When Sarah Solomon took refuge in an old cottage in the woods, she knew it would only be a matter of time before the monsters came a' calling.
Cursed with a power she neither wants, nor knows how to harness, Sarah has become a target, but who is he...
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Moonlight glinted off the edge of the steel blade.
I exhaled as quietly as I could, even though my heart felt like it was hammering loud enough for my nearest neighbours to hear it two miles down the road.
There was even a small part of me that was regretting the distance now, even though I'd totally brushed it off when the letting agent had asked me if I'd be okay out here on my own.
'Oh yeah, sure. I like being on my own. I just really hate people, you know?'
Ian the Letting Agent, who looked as if he'd borrowed his dad's suit and had a barely-there fluffy attempt at a beard that the wind might blow away, hadn't laughed. Not that I could blame him. A young woman on her own, renting a house two miles from the nearest signs of civilisation, most of which happened to be farmyard animals? Yeah. Maybe I was as mad as he thought me to be.
The whole thing felt mad now. Or just plain foolish.
Either way, I was fucked.
I gripped the hilt of the knife tighter and wished my palms didn't feel so clammy. My stiff neck screamed from where I'd drifted off in the armchair.
How could I have been so stupid? Even with a knife by my side, sleeping was dangerous.
Especially at night-time.
I knew this and yet still, I had allowed myself to forget. To weaken.
Frantically blinking to clear the fog, my gaze flitted to the old carriage clock on the fireplace. It was five minutes slow, and always drifted back to its old stubborn ways, no matter how often I'd tried to set it right.
Two hours had passed since I'd fallen asleep. I'd successfully wiped-out months of meticulous vigilance in just two hours. Way to go, Sarah.
Fear tightened my chest as the horrible, nauseating sensation swept through me, goosebumps raging over my skin like a severe case of pins and needles. I knew instantly I was in big trouble.
Moving cautiously away from the living room window, where the moon shone brightly through, as if it was determined to catch me in its spotlight like an escaped criminal, I stopped out in the hallway. From here, I had a straight view into the kitchen.
Fragments of glass lay scattered across the linoleum.
Swallowing, I edged into the room, where the back door swung back and forth, rocked by the winter storm. Flurries of snow had already begun to drift inside, coating the doormat in a fine sheet of flakes. With a growing horror, I followed the line of wet footprints across the kitchen floor, right to where I stood, disappearing into the hallway behind me.
'What the...' I mouthed.
A floorboard creaked overhead.
In the time I had lived here, I'd grown accustomed to the grumblings of the old house. They had become as familiar and as natural as heartbeats, almost as if the cottage lived and breathed around me. This creak, however, was definitely not a natural groan of tired old floorboards, but then again, I had known that as soon as the sound of shattering glass had dragged me kicking, but thankfully, not screaming from my slumber.
