Susan reached the park and stopped to catch her breath. She waded through a snowbank and started in, following a stretch of firmly packed snowmobile tracks. They veered right suddenly, forcing her to abandon the route. Barely fifty yards in, she passed the playground, and knee deep in snow, she stopped short.
She feared she might scream. She knew how a scare felt rippling up her back, how unsettling it was when someone stepped across her grave. But this, this thing that had suddenly stabbed her like a dagger of ice, threatened to cripple her. Terror gripped her as she quivered, cold invading her body.
She gasped and held her breath. A debilitating rush surged through her, sweeping up, up, up, until her head drowned as the frigid fever shackled her. She called out for her son, fearful that only the man in that silvered moon could hear her. A gust broke through the stillness and swallowed her cry. She tried again but there was no reply; only that maddening bluster that seemed to possess a mind of its own.
The cold rippled through her. She felt herself falling and tumbled onto her back. Somewhere, a fleeting voice teased her. Was it Kelan? It was impossible to tell; she could only hope.
Then, from the darkness came a high-pitched scream, an unmistakable beacon of sound.
Kelan.
Susan couldn’t speak; couldn’t call for her child. Something had entered her, had consumed her. It had come like a bullet, as had that voice—that relentless thing inside her head, the one she had tried to tell herself could not be there when it had first rammed into her brain only moments before.
The park began to spin. The sky whirled in endless waves, the stars streaking across an ocean of black. She tried to resist, tried to cry out, only to fall silent as that voice cut ever deeper into her and bled her like a lamb. Bled her into unconsciousness.