The Girl Between Two Worlds

Chapter 1

Chapter OneJune 2015

T

he creature was outside the house. Flapping batlike wings. Trying to find a way in. I dropped to the floor and started crawling to the window, hoping it wouldn’t spot me. If it was a dangerous thing that I had managed to attract, then I needed to do something to stop it.

It was so close to the window that I inhaled a whiff of rotting meat. The full moon illuminated the creature as it flew past. I froze and looked up in time to see a pair of red eyes staring at me from the other side of the window. There was a collective gasp from my friends. It was definitely not a bat. There was a faint trace of a human figure—no, the upper half of a human figure with bat wings the size of a sail.

It defied all rational explanation. Despite being cut in half, the monstrous creature was flying in the middle of suburban San Francisco. Its entrails were hanging out of its body. There was nothing where its lower half should be.

There were books I had read about scary folklore when I was a little girl in the Philippines. Creatures that could split their bodies into two. The upper half—head, torso, and arms—would fly across the night sky and hunt for babies to eat, while the lower half remained on the ground. Right now, I desperately wanted to believe those stories were just products of eccentric writers trying to scare little girls and boys. But it looked like they were true sightings.

The creature looked female with long dark hair and pale skin. But what scared me the most was its face. The red eyes bulged and glowed in the dark, like a crocodile sneering at its prey. Its face was like a wolf’s snout skinned down and dripping with blood. Its teeth were like broken glass and its tongue was a meter long and several inches wide. It was wearing a white blouse covered in blood. Was the blouse a part of its disguise during the day so it could blend in with the humans?

I could not move from my spot. None of us said anything, afraid to breathe, shaking in fear. I knew immediately I was in big trouble because I had no idea how to overpower this creature. I was not even sure if it was what I thought it was. I was warned that dark beings would try to kill me, but this monstrosity was more grotesque than what I had imagined.

There was nothing in the room that could be used as a weapon. The creature outside was becoming more aggressive. It was trailing its claws on the walls. We could hear the screech of its nails against the bricks. It was taunting us.

A whip slammed through the windows, pushing it open. We staggered away, half crawling, half stumbling to the other end of the room. The whip sliced through the blinds, except that it was not really a whip. It was the thing’s tongue, stretching longer and longer, trying to reach us.

A thought entered my head, as clear as daylight: I was going to die tonight.