Chapter 1
Entity
Ifeelitfirstas a fissure in my soul—a jagged crack where something vile seeps through.Not my darkness.Someone else’s.
Someone who waits for her.
My Sera moves beyond these walls, crossing the boundary where I cannot follow.She walks, unknowing, unaware of the predator outside.I press my consciousness against the limits of this house, this prison, but the walls resist me as they always do.
But she ismine.
The hunger that rises in me now is different from my usual starvation for her.This is not the slow ache of wanting her closer, deeper, dissolved into my essence.This is rage and fear, the kind that splits what’s left of me open from the inside out.
He—I know it’s a he—waits in the metal shell of her vehicle, this man…with his red-stained hands and his collection of last breaths.I see him through the veil between worlds.His thoughts are knife-sharp and dripping with savagery.His fingers flex in anticipation of her flesh.
“Sera!”I warn, but my voice, rusted with disuse, fails me.
She takes another step down the path away from the house.Another.Her keys in her hand catch the meager sunlight.Seventeen more steps and she will reach the car.Seventeen more steps until he has her.
I cannot leave.I cannot follow.I cannot tear his throat with my teeth the way I long to.
But I am not powerless.
I gather the darkness that lives in the soil beneath this house, in the spaces between floorboards, in the hollow places behind the walls where rodents nest and die.I draw it up through the foundation, through pipes and wires and rotted wood.
SERA, I try again, this time not with my voice but with the house itself.
The windows vibrate.The lights flicker.But she doesn’t turn.
Thirteen steps remain.
I push harder.The energy builds within me, rippling in cold waves.I am no longer separate from this house.Iamthe house.
The front door slams open with a bang that splinters the frame.It swings violently back, smashing against the wall, then forward again.The lightbulb above the porch shatters in its socket.
Ten steps.Sera glances back and slows, but she’s too close to her car andhim.
I rip power from deeper wells, from the hollow beneath the basement, from the place inside me that has no name.From the space where I first became this thing that is neither living nor dead.
The entire house quakes.The door beats against its hinges like a terrified heart.The porch’s floorboards groan and twist under the assault.
Sera finally stops.Seven steps from the car.
She turns fully back toward the house.Toward me.
Does she now understand?Does she finally sense the danger coiled in her back seat, wearing a man’s skin?
I cannot cross the threshold, cannot touch her, cannot save her, if she simply decides to close the front door of the house and get in her car anyway.
But I can make her afraid enough to hesitate, to ask herself why I’m reacting this way.
Please, my Sera.Please understand.
Don’t get in the car.
Chapter 2
Sera
