Sharp Like Shadow: Book 1 of A Wrath Unseen

Chapter 3

Alice was no stranger to fear.

    She'd been on a first-name-basis with it since the early days of her childhood when her death-visions first started. Fear was a sinister old friend, tiptoeing around in the back alleys of her mind and waiting for its chance to grab her attention. At moments like this it would hopscotch around her rational thoughts and stab her in the lungs.

    Alice clamped a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound of her breathing. She stared in disbelief as the dead man moved slowly up the walkway toward her front door. What was he doing here? How did he find her? The creature inside the dead-man knew that she'd seen it, and she had suspected it would be showing up again, but she didn't think it would be so soon. It didn't even seem real. Like it was the tail end of some dream that she was already waking from, lingering in the still empty chambers of her mind. But this was not a dream. It was happening, and Alice knew she had to do something quick before the dead man found her. Her mind raced with thoughts, none of them good, and every single one led to the same desperate conclusion: she had to get out of there.

    But how could she?

    Grandma and Royce were just on the other side of the front door. She hated to think what a creature like this, one that could take control of a dead person and walk him around her neighborhood, could do to her family. She couldn't leave. Not yet. She could not abandon her family to this monster no matter how scared she was.

    The dead man approached her front door at a slow walk, moving with far too much grace and silence for a man that size. His face remained in shadow until he neared the house and the light from the front windows cast a ghostly highlight across the dark skin of his face. A trick of the pale lamplight gave the man the appearance of what he actually was: a corpse strolling up the walkway. His eyes came into view and Alice saw them moving, shifting from left to right, up and down, scanning his surroundings as though searching for something. Probably for her.

    Alice lowered herself onto her back once more as quietly as she could, flattening herself against the shingles and praying the dead-man wouldn't hear the rapid pounding of her heart. The man was almost to her front door. Clearly he planned to ring the bell. Alice knew she should do something to try and stop him. To keep the dead-man and the thing inside him away from Grandma and Royce. But she didn't know what to do.

    Something. She needed to try something.

    But Alice couldn't move. Fear had crept up behind her and skewered her through the heart, pinning her to the roof and rendering paralyzed. The only movement she could manage was to tremble uncontrollably.

    But her ears were working fine, and Alice had no problem hearing the dead-man's gentle footsteps stop outside the door of her home and the doorbell ring its muffled inquiry from inside the walls of her house. To Alice the bell sounded like the tolling of a death-march, forecasting something every bit as horrible and inevitable as death itself. Then she heard the deadbolt click. The door opened and her brother said, "Yeah? Can I help you?"

    "Royce." Alice whispered her brother's name into the hollow evening like a plea. Her voice was a husk of ragged terror, and a new anger rose to join the fear. Anger at the dead-man for threatening her family, and anger at herself for doing nothing to protect them.

    The dead-man's crushed-gravestone voice rose from below her.

    "Good evening young man. I wonder, can you tell me if Alice Tomkins lives here?"

    It knew her name!

    Of course it did. Her school records would have been readily available in the principal's office. All the dead-man would have needed to do was convince Mr. Berringer to look them up in his massive filing cabinets, and he would have access to her name, address, phone number, everything. Apparently that was no problem for this creature. What else did she expect? This thing could reanimate and take possession of a human corpse; how difficult could it be to manipulate a mediocre high school principal? If she wasn't frozen in place, Alice would have kicked herself. She should have seen this coming.