By Friday afternoon, my brain felt like it had been run through a dishwasher on the pots-and-pans setting.

  Classes had started for me on Tuesday and hadn’t let up since. Algebra here was like my old school’s honors track on espresso. Bio assumed I’d already memorized half the textbook. World history came with reading lists that could double as doorstops. Latin—because of course it was Latin—had declensions that looked like they’d been designed by a bored god with a grudge.

  Even where I’d been “advanced” before, I was now firmly in “try not to drown” territory.

  Northbridge noticed. Or Ms. Cho did, which was basically the same thing. By Wednesday, Vinh had been officially assigned as my tutor: one hour after last period, every day. We’d sit in a quiet corner of the student center, him patiently walking me through problem sets and conjugations while my brain tried to pretend it wasn’t leaking out my ears. Then the shuttle would scoop me—and a handful of kids just out of clubs and practice—and drop us back at our doors.

  By Friday’s last free period, I’d almost started to believe this was my life now. Hard classes, weird homework, secret monster books zipped into my backpack. Tutor. Shuttle. Repeat.

  I’d claimed one of the trees on the lawn—the same big oak the twins loved—and spread my Latin workbook out on the grass. The afternoon light was soft, the kind that made the stone buildings look less like a brochure and more like a place people actually lived.

  I chewed on the end of my pen, staring at the chart in front of me.

  amo, amas, amat…

  A breeze stirred the leaves overhead. Somewhere, kids were laughing on the path. Someone shouted “Heads up!” and a soccer ball thumped against the ground. Birds chattered in the branches.

  Then, between one breath and the next, the birds went quiet.

  A bell started to ring—three sharp peals. Around me, the lawn shifted. Clumps of kids straightened, closed laptops, snapped textbooks shut. A soccer ball got scooped up; someone slung a violin case over their shoulder. They vanished into the closest buildings.

  In less than a minute, the grass around my tree went from scattered bodies and chatter to empty. A couple of leaves skittered across an abandoned patch of sun where someone had been sitting five seconds ago.

  I was suddenly, very clearly, alone.

  Something was crawling across the lawn toward me.

  At first, my brain tried to file it under “injured person.” It was man-shaped, more or less. Same general height, same two arms, two legs. But the skin was wrong—pure black, covered with papery scales like a fish. The clothes hanging off it were shredded and filthy, patches of fabric clinging like mold.

  Its eyes were just…holes. Black pits sunk too deep, no sclera, no iris, nothing to catch light. As it moved, its joints bent a little too far the wrong way, like the angles had been guessed at from a bad diagram.

  A smell hit me a second later. Not rot, not exactly. Cold, like old basements and turned-off freezers, with an under-note of something chemical and sharp—hospital corridors and formaldehyde.

  My whole body went cold in patches. I scrambled backward, Latin book forgotten, fingers digging into the grass.

  The thing’s head snapped up. It locked onto me, mouth stretching in a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. Its lips peeled back from teeth that were too even, too white, like dentures in a corpse.

  I pushed to my feet so fast my Latin book flew, pages fanning across the grass.

  The thing’s head twitched. Then it moved.

  One heartbeat it was twenty feet away, crawling wrong across the lawn. The next, it wasn’t crawling at all—it launched. It covered the distance in a single, hideous lunge, like someone had skipped a frame in reality.

  It hit me like a linebacker.

  My back slammed into the ground. Air whooshed out of my lungs in a stupid little squeak I didn’t hear because the world was dead quiet. Its weight pinned my hips and chest; its hands—too-long fingers ending in gray, splintery claws—closed around my wrists and drove them into the grass.

  Pain flared hot where its claws bit through skin. I tried to yank free; it was like being clamped in a vise.

  It leaned in.

  Its mouth opened.

  And kept opening.

  The jaw unhinged with a dry, creaking sound I felt more than heard. Skin stretched; tendons jumped under thin flesh. Three neat rows of teeth unfolded—small, sharp, all the same size, packed like shark teeth in a nightmare dentist’s office.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  My brain supplied an image, stupid and clear: a bright, cartoony drawing in If You See These, Run. The page with the pale, crawling man and the warning box that said: Never let a WRAITH get close. They feed on your fear.

  Wraith.

  I knew its name and that didn’t help at all.

  I writhed, trying to buck it off, kicking at its legs, but it was so much heavier than it looked. My heart hammered in my throat. I opened my mouth and screamed—

  Nothing.

  My throat worked; my lungs burned; but no sound came out. The silence stayed absolute, pressing in on my eardrums like a fist.

  The Wraith’s breath washed over my face, cold and chemical. Its eyes—those black pits—focused like it was looking past my skin and into something behind it.

  Panic flipped over into something else. Anger. No. You do not get to eat me while I’m learning Latin!

  Heat surged in my chest, bright and hot, flooding my limbs. For a second the world sharpened—the gray pores of its skin, the tiny tremor in its left hand, the way its weight shifted a fraction to one side.

  I twisted hard, shoving up with everything I had. Its grip slipped a millimeter.

  It was enough to make it snarl, jaw flexing, teeth clacking closer.

  “Wraith!” a voice yelled, somewhere to my left.

  Sound came slamming back all at once. Birds shrieked. Wind rustled hard in the leaves. Somewhere, a door banged. Over it all, the shout:

  “WRAITH!”

  Vinh hit it from the side like a thrown brick.

  The impact tore its claws from my wrists. The thing rolled, shrieking now—a thin, metallic screech that made my teeth ache. I scrambled sideways on my elbows, grass burning against my skin, putting distance between us.

  Vinh came up in a smooth, practiced movement, already drawing the knife from his belt. The blade that cleared the sheath wasn’t black like Theo’s; it was a deep, matte red, like dried blood or rusted iron, no shine at all.

  He didn’t hesitate. He stepped in, low and fast, and slashed at the Wraith’s reaching arm. The blade bit; gray flesh smoked where it touched, the smell like burning hair and cold medicine.

  The Wraith recoiled, hissing, then lunged at him instead.

  “Stay back!” Vinh snapped at me without looking, voice flat and hard. He parried a grab, pivoted, and drove the knife toward its ribs. The thing twisted unnaturally, spine bending in a way that made my stomach flip, and the blade scraped along its side instead.

  Footsteps pounded from behind me.

  “Sinclair!” a woman’s voice barked. “Move!”

  Hands grabbed my shoulders and hauled me up and back in one smooth drag. I stumbled, half-turned, and caught a flash of a faculty ID lanyard, a navy cardigan, dark hair pulled into a low knot. One of the teachers—Ms. Patel, my bio teacher.

  She shoved me behind her without ceremony. “Eyes on me,” she said. “Not on that.”

  Too late.

  Another figure sprinted past us, coat flaring.

  This teacher—tall, light-brown skin, close-cropped hair—drew a blade as he moved. Longer than Vinh’s, more like a short sword. The color of the edge wasn’t silver. It was a deep, dense green, like polished bottle glass, same as the girl who was with Theo in the alley.

  He slid in beside Vinh without a word, like they’d rehearsed this a hundred times.

  “Left,” the teacher snapped.

  Vinh feinted high; the Wraith flinched toward him. The green blade carved low, across its hamstrings. The smell that burst out was worse than before—cold and ozone and something like old meat pulled from a freezer.

  The Wraith crumpled, legs folding wrong. It clawed at the ground, dragging itself forward with its hands, teeth snapping.

  “Again,” the teacher said.

  Vinh drove his red blade down, straight into the base of its skull.

  For a second, nothing happened.

  Then the Wraith shuddered. Its mouth fell open wider, teeth rattling. The grayness seemed to drain out of it like dirty water being sucked down a sink. And it collapsed in a heap.

  The silence pulled tight one more time, like a held breath.

  The male teacher touched his ear and said, “cleanup in the quad. Wrath protocol.”

  My hands shook. My wrists throbbed. When I looked down, four crescent-shaped punctures dotted each one, welling bright red. Grass stains smeared my palms. Dirt and something gray flecked my blazer.

  Ms. Patel turned, scanning me quickly, eyes sharp.

  “Any bites?” she demanded. “Mouth contact? Did it touch your face?”

  I managed to shake my head. “Just—” My voice came out hoarse. “Just my wrists.”

  She caught them gently but firmly, turning them over to inspect. Her fingers were warm. “Superficial,” she muttered, more to herself than me. “Lucky.” She let go and met my eyes. “Can you walk?”

  “I—yeah,” I said, even though my knees felt like they’d been swapped for Jell?O.

  “Good. Infirmary. Now.”

  She steered me away from the horror on the grass. I risked one glance back. Vinh was standing over it, shoulders heaving slightly, knife still in his hand. The teacher with the green blade was already on his phone, speaking fast and low, eyes scanning the perimeter.

  Vinh’s gaze flicked up. For a fraction of a second, our eyes met. Then Ms. Patel turned me toward the path and he was out of sight.

  The infirmary was cool and smelled like antiseptic and old Band?Aids. The nurse—a brisk woman with silver hair and readers on a chain—sat me on a cot, cleaned my wrists with something that stung, applied a cream that smelled spicy, and wrapped them in neat white gauze.

  “Any dizziness? Nausea?” she asked.

  “Just…shaken,” I said.

  “Normal,” she said. “You got jumped by a Wraith. That’ll do it.” She said it like “you got stung by a bee.” “Pulse is good, pupils reactive. If you start seeing double or feel suddenly cold, you come back immediately. Otherwise, you’re clear.”

  “Clear for…what?” I asked.

  “Your next class,” she said, as if that were obvious. “You’ve got…Latin, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said faintly.

  “Then off you go.” She gave me a look that was almost kind. “That will heal up quicker than you think, Ms. Sinclair. It’s normal to be scared, but remember you’re all right.”

  I slid off the cot on legs that didn’t quite feel like mine and walked back into the hallway, back toward conjugations and declensions, wrists throbbing under fresh bandages and the taste of freezer-burned air still caught at the back of my throat.