Mila의 작품

ZaraThe surge hit like a wave breaking against rock, and my body moved before my mind caught up to what it was doing."Ryan, down!" I didn't know where the words came from, only that some instinct older than fear had taken the wheel, and I shoved him sideways as the first of them lunged, milk-white eyes wide and unblinking, hands outstretched like they'd forgotten they'd ever needed to grab something gently."Zara!" Ryan's shoulder hit stone hard, but he was already twisting back toward me, already reaching. "Behind me, now.""There's no behind you anymore." My voice came out strange, layered with something that wasn't quite my own, and when I looked down at my hands I found the claws had finished what they'd started, curved and dark and steady in a way that should have terrified me more than it did."They're everywhere."The one Ryan called Marcus reached me first, and up close the wrongness of him hit harder than it had from a distance, skin the color of old candle wax, coat hangin

RyanDarkness swallowed the room whole, and the first thing I lost wasn't my sight, it was the sound of Zara's breathing."Zara!" My hand was still locked around her wrist, I could feel her pulse hammering under my fingers, but the room had gone so black and so loud at once that I couldn't separate her voice from the chord still rising and falling around us like something enormous breathing through the walls."Say something, tell me you're still here.""I'm here." Her voice came out thin, stretched tight over something close to panic. "Ryan, my hands, I can feel them, it's like fire under the skin, I don't know how to stop it.""You don't stop it." I didn't know why I said that, except that some old instinct in me recognized the shape of what she was describing, the way a body starts to unmake itself and remake itself into something else entirely. "You just don't fight it either. Not yet...fighting it now could tear you apart before it finishes.""That's supposed to help?""It's suppo

ZaraThe floor shuddered under my feet like the whole house had taken a breath and forgotten how to let it out, and every wolf in that hallway froze mid-motion, ears flat, bodies gone rigid with a fear that had nothing to do with Ryan or me at all."What was that." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to, swallowed up by the dark pressing in from every side."Nothing good." Ryan didn't look away from the wolf he had pinned against the wall, but I heard the change in his voice, that low current of dread under the command. "Zara, the door. Now."I didn't move yet. The thing wearing Petra's face had gone still too, head cocked toward the stairwell at the end of the hall, and for one suspended second it looked less like a woman and more like a puppet whose strings had all gone slack at once."That's not supposed to happen yet," it murmured again, mostly to itself, and something about the way it said yet made my stomach twist harder than the wolves ever had."Zara." Ryan's voice agai

RyanJude's blood was everywhere, dark and spreading faster than Petra's hands could stop it, and every second I spent in that room was a second I'd left Zara alone with Marcus and the thing wearing her mother's face, and both of those facts were tearing through me at the same time like two different kinds of drowning."Pressure, here, now." Petra grabbed my hand and slapped it down against Jude's side before I'd fully processed the order, and I pressed until my knuckles went white, until I could feel his heartbeat stuttering weak and fast under my palm."He's not going to make it if we don't get the bleeding closed," Petra said, low, clinical, the kind of calm that only comes from having done this before. "I need the kit from the cabinet...second shelf.""I can't leave him.""Then I'll go, and you keep that pressure exactly where it is, don't you dare let up." She was already moving, already gone, and I was alone with a man who'd betrayed every one of us and was dying anyway, dying l

ZaraThe thing that stopped my breath wasn't a monster. It was worse than that, because monsters I could at least understand as something separate from myself, something with claws and wrongness that belonged in stories, not in my life. What stood at the far end of the hallway, half-lit by the flickering overheads, wearing an expression I'd know anywhere because I'd grown up watching it across breakfast tables and holiday dinners, was my mother."Mom."The word came out of me broken in half, and I felt Ryan's hand tighten around my wrist like he wanted to hold me back before I'd even moved, and maybe he was right to, because something about the way she stood there was wrong in a way I couldn't name yet. Too still and too straight. Her eyes found mine across all that distance and there was nothing in them, no relief, no fear, nothing that looked like the woman who used to sit up with me during thunderstorms when I was small."That's not her," Ryan said, low, urgent, right against my ea

RyanThe sound Petra made hitting the floor with Zara still rings in my ears louder than anything else in that hallway, louder than Marcus's voice, louder than my own heartbeat slamming against my ribs like it wanted out.I moved before I decided to move. That's the only way I can explain it. One second I was watching my dead brother wear a stranger's face and tell the truth I'd spent eight months burying, and the next I was airborne, shoulder first, meeting whatever had come through that wall before it could finish landing on the two women tangled together on the floorboards.We hit hard enough that something in the wall behind us cracked. I felt claws, or what passed for claws on a thing with too many joints in its fingers, rake down my forearm, and the pain was distant and unimportant, a problem for later. What mattered was the weight of it on top of me, jaws snapping an inch from my throat, breath that smelled like the inside of a grave."Ryan!" Zara's voice, raw, terrified, not f