The scream shattered sleep like glass against stone.
Kael's eyes snapped open. Darkness pressed against him, thick and suffocating. His heart hammered against his ribs, each beat a thunderous echo in the midnight silence. The sound had come from downstairs, from the kitchen where his mother often worked late mending clothes by candlelight.
But this was not the gentle murmur of her humming. This was a terrified screaming voice, raw and primal.
Another scream joined the first. His father's voice, but twisted into something unrecognizable. Not anger. Not pain. Something worse. Something that made Kael's skin crawl with primitive recognition of wrongness.
He lay frozen, blanket clutched in white-knuckled fists. The rough wool scratched against his palms, grounding him in physical sensation while his mind reeled. Every instinct screamed at him to move, to help, to do something. Yet his body refused to obey.
The floorboards were cold beneath his bare feet as he finally forced himself from bed. Each creak of aged wood sounded like thunder in the oppressive quiet that had fallen between screams. He crept toward his door, hand trembling as it reached for the iron latch.
Through the gap beneath the door, flickering light danced. Not the warm gold of candle flame, but something colder. Bluer. Wrong. The light pulsed with a rhythm that matched neither heartbeat nor breath, casting shadows that writhed with impossible geometries.
Voices drifted up through the floor. His mother's, pleading. His father's, commanding. And beneath them both, something else. A whisper that wasn't quite sound, more felt than heard. It spoke in tones that made his teeth ache and his eyes water, words in a language meant for no human tongue.
Then Mira screamed.
His little sister's voice cut through everything else, high and sharp and terrified. The sound drove ice through Kael's veins, freezing him more completely than winter wind ever could. His hand fell away from the latch.
Coward.
The word echoed in his mind, his own voice turned accusatory. His family needed him. Whatever was happening downstairs, they were facing it while he cowered in his room like a frightened child. But he was thirteen, nearly a man. He should be rushing to their aid, grabbing the poker from beside his small fireplace, charging down to defend them.
Instead, he backed away from the door.
His retreat felt like moving through honey, each step a monumental effort against the weight of his shame. The screaming intensified below, his mother's pleas becoming wordless sounds of anguish. Something crashed, pottery or glass shattering against stone. His father roared defiance that cut off mid-syllable.
Kael's knees hit the floor beside his bed. The impact sent sharp pain up his legs, but he barely noticed. His hands shook as he pressed them against his ears, trying to block out the sounds. But they leaked through, seeping past his fingers like water through a sieve.
The strange whisper-voice grew louder, more insistent. It spoke of drowning without water, of cold that burned, of shadows with substance. Even muffled by his hands and the floor between them, the words crawled into his mind like parasites, leaving trails of frost in their wake.
A new sound joined the cacophony. Wet. Organic. Like cloth being torn, but meatier. His mother's screaming stopped. The silence that followed was worse than any sound.
"Please," his father's voice, broken now. "Not the children. Take me, but not..."
The plea ended in a gurgle.
Kael bit down on his fist to stifle his own whimper. Blood bloomed on his knuckles where his teeth broke skin, copper taste flooding his mouth. The pain helped focus his scattered thoughts, gave him something real to cling to as reality seemed to fray at the edges.
Footsteps now. But wrong, all wrong. Too many for one person, not enough for two. A dragging gait that suggested limbs bent at angles they were never meant to hold. The sound moved through the kitchen, past the living area, toward the stairs.
Hide.
The instinct was pure and primitive, older than thought. Kael scrambled under his bed, pressing himself against the wall where shadows gathered thickest. Dust filled his nostrils, threatening a sneeze he desperately suppressed. Through the gap between floor and bed frame, he could see his door, could watch that horrible blue light grow stronger.
The footsteps climbed. Each impact on the stairs sent vibrations through the cottage's wooden bones. Between the sounds of movement came other noises, dripping and scraping and something that might have been breathing if breathing could be done without lungs.
"Kael?" Mira's voice drifted through his door. But wrong, so wrong. The pitch was hers but the intonation belonged to something else. Something that had learned speech by dissecting throats. "Kael, come see what I found. It's so beautiful."
His sister's bedroom was next to his. The footsteps should have stopped there. Should have entered her room. But they continued past, drawn by some inexorable purpose toward his door.
The latch lifted with a soft click.
Kael pressed his hand harder against his mouth, tasting his own blood as he fought to remain silent. The door swung open with theatrical slowness, revealing the hallway beyond bathed in that terrible blue radiance.
A figure stood in the doorway. It wore Mira's nightdress, had Mira's dark hair. But the way it moved spoke of puppetry, of something wearing his sister's form like an ill-fitting costume. The hairpin in her hair blazed with cold fire, casting shadows that had too many angles, depths that suggested vast distances in spaces too small to contain them.
"Brother?" The thing wearing Mira's face tilted its head at an angle that would have snapped a real neck. "Are you hiding? Mother and Father are waiting downstairs. They want to show you something wonderful."
It stepped into the room. Where its bare feet touched the floor, frost spread in crystalline patterns. The air grew thick with the smell of deep water, of things that lived in places sunlight never touched. Kael's breath misted in the sudden cold, each exhalation a betrayal that might reveal his position.
The creature moved with horrible patience, checking behind the door, peering into his wardrobe. All the while it hummed a tuneless song that made his ears bleed. Crimson droplets pattered onto the dusty floor beneath the bed, each impact thunderous in Kael's heightened awareness.
"Found you."
The thing dropped to its knees beside the bed, bending to peer into the shadows where Kael cowered. For one eternal moment, their eyes met. Mira's warm brown gaze had been replaced by depths of lightless water, by the patient hunger of things that waited in the dark between stars.
Then it smiled with too many teeth.
Kael's paralysis shattered. He rolled sideways, scrambling out from under the bed's far side as fingers that had become something between flesh and water grasped for him. They left furrows in the floor, wood aging decades in seconds beneath their touch.
The window. His only chance. Kael sprinted across his small room, shoulder-checking the shutters with desperate strength. Wood splintered, glass shattered, and suddenly cold night air struck his face like a blessing. Behind him, the thing wearing his sister's shape rose with movements that defied joint and sinew.
He didn't think. Thinking would have meant hesitation, and hesitation would have meant joining whatever his family had become. Kael threw himself through the window, feeling glass tear cloth and skin as he tumbled onto the roof below.
The slate tiles were slick with dew, treacherous beneath his bare feet. He slid more than ran, momentum carrying him toward the edge as inhuman shrieks erupted from his room. At the last moment, he caught the gutter, swinging down to drop the final distance to the ground.
Impact drove the air from his lungs. Pain flared through his ankles, sharp and immediate. But pain meant life, meant he could still run. And run he did, bare feet slapping against packed earth as he fled into the darkness beyond Millhaven's sleeping streets.
Behind him, his home blazed with that terrible blue light. Shadows danced in the windows, performing some grotesque play he was grateful not to witness. The thing that had been Mira stood in his shattered window, watching him flee with those abyssal eyes. It didn't pursue. It didn't need to.
The damage was already done.
Kael ran until his lungs burned and his legs trembled. He ran until the lights of home became distant stars and the only sound was his own ragged breathing. He ran until exhaustion finally dropped him to his knees in a drainage ditch beside the trade road, where he vomited bile and self-loathing onto the dead grass.
Coward.
The word echoed with each heartbeat, carved itself into his bones with every breath. he had hidden like a frightened animal. And when discovered, he had fled rather than fight.
The blue light faded from the horizon as dawn approached, painting the sky in shades of grey that promised no comfort. Somewhere behind him lay three bodies that had been his world. Ahead stretched a road that led away from everything he had failed to protect.
Kael pulled his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around them as if he could hold himself together through sheer pressure. The cuts on his feet throbbed. Glass shards still embedded in his palms caught the growing light like tiny accusations. But these pains were nothing compared to the hollow ache where his heart should have been.
He had survived. That was the cruelest joke of all. The coward who hid beneath his bed while monsters wore his family's faces would see another sunrise. He alone would carry the weight of this night through all the sunrises to come.
In the distance, a rooster crowed. The world was waking to a new day, indifferent to the tragedy that had unfolded in one small cottage. Soon someone would discover what remained of the Reeve family. There would be whispers, investigations, fear.
But Kael would not be there to see it. He could never go back. Not after what he had done.
Not after what he had failed to do.
Rising on unsteady legs, he turned his back on Millhaven and began walking. Each step took him further from the boy who had gone to sleep in a warm bed, surrounded by love and safety and the ordinary promises of tomorrow.
That boy had died the moment he chose to hide instead of help.
What walked away was something else. Something that would learn to survive at any cost, because survival was all that remained when courage failed.
The sun rose, indifferent and golden. And Kael walked on, leaving bloody footprints behind.