I felt it now, crawling up the back of my neck.
A torrential downpour had flooded the campus while squirreled away in the library all day. My boots sloshed through the puddles as I scampered across the fog-shrouded quad. Half-frozen mud squelched underfoot, and the howling winds rattled the bare boughs of the surrounding trees. The fog that had descended was so thick and dark I couldn’t see more than a foot in front of my face.
Swish.
My heartbeat skipped, and my stuttered inhale suffocated me.
The fog swirled around me, wisps unfurling and reaching like phantom claws. A rumble shook the air as if a storm surged on the ground as viciously as an elemental cage. The sound of my heart racing in my ears faded to a dull roar. Shadows from the gloaming dark rose to life within that illimitable haze, and unfathomable shapes moved within.
The flickering glow of a lamp illuminated the edge of something shifting in the gloom. My ribs squeezed my vital organs painfully, and the blood drained from my face.
Wings.
There were giant wings rustling in the fog.
A blunt force slammed into my head, and I stumbled forward. An invisible source was drowning me in skull-crushing pain as daggers of panic shredded apart my innards. Bile spiked in the back of my throat, and I struggled not to vomit as my vision darkened around the edges.
Beyond the veil of reality, deep in the chasm of endless dark, two yellow eyes blinked from within the clouded abyss.
“Breathe.” Something caught me in a hard grip. “Goddammit, breathe, Ophelia!”
A great whoosh of air filled my lungs. And a scream wrenched out of me.
“Fucking—” A large palm slammed over my mouth, stifling my blood-curdling shrieking. “It’s me! Ophelia…”
I blinked, then snapped my eyes to the hardened, ocean-deep glare of Professor Quinn. A shiver ripped down my spine.
We were alone in the dreary fog.
There was no monster prowling closer.
Where had he come from?
The part of my brain responsible for rationality and basic motor function opted out of compliance. Prickling chills assaulted my body, and my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering as sickening shivers wracked my body. My feet were glued to the frigid, muddy ground, and the fog drifted carelessly around me. I was frozen like a rabbit in the jaws of a beast, tense and immobile as if I’d already accepted my doomed fate.
Fear had swept in like a hurricane and carried me away on a tide of visceral, drowning horror. Dread curdled in my psyche and cleaved away the most logistical parts of my mind I had come to rely on. Trembling, I fought to suck in a deep breath as the voice demanded. But when I heard a bird take off in a nearby tree, wings fluttering out of sight, my entire being locked up.
A garbled groan of fear wheezed out as a whimper.
Instead of being torn to shreds in the jagged beak of a monster, some dormant part of me realized that I had been transported to Professor Quinn’s office. I wasn’t in my usual chair across from my desk, which I would have thought odd another time. I was on his couch, and he was kneeling in front of me on one knee. There was a harsh frown slashed across his features and a deep furrow between his dark brows.
“Ophelia?”
“N-no… please… no.” My voice wobbled, and I mentally struggled to untangle myself from the monster in the fog and emerge into the security of my professor’s calming office.
“Just breathe. It’s not here. It’s gone, okay?” A finger curled under my chin, forcing me to gasp for air as my head was plunged into dangerously frothy ocean currents.
Each breath came as a gasp, but the gentleness of his touch on my face curbed some of the panic sparking along my nerves.
“It’s gone?” I repeated in a fractured whisper. “Gone?”
I still couldn’t breathe.
Fuck, I was going to hyperventilate to death. Escaped a monster that might be real or might be hallucinations gifted from my grandfather, all to asphyxiate myself on my instructor’s couch.
“Ophelia, for fuck’s sake—breathe!” He lunged at me. One hand on the back of my head, the other spread over my chest, and his mouth slammed into mine. Odd pressure built on my lips before my mouth opened, and air whooshed into me. An odd sensation that reminded my lungs how to work.
I gasped in a real lungful of air, but it wasn’t nearly as comforting as the hot mouth still glued to my skin.
