Suri couldn’t respond. Not only because the words escaped her, but because the heat that caught her left hand made her flinch. It was a soft sensation, like a fluttering, but the result was that of feeling as if something were trying to claw its way out of her arm through her fingertips. She gasped, cradling her hand against her in an attempt to quell the pain.
“You seem distressed.” Lithely, the girl leapt onto the next bleacher, the metal thump forcing Suri’s focus back on her.
It should have occurred to Suri sooner than it had, but the child had no coat, no hat, or gloves. When she smiled Suri could also see that she had no teeth between her chubby cheeks.
The girl took another hop forward, and Suri jolted, quickly stumbling to a stand while still clutching her stinging palm. The girl tilted her head, her smile fading until her cloudy, white eyes fully opened only to narrow into slits of annoyance.
“I was surprised that he went with you.”
Suri couldn’t concentrate on what the girl was saying, not when the skin around her neck began to bulge and swell. Her tiny body began to twist unnaturally, as if to wring itself out, folding from the waste up to squeeze something swelling in its center.
A set of long, pale fingers curled out of the child’s mouth and dug into her chubby cheeks. Then it pushed.
A loud pop was evidence of the jaw being broken to accommodate the upper body of a blood slicked, red-haired monster dragging itself forward. The ripped open head dangled by a tendon as the man that had half-escaped it casually brushed his wet hair from his smeared face.
Frozen, and unable to fully register the increasing pain in her left palm, Suri watched on in horror. She couldn’t look away. She couldn’t move or cry out. Her heart was the only thing that wasn’t still about her; it just wouldn’t stop drumming as the man parted his lips to speak.
“It is time that he was returned to me.”
His voice crawled along with him as he discarded the mangled corpse at his waist like a pair of old pants. He stood upright, towering over the small girl’s disfigured body before it fell onto the cold, metal bleachers. His white eyes practically glowed as he cast them upon the stunned teen, but his next words snapped her back to reality.
“You understand, right?”
Suri stopped breathing. That voice. That achingly familiar voice. No longer distorted by the little girl’s, she could now hear that this voice was the same one that had wormed its way into her ear three days ago, just before the speaker had thrown her in front of a moving train.
The man’s head tilted, his eyes watching her blankly as she cowered, but what panicked Suri more was how they continued to lift as if spotting something behind her.
“How inconvenient.”
Before she could consider questioning what he meant—or worse, turning to look at what he was gazing at—a bright flash of light forced her to close her eyes.
The blinding light had been accompanied by a deafening boom. Although Suri couldn’t see it, she could feel the air prickle and fizz, like she had been greeted by a storm cloud. The current rushing through her feet finally released the scream stuck in the back of her throat.
Was this it? She was just going to die in a horror show of confusion and self-pity?
“Run!”
The unfamiliar voice that shot her way made her eyes finally snap open. Standing between her and the sickening creature was a woman so short that Suri could see clear over her twirly pixie cut even if she had been standing on the same rung. Despite her stature, the woman gestured with a thick arm at the teen to prompt her to move away.
Suri wasn’t going to wait for an explanation. She tried to rush down the bleachers, only to be stopped when the woman side-stepped to block her.
“Are you nuts?” she puffed her amber cheeks out childishly, “Run in the opposite direction of the guy trying to kill you!”
Right, duh. Suri whipped around, uncertain if the woman’s advice was any more logical considering the ‘opposite direction’ was the rail lining the top of the bleachers.
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