The Thinning Novels & Stories

I know I haven't but I also know not to be fooled by that innocent face of yours something is buried underneath it and you're not fooling me" Violet So do you Ethan you don't fool me I know underneath that mask of yours you hide a side of yourself you don't want your father or the rest of us to know but I'm not buying it" do you hear you're not fooling me Ethan" I said threateningly coming closer to his face but instead of getting angry like I had expected him to " he chuckled playfully Good then it seems that both of us are not fooling each other then" we are more alike than you know Violet

And the way he looked at me, not angry, not threatened, just bored. Like I was some kid who had wandered into the wrong room and hadn't figured it out yet. I turned and put my fist through the drywall. The crash snapped through my knuckles and the sting was clean and quick, the kind of pain that cuts through noise. I pulled my hand back and stared at the split skin across my knuckles, breathing hard, and felt exactly none of the relief I was looking for. Mable Thorne. She had sat in the Dean's office and I had let them strip her scholarship down to a "under review" like she was a line item that needed adjusting.

I heard her fake a sob and I knew she was wiping her fake tears behind me. At the speed of light, I turned to her and her face came into view. She was a girl with a long blonde hair packed into a bun, small eyebrows, doe eyed, a button nose and a thin pink lips. All in all, she looked like a kitten. “I'm not going anywhere after school,” I whispered timidly, making her snort and shift her eyes away from me. I sighed deeply, wanting to talk her out of it when I heard Mrs. Finn once again.

“Thank you so much,” Just a short time later a Nurse Anette comes in except she doesn’t adjust my air conditioner unit she scans my head with a thermometer. “Now I know why you think sixty-five degrees is too hot for you. You have a fever of a hundred and two. We are going to have to take some more blood to see what's wrong,” She

“The school didn't stop, Chloe. They didn't learn a single thing from what they did to Summer and Jaxson. The machine just kept running the exact same play the second you guys walked across that graduation stage." I stared at her, the noise of the jazz playlist fading into a dull, static ring in my ears. “ What do you mean they didn't stop?" Marcus leaned in even closer, the scent of white wine and raw anxiety rolling off her in waves. “Dean Sterling and the board of trustees... they didn't dismantle the media-licensing framework. They expanded it. Right after the draft window closed, HypeTV brought in a new corporate sponsorship package, and the athletic department needed a new narrative to

The morning after the shipyard was not a dawn; it was a cold, mechanical reboott. Silas Thorne stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror in his dressing suite, adjusting his tie with the precision of a diamond cutter. His movements were fluid, devoid of the jagged tremors that had plagued him in the ruins of the Crèche. His eyes, once clouded by the smoke of a thirty-year-old fire, were now as clear and piercing as glacial ice.

She goes still. He runs his thumbs once across her cold fingers, slow, like he's trying to transfer warmth by direct application. "Your hands," he says. "They're always like this in winter. It's circulation." She watches his face—he's looking at her skirt, she realizes, at the hem of it moving in the wind, the thin fabric and the cold. "I have a down layer underneath," she adds. "I'm warmer than I look." He does not look entirely convinced. He doesn't release her hands.

"Zack belongs to the pack. He belongs to me. If I find out you’ve been doing more than healing in that cottage, you’ll find out how we deal with intruders." I didn't give her the satisfaction of an answer. I just walked out into the hallway and leaned against the cold wall, gasping for clean air. Every word she spoke was a threat to my triplets, but a deeper, medical dread was settling in my gut. This was the biological manifestation of the 'Thinning.' In the medical world of shifters, the Thinning wasn't just a spiritual myth. It was a biological crisis that happened when a pack's energy was being drained.