“Jesse,” I try to whisper, but my teeth are clenched too hard. His name is a barely audible hiss.
The shadow steps out of the wall.
I grab the chair’s armrests, but my legs refuse to lift. I’m frozen, pinned like a moth in a glass case, helpless to do anything but watch as the shadow drifts to the foot of Jesse’s bed.
Jesse passes in front of the shadow, momentarily blocking it from my view.
When he steps forward, a young boy sits on the edge of Jesse’s bed.
Green-eyed, with curly hair the color of clover honey, he wears a rumpled gray and white outfit that looks straight out of a medieval movie set. The sleeves hang over his small fingers, and his suspenders are buckled into shorts that might’ve been made out of potato sacks. Beneath them are wool stockings that disappear into his flat, rounded shoes, which appear at least one size too large.
The boy smiles at me, revealing three missing teeth at the bottom of his mouth. He swings his short legs.
My knuckles whiten around the armrests. Despite the racing speed of my heart, my mind manages to cut through the haze to assess the situation with something approaching clarity.
I sniff, but the air smells the same. No trace of sewage or rot. The boy’s unblinking, smiling eyes are green, not orange.
Whatisthis?
A drop of blood lands on Jesse’s gray rug. Another joins it, then more, until a river of red soaks through to the ground.
The boy’s legs keep swinging.
It takes every ounce of my willpower to drag my gaze from the blood-drenched rug to the boy’s face.
He continues smiling as blood drips from his eyes, coursing over his round cheeks. It flows from his ears and nose, running down his neck, his chest, disappearing into his uniform.
When he stands, the rug squelches beneath his oversized little shoes. He steps toward me, that eerie smile still fixed on his face, and covers the hands I’ve wrapped around the armrests with his own.
He feelsreal.Like skin and bone instead of the shadow he came from.
My jaw finally unlocks enough to force out a single question. “What. Do. You. Want?”
“Look what you did, Annie.” A voice, older and distinctly feminine,slides out of his bloody mouth. “You almost wasted this boy. I found him running down the street, screaming for his papa. What if he’d gotten away?”
The blood has nearly coated the boy’s entire face. When he brings it close to mine, I can barely see his features beneath it. “We have debts to pay, Annie. This life isn’t free, and you cannot afford to have friends, my love. Not when it needs to feed.”
Again, a blade of clarity temporarily cuts through the terror.It.The creature?
Tears slip from the corners of my eyes. The boy stumbles away from me, and his sob hits me like a fist to the chest. He finally sounds like a child, alone and terrified. His knees wobble as he trips forward and lands behind Jesse. He utters a pained sentence in a language I don’t recognize.
With barely a sound, the boy’s body melts into the floor.
My stomach roils. I can’t breathe.
A shadow stretches behind Jesse once more when he steps toward me. The air thins, and time seems to restart with a shudder.
At last, my body thaws from its petrified curl. My limbs belong to me again. I can move my hands, my jaw.
With breath I shouldn’t have, I unleash a blood-curdling scream.
It takes nearly a full hour to calm down enough to tell Jesse what I saw.
“I don’t get it,” Jesse says from his cross-legged spot on the floor. He hasn’t moved since I told him the shadow peeled away from him while he paced. “I was at the window, and then I crossed the room. By the time I turned around, you were screaming. It was five, ten seconds. You’re saying all of that happened in ten seconds?”
I wrap my arms tighter around my knees. I wedged myself between his dresser and the wall, eliminating any chance of shaping my own shadow. “No, it was … three or four minutes, maybe?”
Jesse studies the thin shadow behind him. “So you think it stopped time?”
