
because it was hidden behind the drapes. When the hallway was
illuminated, she didn’t move on to the rest of the house. Instead,
she decided to tackle every room. How could she sleep if she didn’t
know what lurked behind each of those ominous doors?
    The first door she flung open wildly and
jumped back into the hallway, expecting something or someone to
jump out, like a bat. It was another empty bedroom. The next door
revealed another empty bedroom. The next door—a bathroom. The next
door—a game room, complete with foosball and a pool table. She was
becoming braver with each door and stopped turning on the lights
after the lights in the hallway illuminated the empty rooms.
    The second-to-last door was a storage room,
filled with extra chairs, tables, fake plants, vases. One section
of the room had less clutter, as if all of the offending junk had
been pushed away from the central object. It was an easel, and on
the easel was a painting covered with a sheet. Leaning against the
wall were stacks of what looked like more paintings. Were these the
paintings that had been removed from each of the rooms? If so, and
they were removed because of fear of theft, then it was stupid for
the owners to place all these priceless paintings here in one room.
Or maybe they had forgotten to lock the door. Nevertheless, this
was what she’d been looking for…answers.
    Maybe it was a Monet? Or a Picasso? How cool
would it be to actually see one in person? Or what if they were
moved into this room so the owners could say that Mina and her
mother had stolen the paintings after they’d moved in? She was
flooded with a host of different reasons why the owners might have
moved the paintings here…and all of them ended up with Mina and her
mom in jail.
    She had no choice; she was going to have to
look at the paintings, and she would start with the one covered on
the easel. Just when she was about to remove the sheet, she had the
intense feeling that she was being watched. She dropped her hand to
stare around the room, and the barest reflection of movement in the
glass drew her attention to the large framed window. It was still
raining and dark, but she thought she saw something on the lawn
when the lighting flashed.
    Being careful to not be seen, she crept to
the side of the big window and curtain, and took up a lookout. She
held her breath in anticipation and waited until the next burst of
lightning. There it was, a quick flash! And sure enough, there was
someone in the middle of the yard, staring at the house. It went
dark again, and she began to panic. What was that? Who was that?
She lay in wait for the next minute until the storm illuminated the
yard again.
    Boom! The crash was simultaneous with the thunder, and he was
there! Right there! Thirty feet from the window, and he was looking
right at her. It was the man from the cemetery! He had stopped
right outside what looked like a ring of white rocks, and he was
beckoning to her.
    Mina screamed and crashed backward into the
paintings behind her, her fear causing her to subconsciously call
for Jared.
    An instant later Jared was by her side,
steadying her and trying to keep the picture from falling over.
“Clumsy, as always. I think you could use another lesson from
me.”
    “ There’s someone…outside!”
she choked out. Her