Episode two
699 Words
Chapter Two – The Hunger
Kael didn’t sleep.
He lay on the old twin mattress in his childhood room, staring at the ceiling while the fire downstairs whispered and popped like it was trying to speak. Every creak of the house sent adrenaline pumping through his veins. He told himself it was just the wind. Just the house settling.
But the footprints on the floor said otherwise.
He’d cleaned them up before nightfall, hoping that erasing the evidence would erase the fear. It didn’t.
Something had been in the house. And it had left through a locked door.
At some point near midnight, his skin began to itch. First at the base of his neck, then along his spine. His muscles cramped like they’d been twisted in his sleep, even though he hadn’t moved. He sat up and pressed his palms to his face.
They were burning hot.
He stumbled to the bathroom. The overhead light flickered when he flipped the switch, bathing the cracked mirror in a sickly yellow hue.
His eyes were wrong.
Too bright. The irises rimmed in gold. He splashed cold water on his face, blinked, and they faded back to their normal green. Maybe the light. Maybe exhaustion. Maybe he was losing it.
He opened the medicine cabinet, found an old bottle of aspirin, and swallowed two dry. He caught sight of a small box shoved in the corner—his mother’s sewing kit. Inside, he found a needle. Without thinking, he pricked the pad of his thumb.
Blood welled up instantly.
He expected it to sting. It didn’t.
Instead, the pain was… distant. Like it belonged to someone else.
He shook his head and rinsed the cut, then bandaged it. Back in his room, he sat on the bed again, staring at the wall of scratched wolf drawings.
A memory tried to surface—something from long ago. A dream. Or a nightmare.
He’d been running through the woods. His feet were bare. The air was thick with fog and something heavier—iron and rot. He was chasing something. Or was it chasing him?
A scream echoed in his mind. A woman’s voice. Cut short.
He clutched his head.
Too many images. Too many missing pieces.
He lay back, willing his body to relax, but the bed felt wrong beneath him. Too small. Too soft. His bones ached like they were too big for his skin.
At some point, he drifted off. Or blacked out.
He woke in the forest.
Naked. On his hands and knees. Cold earth beneath him. Leaves in his hair.
The moon hung full and heavy in the sky, pale and bloated like an eye watching him from above.
Kael staggered to his feet, heart pounding.
Blood. He smelled it before he saw it.
His hands were coated in it. His mouth tasted like copper and meat.
“No,” he whispered, but his voice cracked, animal and hoarse.
He turned in a circle. No sign of his car. No sign of the house.
Just trees. Endless, towering trees.
And claw marks.
He found them carved into the bark of a massive pine nearby—long, deep grooves, too high for a human hand to reach.
He touched them, and his fingers fit perfectly in the ridges.
His stomach turned.
A low growl vibrated through the woods, not from his throat but from somewhere nearby. Something else was out there.
He ran.
Branches whipped at his face. The cold stung his bare skin. He didn’t know where he was going, only that every fiber of his being screamed move.
He didn’t stop until the trees thinned and the silhouette of Raven Hollow’s water tower rose through the mist like a monument to forgotten things.
He collapsed at the edge of the clearing, gasping.
Then he heard it—movement. Heavy footsteps crunching leaves.
He turned.
A woman stood on the other side of the clearing. Long dark coat, hair braided and slung over one shoulder. She wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t even surprised.
She held a silver-tipped spear in her hand.
“Kael Morgan,” she said, voice cool and flat. “You’re a hard man to track.”
- Writer
