🥈𝕊𝕖𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕕 𝕡𝕝𝕒𝕔𝕖 in the Guilded Raven Awards hosted by @TheGuildedRaven
🥈𝕊𝕖𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕕 𝕡𝕝𝕒𝕔𝕖 in the Coalition Awards hosted by @CoalitionAwards
🥉𝕋𝕙𝕚𝕣𝕕 𝕡𝕝𝕒𝕔𝕖 in the Regal Awards, hosted by @YaDramaQueenbkp
"Pareidolia is when...
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I wake to the small voice of Klaus calling my name. The sound echoes and bounces off the walls. I shut my eyes again, kicking myself for letting Klaus watch an R-rated movie. I sit up and blink, letting my eyes adjust to the dark before me. Satin sleeps in a mess of blankets entangled in her arms and legs on a mattress across from me. Standing, I walk groggily to the boy's room, purposefully avoiding floor sections known to squeak. In the dark, I miscalculate, and my hip bumps into a side table. "Shit." I should have brought a flashlight.
Behind me, a floorboard creaks. I stand still as I hear another creeeek. The back of my neck standing on edge with goosebumps.
Creek, creek. There it is again.
Something is walking toward me, and I know it can't be a person because people do not emulate the sound of an animal with such finery as the thing behind me did. I slowly turn around, my eyes somewhat adjusted to the dark, expecting to find the yellow eyes of a dog, but instead, what meets me is much worse. A tall black-skinned animal with long arms and even darker fur stands, yes, stands before me. Shimmering teeth cot by the moonlight peer back at me—a low, barely audible growl gurgles in its long throat, and I'm stuck, my body dead with fear.
What feels like an eternity later, I move one foot back, but it charges me as if that was the signal. A sound escapes my mouth as I slam myself against the wall. I hardly see the claw extending in the dark, and then the thing runs past me in a fast blurry breeze. I hear it, and I think it's jumped because I can just make out a shadow downstairs extricating itself from the gaping hole in the building, the part that had been too high to board up. I automatically cover my shoulder with my opposite hand. It had touched me just for a second, probably less than a second, actually. It must have cut me; I can feel the sting of a slice.
"Monarch!" Ronan calls, stumbling out of his room wearing nothing but boxers, "I heard something?" A flashlight shines in my face, and I squint my eyes. "Sorry," he casts the beam of the light downward. "Your arm." He said, staring at it.
I look for the first time at my arm. My right hand is still covering the claw mark, but I can see blood still warm, snaking through my fingers and down my arm, beginning to curl and drip off my left hand's fingers, forming a minuscule puddle of red.
"What happened?"
I searched for words, but all I could think of were those preternatural yellow eyes.
***
The others were up now and clustered around me in the upstairs bathroom. Multiple flashlights had swum in the air, searching for what I had described to them when I had finally found my voice, but the thing was gone. Had fled through the hole rendered wall leaving nothing in its wake.
"Ok, so I think you're good, or at least nothing looks like it's infected, but your sure your feeling ok, like sure?" Satin asked me for the overindulged fifth time, returning the stitching supplies to the first aid kit. I was sitting on the bathroom counter. She spread a glob of antibiotics on a bandage and, with another, wrapped my arm, glancing at a medical book to be sure she was doing it right. Klaus snoozed in my lap, perfectly content which had been kind of comforting through the whole getting stitched up unpleasantness.
