Page 15 of A House of Cloaks & Daggers

Monsters

Wren made it downstairsbefore I did.

His speed was unnatural. On clumsy human legs, I tried to keep up, but the steep descent tripped me, and the handrail slid out from underneath my grip. I almost went soaring over the last flight, skidding when my feet hit the linoleum in the hallway.

My parents were in the sitting room, where the television had remained static and grey. At the window beside it—

The caenim.

It was the tall one from the street.

In the shadows, its features were hard to discern. It stood outside the window in tattered robes, its hood concealing the ghastly face that would plague my sleep for years to come. A conjuring of darkness and horror made real.

One hand—grotesquely thin and gangly but bearing a nauseating resemblance to that of a human—was pressedagainst the glass. Slowly, it scraped an iron-tipped nail down the window. The shrill, keening sound was enough to make me cringe.

And enough to shatter the entire window.

My shout of warning was swallowed by the sound of the exploding glass, and my follow-up cry was lost on the breath that Wren knocked from my lungs as he shoved me out of the way.

He prowled into the room, drawing a small blade from his side. I followed at his heels, peering around his wide frame, looking for my mother.

Broken glass littered the carpet and the coffee table, refracting light from the television and the moon. The couch was empty. I took a step further in and found my parents on the floor.

My father was scrambling to his feet. My mother was clutching her left wrist in her other hand.

The caenim stepped over the windowsill, its long legs granting it otherworldly ease. Due to its significant height, it had to bend its neck to fit in the room. As it lowered its head towards the floor, the television light illuminated its face; stumpy teeth bared in its eye sockets, forked tongues tasting the air, shapeless nose flaring widely.

Its attention was locked straight ahead—on the couch, on the people behind it.

The sound of a knife slicing into flesh cut through the room, and I glanced back at Wren to find him holding up his palm, a fast-healing wound dripping blood onto the floor.

My relief that he bled a colour that looked like red was genuine but short-lived. He smeared his blood onto the wall, no doubt in an attempt to distract the monster whose every sense was trained on my parents, and I suddenly remembered that it was deaf.

“Don’t move,” I cautioned. “Hold your breath.”

My mother’s eyes flashed to my face. The expression she wore told me she knew that already from years of living with my father. But she also knew that eventually someone would get hurt, and she—

“No!”

My shout was too late.

My mother did as she always had, as she always would, and moved to take the blow for her children without trying to find another escape.Thus, the cycle repeats, and repeats…

She jumped over the couch, crying out as her injured wrist bent further in the wrong direction, and screamed at me, “Run, Aura! Get Brynn and run!”

The caenim tracked her by scent and opened its mouth into a dark grin.

Wren sent the dagger flying across the room and unsheathed his sword, but the caenim must have felt the shift in the air. It deflected the blade with its iron claws, sending it clattering against the far wall.

“Get her out,” he barked at me as he advanced upon the beast.

But even Wren wasn’t as fast as my father.

He might have been, had he only known that there were two monsters in the room with us.

My father moved with more determination than he’d ever displayed for anything before in his entire miserable life. He careened around the corner of the couch and grabbed my mother by the back of her neck, shoving her towards the caenim head-first as he ran for the open doorway.

No—not towards it. Right into its outstretched arms.

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