All of them watched Metelda head deeper into the shadows, wondering who received the worst treatment.
"Us." Tsuna and Klaire said in unison, nodding at each other. "For sure, no bet."
"In another light, that means she has deeper feelings for both of us than anyone else." Junior tried to throw a positive spin on the realization.
"The word you're looking for is hate," Lilly said, dragging Klaire out of any misunderstanding beforehand.
"There is a thin line between love and hate, kiddo." Tsuna schooled Lilly.
"How can there be? Aren't they polar opposites?" Junior asks.
"And that's why you don't have a girlfriend." Said Lilly, while the rest of the family nodded along, with Klaire looking away, avoiding her opinion getting into their family mix.
"That thin line sure is tied around my neck every night." Said Junior, storming off behind Metelda, hoping to catch her before the darkness caught him.
"How are you walking faster than my sprint!?" They heard him yell from within the shadows.
The next day, Tsuna dragged Klaire to the café she owned in the nearby city. Like her, it was a weather-beaten, time-stained refuge hidden down a crooked alley that should have been abandoned decades ago, yet it sat at the very crossroads of their booming city, surviving on stubborn charm alone.
With Junior and Metelda starting school the same day, Mr. Terror and Lilly also moved out of the mansion to work from their office, seeking life among people rather than the lingering ghosts of the mansion.
As the last of the Terror family stepped off its grounds, the mansion seemed to exhale; a long, rattling breath of something ancient and long-suppressed.
And the moment their presence faded beyond the gates, the house began to change: Shadows stretched unnaturally across the halls, thickening at the corners as if seeping out from the walls themselves. The once-flickering lightbulbs, which Lilly had so tirelessly replaced, dimmed until they barely glowed, casting eerie, half-lit corridors that seemed to twist and stretch free of prying eyes. The wooden floors, which had begrudgingly stopped groaning under constant human insistence, now creaked and sighed freely, whispering in tones too low to be human. Doors that had once remained stubbornly closed now swung open without warning, as if inviting with the lure of suspense. The grand staircase, which had caused countless stubbed toes and embedded plentiful splinters into unwelcomed fingertips, began to shift ever so slightly—just enough to misplace a step, just enough to send the next unlucky visitor tumbling.
The portraits lining the walls that had resigned themselves to watching the Terror family's mundane struggles now regained their former menace. Eyes, once still, resumed their subtle tracking. Smiles stretched too broad, too thin. One painting, an old Terror ancestor with an especially severe gaze, twitched at the edges, its subject leaning ever so slightly forward, as if listening for signs of anyone returning.
The air grew heavy with a static charge while the mansion itself held its breath. Waiting. Hoping for new occupants to toy with; anyone but the Terrors.
In the attic, where no soul dares venture, a single chair rocked lazily back and forth, as though something unseen had finally gotten the time to get comfortable.
At the heart of the mansion, in the cavernous great hall, the stubborn fireplace woke again; A towering monolith of blackened stone and grotesquely intricate carvings, it had once been the mansion's grand centerpiece, until the Terror family subdued it. Now, with no one left to keep it dormant, it stirred.
The gargoyle-like faces etched into the stone stretched into silent screams, their mouths widening in an attempt to inhale the room itself. Their hollow eyes drank in what little light remained, turning the hall dimmer with each breathless second.
The hearth yawned open, vast enough to swallow a full-grown man. Its iron grate, warped from battles the family never spoke of, curled into jagged, claw-like bars. No wood lay inside. No fuel had been left behind. Yet the fire erupted; It birthed itself from the empty pit in a single, shuddering roar, but not a sound followed. No crackling. No popping. The flames whispered instead, a low, guttural murmur like a language spoken underwater.
Even after all that struggle, the fire was still wrong. Too dark at its core, too viscous in the way it clung to the stone.
The fire dripped upward, defying gravity in slow, liquid smears.
Shadows writhed across the walls, forming shapes that took too long to dissolve. Some stretched into silhouettes of people who weren't there. Others lingered, tilting their heads, listening. Watching. Waiting.
And then there was the heat. Or rather, the absence of it.
The fire burned violently, hungrily, yet the room only grew colder. Frost threaded its way across the stone floor, careful and deliberate; The chill itself was stalking outward from the hearth.
Whatever burned inside wasn't creating warmth—it was feeding on it, siphoning every lingering trace of heat from the air, the walls, even the breath that left one's lungs.
A deep churning rose from within the chimney; slow at first, then steadily louder. It wasn't the crackle of burning wood, nor the rush of smoke. It was a pull. A dragging, rumbling inhale, as though something far below the mansion's foundation were taking its first breath in ages.
The chimney vibrated. Dust sifted down in trembling streams. And the pull grew deeper. Hungrier. Like the fire was only the throat, and something else was waking in the dark, swallowing the warmth of the world one breath at a time.
The mansion had many secrets. Many more horrors… but the fireplace was the oldest. The hungriest. It was a gate, a wound in reality that had been forced shut for generations. Now, with no one left to keep it sealed, it was waking to reclaim what was once lost!
Mr. Terror and Lilly met up in a bar close to the mansion after working hours, awaiting a call from Metelda, who was always the first to re-enter the house. Mr. Terror wanted an expert like Klaire first. In contrast, Lilly wanted Tsuna to accompany her for obvious reasons: to record Tsuna's petrified reactions, make GIFs of them, and use them in every family group text. Tsuna, however, had a similar plan, keeping Klaire busy to get some GIFs of her son and Lilly.
There were already way too many memes about Junior.
"If there is a chance... I would like to go." Klaire insisted.
"Can't physically stop you..." Tsuna chuckled. "Don't push me mentally though." She laughed harder, sending her dentures flying. "Why are you so obsessed with the supernatural anyway?" she spat as she spoke.
"Because normal is boring," Klaire said, a déjà vu of repeating herself playing alongside. To avoid further questions and spitballs, she chased the slippery dentures, apologizing to the customers at every turn. "Sorry, and welcome to the tooth fairy!" She joked about the café's name by playing puppeteer with the dentures.
"Need more time?" Tsuna wondered. "Fuck it! I don't have much time left. I gotta crack her open soon." She rubbed her hands, a devious smile cracking her lips and exposing her gums.
"Why are we here again?" A customer asked his buddy, shivering from Tsuna's smile.
"For the girl flopping around in the skirt—if you stop checking out the cougar, that is!"
Meanwhile, Metelda reached home, ignored the mansion's attempts at scaring her, forgetting to call her parents, and, as usual, got up hours later to a room full of glares.
"What!?" She frowned.
"You were supposed to call!" Dad yelled, voice cracking with leftover panic.
"We thought something happened to you," Mom added, clutching her chest.
"I peed myself," Junior announced shamelessly, like he was delivering the weather.
"Ghosts might not be real, but assholes occupy more than half our world!" Tsuna grumbled, throwing her hands up.
"Glad you're okay," Klaire said softly. "I'm honestly shocked no one talked over one another."
"She doesn't like it," the Terrors replied in eerie unison.
"And you know how she gets when she has the energy to reply—let alone when she hasn't," Tsuna groaned, rolling her eyes so hard Klaire half-expected them to fall out like her dentures.
Metelda took her time… a bit too much time… standing in the orange spill of the setting sun as if she were soaking it up like a lizard on its last brain cell. Everyone waited in absolute silence. They'd learned the hard way (four times, in fact) that overwhelming her with too many words only knocked her straight into a coma-like nap. So now all insults, concerns, and complaints were rationed into tiny, bite-sized sentences.
When Metelda was finally ready, she reached into her bra and pulled out a gun—her oversized clothes hiding it disturbingly well.
"Got Terror with me," she said flatly, addressing Tsuna's earlier concerns first. "Always."
She waved the gun at Klaire, who stumbled back with the others. Then she cocked the trigger and pointed the weapon at Lilly. "Never," she said, took a pause, and flicked it toward Dad. "Forgot."
She casually shot a drawer, blowing the lock clean off. "Maxi pads in there," she nodded at Junior.
"Why do you have them locked away?" Tsuna asked.
"Fun…" Metelda mumbled, collapsing backward into the warm embrace of her bed, too drained to finish the sentence. "Wa… fo…" She burrowed into her sheets, already fading.
"It'll be funny if someone wastes their time getting through a lock only to find pads," Junior interpreted. "And I think she wants us out. Wake her after dinner. Or…" He starts running without completing the sentence.
"Oh!" they all gasped, rushing behind Junior and dodging invisible bullets.
Lilly glanced at the bullet hole on her way out and couldn't stop shivering, even when they stopped behind concrete walls. "That accuracy… I'm glad she didn't start shooting."
"I didn't teach her that!" Mr. Terror said quickly.
"No, duh!" Lilly rolled her eyes. "I took her to one shooting lesson. One! There's no way they wouldn't let her attend without an adult. So you're telling me she got that good from an hour of practice! That's not possible. Right?"
"Wouldn't the instructor have said something?" Klaire wondered. "Recommended her to the Olympics or whatever?"
"Not if she pointed that gun at him," Tsuna said, already calculating her next approach to an armed, unreadable Metelda.
"Ah, more work," everyone groaned at once.
"Must've gotten her gun the same way," Tsuna murmured, leaning toward Klaire. "Remind me to stay on her good side."
"It's printed on our menu," Klaire whispered back with a chuckle.
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Forty-Eight. ———<>||<>———