Chapter 2: Cold Shadows
571 Words
The morning after felt... wrong.
Kade sat on the edge of his bed, hands loosely gripping the sheets as gray light filtered through the cracked window. The air smelled of rain. Or maybe ash. He couldn't quite tell anymore.
The mark on his wrist—it was still there.
Thin. Black. Delicate like ink on fragile paper.
At first, he thought it might be some lingering dream. Sleep paralysis. A hallucination.
But no. It remained. Real and chillingly cold to the touch.
He traced it absentmindedly.
It pulsed.
Once.
Just faintly.
> (I know what you’re thinking—)
(This is where I panic, right? Start screaming, flipping tables? Call for help? Yeah… no. That’s not me.)
Kade gave a soft, humorless chuckle under his breath.
There was a strange calm in him. A cold stillness.
Maybe because part of him—the part that had been quietly decaying for years—had expected this.
Something unnatural. Something that finally made the outside world as broken as he felt inside.
Downstairs, the house was already stirring.
Vera’s sharp heels clicked against the kitchen tile.
Riven’s voice drifted in, smug and perfect as always.
The normalcy of it felt... artificial. It grated against his bones.
Kade pulled on his hoodie, stuffing his hands deep into the pockets. The cigarette case was still there, heavy and cold. He didn’t dare open it again. Not yet.
The mirror caught his reflection as he passed.
For a flicker of a second—his reflection didn't move.
Eyes—slightly too dark. Skin—too pale.
Then it caught up.
A glitch.
A breath.
Gone.
School was the same suffocating mess it always was.
Faces he barely remembered. Voices that blurred together. Time felt like it skipped in strange half-steps—blinks that lasted too long, moments that stretched then snapped back.
Finn Calder waved from across the courtyard, grinning like an i***t.
“Yo! Kade! You alive, man?”
Kade hesitated, lips twitching.
“Barely,” he murmured.
He joined Finn under the rusted stairwell where they usually killed time. Finn immediately launched into some dumb story about a teacher tripping over a mop, hands waving animatedly.
Kade only half-listened.
His fingers kept brushing the mark through the sleeve of his hoodie.
The air around him felt... different.
Like something had shifted permanently.
> (You’re wondering when I’m going to tell someone, right? Classic move—confide in the comic relief, dump the plot on the sidekick. Yeah. Not gonna happen.)
A shadow moved at the corner of his vision.
He stiffened.
For a heartbeat, the courtyard flickered.
The sky above—shivered. The grass—twitched unnaturally.
And standing by the old fence—just barely visible—
Something.
A shape.
A figure.
Watching.
Eyes like pinpricks of silver.
Then—snap.
Back to normal.
“Kade? Earth to Kade?” Finn snapped his fingers in front of his face.
Kade blinked hard, forcing a shaky breath through his teeth.
“Yeah. Sorry. Zoned out.”
“You good, man? You look like you saw a ghost or something.”
Kade forced a crooked smile.
“Something like that.”
That night, he didn’t sleep.
The mark on his wrist had grown.
Just slightly. Barely noticeable unless you knew to look.
And in the mirror—
The reflection was still just a fraction too slow.
Somewhere in the distance—
The shadows were stirring.
- Writer
