She snorts. “Come on. You don’t have to be good. Just follow my lead.”
“I may step on you.”
“I’ve been stepped on by worse.”
She pulls me by the hand. I follow.
We move clumsily at first. My feet are too large, my instincts too battle-trained. But her hand in mine is a map, and her body sways like it was made to be in sync with mine. Our chests brush. Her hair brushes my jaw. She’s warm. Real. Her heart beats fast.
“Hey,” she says, low. “You’re not half-bad.”
“I learn fast.”
She spins. I catch her.
For a moment, it’s just the music. Just her.
And I forget the spear. The monster. The other world.
I almost feel… human.
Then the shadows twist.
And I smell death again. At first, I think it's just the wind again.
A chill cuts through the warmth of the music and the laughter, slicing along my spine like a whispered warning.My blood knows before my eyes do. The joy around me—manufactured and fragile—wavers like a candle in a foul wind.
Then I see him.
Old. Bent. Wobbling in the knees and hunched in the spine. A man who doesn’t fit the tempo of the world around him. His face is lined with time but not weathered by life—his skin looks too smooth, like stretched leather left out in the sun. His eyes, though…
His eyes are wrong.
Clouded, but not blind. They shimmer faintly. Not the shimmer of reflection, but of something alive beneath the surface. Something hungry. He moves among the dancers, not with joy, not with rhythm—but with intention.
Predator’s intention.
I step toward him.
That’s when the music shifts.
Booger’s voice crackles through the speakers like a battle cry. “KICK IT!”
And then the blues hits.
It starts slow—a dirty, crawling riff thick with distortion and swampy rhythm. A rhythm from the bones of this world. And the moment it hits, the old man screams.
No.Itscreams.
The disguise shreds itself with a sound like tearing meat and snapping bone. Flesh sloughs off in blackened strips. The human skin splits like a burst sausage, and what was once a frail frame becomes a rising pillar of rot and rage.
It grows.
Tall. Twisting. Wrong.
The twin faces writhe as if they’ve been sleeping, and now woken by the music, they shriek in stereo. One sobs in reverse. The other cackles in a voice made of knives. Limbs extend, crackling like dead branches bending against a storm.
The Vorfaluka is here.
