Click.

Blood splatter on a broken-white wall.

Click.

Broken man’s body in the kitchen, knives ignored.

Click.

Teeth marks on his inner wrists, his neck, torn-open windpipe.

Click.

Blood splatter on a family portrait.

Click.

Young woman’s body halfway down the stairs.

Thorn lowered his camera. There were others with them, carefully preserving evidence, and Thorn couldn’t speak openly to Abigail. But he knew. This was exactly the way he recalled his own murders, the way he’d done it when he killed his family. Thorn hated how he could think those words without feeling the weight of them. He watched Abigail, knowing that she did feel that pain. She was taking samples of the blood splatter, managing to look cold. He knew there wouldn’t be any evidence found. The way his hair, his clipped fingernails, his blood disintegrated, so would this new skugabor’s. Thorn was convinced. It was over. He was done. He felt no need to see the woman, upstairs. Whatever she had to do with it, it was for someone else to figure out.

He was so, so tired.

Thorn went outside for a smoke. Abby followed him.

‘I don’t know how, but this is real,’ he told her. ‘One of those missing kids is sitting somewhere in complete shock of what they’ve done. We’ll have to find them.’

Abigail swallowed. Thorn knew she was thinking of her mother. He didn’t dare bring it up. As he closed his eyes, he exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke. This might be his last package. Abigail pulled a photo out of an evidence bag.

‘They identified the girl inside,’ she whispered, ‘It’s the oldest daughter. She’s moved out, she was visiting at the wrong time. That man sitting by the ambulance, he’s her boyfriend. He came looking for her when she didn’t come home. He called us.’

There was obvious pain in her voice. Thorn swallowed.

‘There’s two girls missing. Asrun, the youngest, is fourteen. She worked the first shift at a shop in town, then came back home. Had she worked late… well, she didn’t. We don’t know if she’s even been here – technically she could have disappeared on the way here.’

‘Fourteen?’ Thorn said, looking at the photograph. ‘That’s young, that’s too young. Maybe she came home to the carnage and ran away?’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Abigail said. ‘The other girl is a foster kid, goes to university here, studies history. She turned eighteen over a year ago, but she chose to stay here. That’s all the boyfriend knew, and honestly, he’s not in a mood to talk.’

‘Do we have a photo of her?’

Abigail took another photo out of the bag. Thorn dropped his cigarette.

‘Ah, hell,’ he whispered. This wasn’t going to be done and over.

‘What, do you know her?’

‘I spoke to her, what, yesterday night?’ his thoughts were running wild. Was he contagious? No, that was ridiculous. ‘I’ve seen her before, at concerts. She never said very much. I don’t think she had a whole lot of friends on the island.’

‘Did she tell you her name?’

‘May. Her name was May,’ he said. ‘Fuck, Abigail, I thought I was done.’

‘What does this change?’ Abigail asked. ‘It’s not like you have, well, feelings, right?’

‘I have some semblance of a conscious, you know, Abigail,’ Thorn said, a bit louder than strictly necessary. ‘I don’t go around killing strangers for the hell of it, I don’t have a fucking choice. You don’t know what it’s like- they’re constantly tugging on my borders, on my thoughts, I’m constantly aware of them. I’ve recorded myself sleeping, once – when I dream, the shadows go wild on the walls, under my bed – I pull them around and form patterns, sometimes it looks like they dance, Abigail, I-’

He took a breath. ‘I can’t just- pretend I don’t know her and leave her to figure this out alone.’

‘Terji, if the old skugabor dying when the new one emerges is the natural order of things, I don’t think you’ve got much of a choice.’

‘My god, Abigail, I can try, can’t I?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Do you want me to die?’

‘I though you wanted to die,’ she said. She didn’t admit it, but Thorn knew he’d been right. It pleased him that that hurt, somewhere deep down. But she was right, too. He had wanted to die, to stop the blood, the murder, the endless cycle of itches and carnage. It could stop, now. For him.

‘I’m going to go looking for her.’

Abigail said nothing. Thorn could tell she’d been hurt. He didn’t know where, or how exactly, but he figured he was to blame somehow. Here, right outside the house, too many people were swarming about. He couldn’t do it here. He began walking towards the forest.

‘Thorn!’ Abigail yelled after him. He paused. ‘I- be careful.’

He smiled back at her, and continued to walk away. Did she think Thorn would find May the way she’d been during the murders – raging, unreasonable, without control over even an inch of her body? Probably. She hadn’t been learning very long, before she took over from her mother. Like May, Abigail had been a foster kid.

Once he was out of sight, Thorn took a deep breath. The vocalist gave in to the shadows.

He became one with them immediately. He’d never gotten used to it – the ink-black cold, the feeling of not having a body. Thorn didn’t trust the shadows, but today he needed them. They were the quickest way to travel. He hardly had to think it before he was moving, the sickening feeling of being liquid taking over. It stretched out his consciousness, mingled it with the viscious thoughts that filled the darkness. He hated how comfortable, how natural it felt; how easily he sped out of the forest, down to the city. The closer he came, however, the more something began to unnerve him.

Thorn could feel someone else tugging at the shadows. He had not sensed that in decades. It felt wrong. It wasn’t the calm, rhythmic heartbeat that cities gave out, or the soft rolling of the sea. If he’d have had a neck in that moment, its hairs would be sticking right up. It was a violent, painful tugging – not the gentle, subtle movements Thorn had taken decades to master. Whoever was yanking at the dark down there in Slakshaven was angry and hurt and desperate. And young. Gods, Thorn remembered being that young, somewhere deep, deep down.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Within the dark, he made himself small; traveling through nothing but the shadows between the cracks in the pavement. It didn’t take him long to get past the suburbs. The closer he came, the harsher he felt the yanking, as if someone was tugging at him. It nearly physically hurt. The second Thorn thought that, the shadows spit him out hard onto the pavement. He swore, breathing hard, heartbeat taking some time to become regular again. He didn’t bother getting up yet. He stared up at the sky, trying to process seeing rather than sensing, knowing. Trying to process how lungs worked, what muscles were for.

Even outside of the shadow, he could feel that tugging at his borders. He climbed back onto his unsteady feet.

May sat in the brightest, most depressing café she could find. The cup of tea in front of her had been hot enough to burn her fingers when she bought it. Now, it was stone cold. Everything was cold. Something was constantly bothering her in the back of her head. It took all May had to shove it away. Keep it out of her head. Stay normal, stay alive. Something in May expected the police to come through the door any moment. She didn’t know why she had done it, hell, she barely understood how she had done it. Her memory was a blur, already fading. She was so, so tired. Flecks of dried blood were caught under her fingernails. She knew what had happened before, though. That she remembered too clearly.

Erika had never come downstairs for breakfast. Her eggs had turned cold, and May remembered hoping that she’d gone back to bed. She couldn’t hear the shower running anymore. She’d sat down at the kitchen table with an essay on the failed christianization of Threoo, unable to concentrate. The itching in her veins had grown impossible to ignore. It danced in her blood, in her bones, right under the surface. It was then she’d seen the shadows dance. They didn’t stay in place like they should. May had turned all the lights on. That had been a mistake. The shadows became harsher, their angles defined, their existence more definite. The fear had set in. Asrun had been gone for hours at that point, it was ten in the morning, and something in May felt undeniably, terribly wrong. She didn’t knew why she’d gone upstairs. She’d intended to go into the bathroom, that she remembered. But when she opened the door, Erika had been there, in the bath. Dead.

She’d fallen to her knees, expecting to bruise them on the bathroom tiles. Instead, she’d go on falling. May remembered not having a body, the cold, the dead-cold fear running through veins she did not have. Time, like her, had turning liquid, twisting and turning, denying May her life. When the shadows finally spit her out, they had still been inside her body – her veins had been blackened, and every bit of her was so, so cold. She’d heard Erika’s older daughter knocking on the door.

May remembered thinking she couldn’t let her see her mother’s body, the empty veins. So she opened the door, and she killed her. May killed her. Erika’s husband – what was his name again? – had come downstairs at the noise, the screaming, the sounds of death. So she’d killed him too. She couldn’t recall the details, nearly as though she’d only been watching, uninterested – as if it hadn’t been her, moving like that, killing them so easily. May’s only clear memory from that point on had been turning around, to see Asrun in the doorway. Somehow two hours had passed. They had stared at each other. May had seen the realisation dawn in the younger girls’ eyes, the fear, the disgust.

From that point on May remembered nothing. She assumed she’d murdered Asrun, too, in that horrible way she’d done the others. She imagined thin wrists torn open, windpipes crushed. Before then May hadn’t known she’d had the strength to even do that. A day ago, she’d have thought it impossible.

From the second she’d regained control, she’d felt the shadows pounding at her defences, pulling at her, whispering in her ear.

Can’t you see what power we gave you? They seemed to ask, can’t you tell how strong you are, girl, of course you want to use that strength. Give in- it’ll be easier on all of us.

Of course it was very much possible that May was making that up. Giving words to the thing she didn’t want to believe was conscious, didn’t want to think was sophisticated enough to make plans like that. So she pushed back. It took what little strength she had left.

She barely heard the café’s door open, a stranger’s voice asking for a coffee, the rustle of a leather jacket when someone took the chair next to hers.

‘May?’

Only then did she look up. Was it yesterday she’d spoken to him? The hypnotic rhythm of that concert seemed so, so far away, and yet it still echoed in the vague pain in her neck. Yet now that the vocalist was here, the shadows’ pounding on her brain faded to the background of her conscious. She could breathe.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked, not a hint of concern in his voice. Maybe she just couldn’t tell, though. His voice came from very far away. May wanted to laugh.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘How do you know?’

‘I’m the same,’ Thorn said. May stared at him. His hair was wet, sticking to his face, and she wondered how old he was. There was not a hint of youth left on that face, but there were no wrinkles, no grey hair, no nothing. He looked as though someone who’d never seen an adult had created one.

‘How?’

‘I’m the same,’ he said. ‘I did the same thing, decades ago. It changed me.’

‘What is happening to me?’ May asked.

‘You’re becoming like me,’ the vocalist told her. ‘Try not to fight it too much, May. It’ll fuck you up no matter what you do. It’ll get easier.’

May wanted to believe him, but something in her screamed no! at everything he was telling her. She would not, could not accept what she had done. She was human. It should hurt, sanity be damned, and she would let it hurt. May began to cry. Thorn let her be, sipping his coffee.

‘We should go, May,’ he said then. ‘They’ll come looking for you soon. We can’t have them find you.’

‘Does it matter?’ May whispered. ‘I just destroyed everything I had.’

Thorn didn’t answer, but got up and May did, too. She followed the vocalist out of the brightly lit café, into Slakshavens dusk. She was so, so tired. If she could just retreat into herself, the yanking would stop, something whispered to her. It didn’t seem so very dangerous. As she watched the heels of Thorns boots connect with the pavement over and over again, May slipped into herself. There was nothing but peace, there, at first.