Page 6 of Stealing Embers

When I pop up from a crouch, my realities have merged.

No! This can’t happen right now!

Structures from the real world remain, but it’s as if a Technicolor screen has overlaid them.

The building to my left must be an apartment because it’s bursting with light. A mix of colors pulsate around it like a giant rainbow aura. Reds and blues dominate the assortment, with sparks of yellow, green, and purple.

Currents of air move around me in tangible waves of light and sound, causing the hair on my arm to rise and a sticky-sweet aroma to tickle my nose.

I ignore all of it, because it’s the dark smudges high in the lavender sky that have captured my attention.

They are the creatures of my nightmares and this distorted reality: shadow beasts.

I’m not frightened of the dark, but I am scared of them. They’re the real monsters that go bump in the night, and I have the scars to prove it.

Black splotches jerk through the air like bats, making their trajectory almost impossible to gauge.

Cover. I need it. Fast.

My feet beat the pavement as I race down the alley. I keep one eye on the beasts in the sky.

I only ever have two options when I’m attacked: find somewhere to hide, or blend in with a large group of people. The former is always the better choice, because avoiding floating blobs of color—which is how people appear to me in this reality—is tricky. Also, people can see and hear me clearly, but the shadow beasts? Conveniently invisible to the naked eye. When I’m fighting off or running from dark amorphous shadows with sharp claws that no one can see, I definitely look insane.

Since it’s still early in the morning—it can’t be much past six—the commuters aren’t out in full force yet, so blending in with a group is not even an option.

That means I have to find one of my hidey-holes. Somewhere to lay low until the spectrum world fades.

I mentally run through the list of safe locations as I sprint. The closest is an alcove under the Platte River Bridge about eight blocks away. The white aura that encapsulates my body might as well be a beacon that reads MEALTIME to the flying creatures above, but being near running water will camouflage me. Since discovering the trick, I always have a list of places I can hide within running distance.

Bursting out of the alley at full speed, my mind focuses on reaching my destination. There is no way my human pursuers can keep up with my speed. Since there isn’t a row of glowing auras waiting for me the moment I bust out of the alley, I have to assume they haven’t caught up to me.

I ignore the sights and sounds vying for attention.

My path is already plotted in my mind: four blocks straight, three blocks east.

My eyes remain fixed on my course.

I eat up three blocks in only a handful of seconds. I have to hope that any people driving by didn’t catch the blur darting down the street.

I’m just about to round the corner of the fourth block when a shadow drops out of the sky and lands in front of me.

Skidding to a halt to keep from colliding with it, I hear the telltalethudnot far behind me.

Fear burns its way up my spine and explodes like a firecracker in my brain.

The monsters have found me.

The shadowy forms boxing me in are just that—formless blobs of darkness. They remind me of a moving black hole. Their edges are semi-translucent, almost like looking through shady mist. I can’t see through the main part of their bodies—if that’s what the darkness even is.

If this reality is like seeing the world through a sunlit kaleidoscope, these beings stand out for their absence of color. It’s as if they suck the beauty of this world into themselves. Not satisfied by simply obscuring the light, they seek to devour it.

The forms on either side of me undulate and move, as if posturing. I don’t know what they are or what they want, except to hurt me. My body is littered with scars from these creatures, whose sharp talons I never see, but feel slicing through my flesh.

Since no one else can see these abhorrent beasts, my foster families and social workers always thought my injuries were self-inflicted.

I learned to hide my wounds as best I could, but a particularly bad attack six months ago landed me in the hospital. I needed thirty-four stitches and two liters of blood to replenish what had been lost.

Since I had a history of similar injuries, the powers-that-be assumed I’d done something to myself. And what defense could I have given them? The leading theory was that I’d jumped out of the window of an abandoned industrial building. I suppose that would account for the cuts on my body, as well as the broken bones.

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