Bound to My Step-brother

Chapter four

Lila's POV

By the time we left, the sky outside had gone dark.

I said goodnight to Ryker at the edge of campus with a brief kiss.

I heard it before I understood it.

Footsteps. They were heavy, fast, matching my pace no matter how quickly I moved. I glanced back and saw nothing but empty path and long shadows of trees. Yet the footsteps kept coming, steady, relentless, never falling behind.

I ran.

My lungs burned within seconds. My legs pumped harder than they ever had. The hostel gates felt impossibly far, and still the footsteps trailed me exactly, like whatever it was didn't need to hurry because it already knew I couldn't escape.

I burst through the hostel door and slammed it shut, chest heaving, sweat sticking my shirt to my back.

Nadia looked up first. "Lila? What happened to you?"

"Someone was chasing me." I could barely get the words out. "I didn't see a face. Just footsteps. The whole way."

Talia was already on her feet. "Did you see anything at all? A shape?"

"Nothing." I sank onto my bed, hands trembling. "It matched my speed exactly. The whole time."

We sat there turning it over, throwing out names, rival packs, jealous students, maybe Victor's enforcers sent to frighten me. None of it fit. None of it explained footsteps that never sped up and never slowed.

That was when the air changed.

Pressure dropped over the room like a hand closing around it. The temperature fell so fast I saw my own breath. Nadia's words died mid sentence. Talia froze, mouth open, no sound coming out.

Something walked through the room that I couldn't see, and it took the breath straight out of my lungs.

I clawed at my own throat, gasping for air that wouldn't come, black spots swimming at the edges of my vision. Beside me, Nadia and Talia clutched at themselves too, eyes wide, mouths working uselessly.

~This is it. This is how I die.~

The thought barely finished before something in my chest split wide open.

My eyes flew open on their own, and light poured out of them, bright and blinding, flooding the room in white. A shield burst from my skin, arcing out to wrap around me, around Nadia, around Talia, pushing back against whatever pressed down on us. The force recoiled, and the air snapped back to normal so suddenly all three of us gasped, air rushing back into starved lungs.

For a long moment none of us moved. The light flickered once, then faded.

Whatever it was, it was gone.

Nadia found her voice first, shaking. "What was that? You, or it? Either one."

"I don't know." My hands trembled worse than before. "I didn't decide to do that. It just happened."

Talia stared at me like she'd never seen me before. "Your eyes were white, Lila. Not glowing white. Actually white."

"I felt like I was dying," I whispered.

"So did I," Nadia said.

We sat pressed close together a long while after that, none of us brave enough to break apart. Eventually Talia asked the question hanging over all of us.

"How did you do that?"

I shook my head, throat tight. "I don't know what I am anymore."

***

I was the only one in the hostel . Talia and Nadia had gone ahead to the restaurant, promising to save me a seat, but I wanted ten more pages, just ten, before I dragged myself into the noise of the world again. It helped distract me from the nagging thoughts of what was after my life. I'd told Ryker about the chase and the suffocation. He told me he'd drop by at the hostel in the evening.

I didn't hear the door open.

I felt it instead, a drop in temperature that prickled the hair on my arms, and when I looked up, something stood in the doorway that made every thought in my head go white with terror.

It had once been a person. That much I could tell from the shape of it, the ruined suggestion of shoulders and a spine beneath skin gone grey and papery. It was stretched too tight in some places and sagging loose in others where flesh had simply given up holding itself together. Its eyes were sunken hollows, no color left in them at all, and when its jaw opened, it made a sound like wet rope dragging over stone. The Undead.

I screamed. I didn't decide to. My body did it for me, the sound tearing out of my throat before my mind had even finished processing what I was looking at.

"Help me!" My voice cracked apart in the empty hall. "Somebody, please, help!"

Nobody came. The building had emptied too well. My own voice bounced off the walls and died there, swallowed by distance and closed doors.

The thing in the doorway tilted its head at an angle no living neck could manage, studying me the way a predator studies something already caught.

Then it raised one skeletal hand, and fire bloomed from nothing, a ball of orange and black flame hovering above its palm like it weighed nothing at all.

"No, no, please, no." I scrambled backward, knocking my chair over, putting a desk between us that I knew wouldn't matter at all.

It threw the fire. I dropped to the floor on instinct, and the flame sailed over my head and struck the far wall, bursting into a spray of sparks that caught immediately on the curtains, on the wall papers, and anything dry enough to burn.

Another fireball came. Then another. The creature moved through the room almost lazily, throwing flame after flame like it had all the time in the world, like my terror was simply part of the performance.

I crawled toward the door, coughing already as smoke thickened the air, but the creature reached it first. It didn't attack me directly. It didn't need to. Instead it turned toward the door itself, opened its ruined jaw wide, and swallowed the key still hanging from the lock, metal and all, the sound of it scraping down some hollow, rotted throat.

"No." I slammed my palms against the door, rattling it uselessly. "No, no, open it, please, open it!"

The undead disappeared.

The lock held. Smoke poured thicker now, curling along the ceiling, stinging my eyes until tears ran freely down my face. Somewhere behind me, a shelf of books caught fully, flames leaping high enough to lick the ceiling tiles.