the Walker was much too fast for it. Worse still, each blow appeared to slow the Beast further. The Mistwalker resumed siphoning his prey’s lifeforce through the open gashes on its back, while inflicting more wounds with his tendrils. When the Cthulhu Beast all but ceased fighting back, the Walker flew back to its face and used his tendrils to open wide the creature’s maw. Hovering before it, he greedily sucked the very life out of the monster, whose massive body began to shrink and wither before our very eyes.
My heart all but stopped at this dreadful déjà vu. That fateful night in the Mist, eleven years ago, this was what Jared had intended for me. I could almost feel again the bruising hold of his big hand around my wrist, all but crushing my bones as he opened the shutters and threw me out of my own house and into the Mist. A different Beast had been roaming the street, immediately converging towards me the minute I stumbled down the five steps of the front porch’s stairs. I tried to run back inside, but Jared slapped me then dragged me a few meters down the path before shoving me towards the sidewalk. I fell so hard on my knees it was a miracle I hadn’t broken something.
That was when a wraith-like, dark shadow swooped down. I covered my head with my arms, thinking my final hour had come, but it continued past me to tackle Jared. I could still hear his horrified screams as the Walker pinned him down. I scrambled back to my feet, terrified at the thought I had to walk past them to get back inside the house. Yet, I didn’t hesitate.
Immobilizing Jared’s arms and legs with his shadowy tendrils, the wraith held my ex’s head by the hair while he drained the life out of him. My hair stood on end from the energy swirling around them as I rushed past their location. A choked sob of relief escaped me when the tendril I’d expected to wrap around my ankle never did. I jumped up the stairs in two steps and slammed the door shut behind me. I ignored the sickly-sweet scent of the white clouds of the Mist that had made it inside the house and were slithering on the floor. Wasting no time, I locked the front door and slapped my hand on the button activating its metal shutters.
As they lowered before the front door, increasingly blocking the nightmarish view outside, I stared in horror at other Mist Beasts gathering near my house, while staying at a safe distance from the Mistwalker. He was the last thing I saw, dropping the desiccated corpse that had once been Jared, while staring at me with glowing eyes.
Shaking away the dreadful memory, I refocused on the Mistwalker outside. In the seconds that followed, the energy flow between him and his prey ended. The husk that remained of the Cthulhu Beast collapsed like a sandcastle of ashes. The Mistwalker turned towards the window, his yellow eyes glowing with the intensity of the sun at its zenith. He glided gracefully to the window, his gaze locked with mine. He placed both his shadowy palms against the reinforced glass, his featureless face a hair’s breadth from it.
“Hello, Naima… Missed me?”
I gasped, and my hand flew to my throat at the sound of the otherworldly voice that resonated inside my mind. Although he didn’t have any visible mouth, I could have sworn a malicious smile had appeared on his face.
The long and lethal claws of his right hand started tapping on the surface of the glass. My brain froze, and cold shivers ran down my spine as I recognized the rhythmic pattern. My ethereal stalker had played it on my shutters every day of the Mist for years following that fateful day, attempting to lure me out to finish what my escape had cheated him out of.
My Nightmare had found me again.
Chapter 2
Naima
I wanted to run away screaming, to find a dark place to hide in. How had he found me, so far away from my house? Why return now when he’d been quiet for so long?
He can’t get me in here. If he could, he already would have.
Those words only partially reassured me. He’d never spoken to me before. In fact, I didn’t know of anyone having ever been spoken to by one the way this Walker just had. It then struck me that the other Beasts and Walkers