Stories in Broken Glass

Chapter Six

CHAPTER 6

Beyond the threshold of the home was nothing.

Not the creepy blonde guy from the arcade, not some random teenager or rival hockey player running down the darkened street.

Not even a bag of dog s**t on fire.

There was nothing.

“I’ll check the camera’s,” Keith whispers, as if speaking louder than a heartbeat would bring some monster out of the dark.

“That’s a good idea.” Emma comments, Caleb murmurs something to his brother that has him jerking back in shock.

I should be intrigued about what their talking about in hushed whispers, but I swear to anything in the sky that I saw them.

Those two orbs of gold that had occupied my brain.

My breath escapes me. My heart takes off in a foot race with a Ferrari.

My feet are sore, slapping the road and stinging up my legs. My shirt gets caught on something, the fabric resisting for a moment.

Something sharp stabs into my foot.

I stumble, my run slowing to a jog, until I’m standing still.

It’s dark, but just light enough that the trees I’m surrounded by have morphed into creatures of shadow and evil.

I’m heaving. There minutes of insanity have passed. The golden eyes have disappeared into the darkness of my mind.

There’s a rather large splinter in my foot. Emma found me; her thumb pressed into the inside of her elbow in a gesture I knew was fear.

It made my heart ache, and my eyes burn. What was wrong with me?

Leigh was ready when we made it back to the house, tweezers, and bandages, because there was a surprising amount of blood.

Caleb was nowhere to be found. Keith had reported that there was no one on the cameras, that whoever had thrown the brick must’ve stood just out of range of the window camera.

All this information, and the conversations passed by me. I felt high.

I’d only been high once; it wasn’t what it was all cracked up to be.

This felt like being high in the movies. Voices weaved together until I could hear music, the pain was numbed, and my head felt too heavy.

The roof was spinning. Why am I looking at the roof?

Someone was yelling. Someone was always yelling.

I tried to roll over—to burrow under the sheets in my bed—to escape the noise.

My bed sheets were cold, and hard. It was warm in a small spot where my head was, so warm and smooth.

A metallic smell tickled my scenes before I came into sleep.

I woke up in Caleb’s bed.

I know because he was laying on his side—paint me like one of your French girls’ style—after a quick perusal of my body I noted that I was in Leigh’s pyjamas.

Caleb was still watching me.

“Hey.” He smouldered like Flynn Rider. My face was filled with so much hate for this man that I simply left.

Swinging my feet to the carpeted floor, I encountered a game controller. Kicking it way with enough force that my entire body jerked, awakened a headache in the back of my brain.

“You fell asleep during the movie last night, not that I blame you. If it weren’t for the beer, I would have been passed out down there—that movie was so bad.” Caleb’s voice is normal, his room is normal, the sun rose this morning as normal. But something isn’t normal.

Something felt off.

The gaps in my memory were being filled with Caleb’s sure voice.

“So, when’s breakfast?”