The moment Halya’s mother went missing seven years ago, she started seeing horrific monsters that only her best friend, Sofie, sees too. When Sofie is revealed as a vessel to a god from an unknown world, Halya discovers she too has more connections to it than she should. With the help of the charismatic and deadly Xavyír, captain of the Sentinels sent to guard Sofie and their god, Halya ventures to this realm in an effort to find answers about her mother’s disappearance, and what it means for her own strange abilities.
It’s fitting that the spirit wanders in mere minutes after I opened mamka’s missing persons report.
It might have been a young boy, once. He’s barefoot, trousers ragged around thin white legs, swaddled in a sweater with the hood drawn up. It’s nearly enough to hide scratched-out voids where eyes should be, orange dots glowing within. He stands by the café entrance as patrons stream past. No one looks at him.
Like a honing beacon, his head snaps toward me.
I look at my laptop, staring at pixelated blue eyes before remembering I have to blink, sit back, breathe like my veins aren't bubbling with mercury as I covertly track his progress round the room. He watches people as he goes, peering into their faces. When no one so much as twitches at the head blocking a phone, or motionless between chattering friends, he roams on. My breath stutters when I see his back, an open wound like a bomb exploded there. Black ooze drips from ragged flesh, yet nothing stains the floor, and I smell no putrid odour.
Over and over, he stops, stares, and goes. He doesn't stick to anyone. He simply, aimlessly, drifts. On his third loop I realise he’s edging closer every time he circles to me. I sit forward on the fifth, eyes fixed on the screen as if I can intuit where mamka is if I simply stare hard enough.
Seconds pass. I chance a glance back. He’s to my right, bent with his shadowed face in front of a woman sipping coffee as she reads a book. I twirl the spinner ring on my thumb as a headache blooms behind my eyes. I’m desperate to, but I can't leave yet. That will catch his attention, and curiosity will drive him to follow me home, like others have before. I need to shake him off here, by playing at ignorance. He’ll grow bored and go, like they always—
Frigid breath whispers on my nape. Goosebumps trail down my locked spine as I spy a shape in the corner of my eye; he’s right behind me.
My ring clatters as I toy with it. I barely hear it under the roaring in my ears as he leans over my shoulder, voided eyes on my face. The tip of a thin nose nearly grazes my cheek.
The slam of a book on the table sends me jerking back. A young man drags out the chair beside me and drops into it, waving in vague apology at frowning patrons. Lights play off his ivory skin as he slings an arm back over the chair, legs crossed with his ankle on a knee. His angular, aristocratic beauty is accentuated by a biting smirk when I meet ice green eyes, sleepless shadows smudging the skin beneath. A stroke of mint green liner traces his lower eyelids to a subtle wing.
A flurry rushes past. Warily, I peek to the side. I watch, stunned, as the boy hastens to the exit without another backward glance, s if he never cared for me.
My pent-up breath shudders as I slump. I cast the man a sidelong look, and tense; in the glass behind him, the tattered cloak of a creature with yellow headlamp eyes and toothpick teeth dripping black slime floats away. In seconds, it’s gone.
Lips thin, I switch windows to my story. Minutes pass in prickly discomfort as I ignore him. The cursor blinks in a half-finished sentence I can’t recall the end of, an accusation for how long it’s been since I wrote anything.
“Who is it?” His accent is vaguely French, vaguely Eastern European, vaguely nothing recognisable at all. His voice is soft, but in the bubble snapped down around us, it’s loud as the bomb that might have gone off on the boy’s back.
I stop pinching the sore spot between my eyebrows. I lift my phone from the pink strap slung across my chest and type in the notepad, ‘Who?’
“The woman in the picture. You’re very alike.” His head angles as he considers me. A line of cuneiform inks a loop around his throat. “You have the same nose.”
I knew you the moment I saw your nose in the ultrasound. A light stroke, a tap on the tip. Just like mine, my Halinka.