MARKED BY THE ENEMY

NOVA I used to think the scariest sound in the world was my alarm clock going off before a shift. I was wrong. The scariest sound is silence — the kind that falls over a whole town at once, like someone reached down and pressed mute on every dog, every cricket, every car engine three streets over. That's the sound that woke me up. Not a noise. The absence of one. I lay there in the dark for a second, heart doing something stupid and fast, telling myself it was nothing. Power outage, maybe. A storm rolling in. I'd lived in Ashwood Hollow my whole life. Nothing happened here. Nothing ever happened here. Then Elena's door creaked open down the hall. "Nova?" Her voice was small. Sixteen years old and she still sounded seven when she was scared. "Did you hear that?" "Hear what?" I was already swinging my legs out of bed, already reaching for the bat I kept by my nightstand — a leftover habit from Dad, who used to say a house with two girls and no man in it needed something within reach. I never thought I'd actually grab it and mean it. "I don't know. Like... growling. Outside." My stomach dropped. "Stay in your room," I told her, and for once, she listened. I crept to the window, pulled back the curtain an inch, and looked down at the street where I'd ridden my bike a thousand times as a kid. There was a shape at the edge of the Petersons' yard. Too big to be a dog. Too still to be anything I wanted to name. Then it moved, and I understood, all at once, that whatever normal was — I was about to lose it. "Elena, get your shoes," I said, already moving. "Now! We're leaving." She didn't argue. That's the thing about my sister — she's sharper than people give her credit for. She knew from my voice this wasn't a drill. We made it as far as the kitchen. The front door didn't open. It came apart — wood splintering inward like something out of a nightmare I hadn't had yet, glass from the little decorative window shattering across the floor in a bright, awful spray. I screamed, grabbed Elena's wrist, and shoved her toward the back door. "Go! Go, go, go—" She ran. I turned to follow her and something slammed into me from the side hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs and send me skidding across the linoleum onto the counter. Pain lit up my ribs. I could hear Elena screaming my name from somewhere outside, could hear the back gate banging, and I thought — good, run, don't stop, don't look back. And then I looked up. It stood in what was left of my kitchen doorway, silhouetted by the streetlight outside, and every part of my brain that still believed in a rational, explainable world just... shut off. It wasn't a dog. It wasn't a bear. It was built wrong for either of those — too tall on its back legs, shoulders too broad, eyes catching the light in a flat amber glow that didn't belong to anything that should exist. I should have been able to scream. I couldn't. My whole body had gone cold and strange, like it already understood something my mind was refusing to catch up to. It took a step toward me. I scrambled backward, hand searching blindly for anything — the bat, a knife block, my phone, anything — and found nothing but empty air and shattered glass biting into my palm. "Please," I heard myself say, in a voice I didn't recognize. "Please, don't—" It didn't stop. I threw myself sideways, hit the back door frame, and for one wild second I thought I might actually make it, might actually get outside where Elena was still screaming my name in the dark — and then something closed around my arm like a bear trap wrapped in fire, and I went down hard onto the porch steps, and the pain was so enormous, so total, that the whole world narrowed down to a single white point of agony and the taste of copper in my mouth. Somewhere very far away, I heard Elena scream my name one more time. Somewhere closer, I heard something growl low in its chest, almost like it was startled by its own bite. I remember thinking, absurdly, I have a shift at seven a.m. I remember thinking about the dishes still in the sink. I remember thinking that I hadn't told Elena I loved her before bed, and that if this was it, if this was really how it ended, that felt like the worst part of all of it — worse than the pain, worse than the blood soaking hot down my arm, worse than the amber eyes staring down at me like they were deciding something. My vision blurred at the edges. The night sky tilted sideways. And then — through the haze, through the pain eating me alive from the inside out — I heard footsteps. Fast. Controlled. Not panicked like everything else in this nightmare. A second shape dropped into the wreckage of my porch, crouching over me, and for one disoriented heartbeat I thought I was being rescued. Then I saw his eyes. The same amber glow. He wasn't here to save me. He was one of them.