The night had cracked open like a wound
Francisco was the first to feel it, an invisible tug under his ribs, sharp and sudden enough that he staggered mid-stride. A moment before, he had been sprinting with the others through the trees in blind pursuit of the husk-children, lungs burning, heart thundering, every nerve charged with the same impulse: end it. End this nightmare before another child dies.
But the sensation that ripped through him now was different. It wasn't the pull toward the creature this was a violent recoil, a wrongness, a realization that hit him so hard he almost fell.
He skidded to a stop, boots scraping the forest floor.
Manuel nearly collided with him. "Francisco! Why did you….?"
Francisco's eyes widened, breath trembling. "It's not here."
The certainty in his voice chilled all of them.
"The woods," Francisco whispered. "It tricked me. The pull it was pushing me away, not guiding me. Dios… I led us the wrong way."
Maria cursed under her breath. Ivan looked back toward the town with dawning horror as the echo of panicked screams rolled like a wave across the distance.
The screams weren't fading.
They were growing.
"We have to go back!" Isabella cried, already turning. Her braid whipped over her shoulder as she sprinted toward the distant glow of torchlight and smoke.
Manuel didn't hesitate. "Move! NOW!"
The hunters pivoted as one and ran—harder, faster, more desperate than before. Their breath tore ragged through their throats, boots hammering roots and stone.
Behind them, the forest felt colder, as if watching their retreat.
Ahead, the screams only multiplied.
By the time they broke through the tree line and saw the city hall square, all of them stopped dead in their tracks.
The hall had become a trap of its own making;
"What…" Isabella's breath froze.
It wasn't just noise, or motion, or chaos.
It was something beneath all that.
A weight. A presence.
The way the air felt before a storm charged, wrong, ready to snap.
People were running in every direction. Parents clutched their children. Some fought to push into the hall while others fought to escape it. Bodies pressed, collided, stampeded. Someone fell and was immediately trampled. A woman screamed a name over and over. The sky above looked bruised by smoke and torchlight.
Francisco felt sick. This is my fault…
"It's inside," Manuel said, voice low, horrified. "The creature is inside with them."
"And it knows we're coming," Ivan muttered.
They forced their way through the panicked crowd, shoving bodies aside. Manuel barked, "MOVE MOVE! GET OUT OF THE WAY!"
Most didn't listen. Fear made them deaf, blind, wild.
And then…
A scream ripped through the air, cutting through everything. Sharper. Closer. More primal.
A child's scream, but layered echoing with something wrong.
Maria's hand flew to her musket.
"That was inside!"
They burst through the doors.
The world beyond them changed.
Blood streaked the stone. Benches overturned. Lanterns shattered. Parents clutched their children beneath them on the floor as if covering them with their own bodies might shield them from a hurricane.
And in the center of it all ….
The creature.
Not wearing a child this time.
Not using a borrowed shell.
Its true form.
At first glance, it seemed human, roughly the shape of one, arms, legs, a torso
but the longer anyone looked, the more wrongness surfaced. Its limbs stretched unnaturally long, sinewy and too thin, as if its bones were made from sharpened shadows. Its skin or what passed for skin…. was pale and almost translucent, rippling like stretched wax lit from within by dying coals.
The head… Dios santo.
The head was a mockery of a human face: elongated, jaw split slightly open as though unhinged, and behind the slit of a mouth, rows of teeth too small and too many. Its eyes were hollow, not black, not white, but the color of nothing at all.
And it stood above the children it had killed.
The hunters froze.
Francisco's knees nearly buckled. His lungs forgot how to work.
Isabella whispered, "Madre de Dios…"
Matteo clutched the doorway, instantly pale.
Manuel's hands trembled despite himself. He raised his gun, jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
The creature didn't flinch.
It didn't even acknowledge him.
Instead it turned slowly, impossibly smoothly, its neck bending as though boneless.
It looked at Francisco.
Not the others.
Just Francisco.
Francisco's breath shattered. His pulse hammered so hard he thought he'd faint. Something inside him recoiled almost violently, as if a thread between them snapped tight.
Then….
It smiled.
Not with lips.
With all its teeth.
"Shoot it!" Maria choked.
Manuel fired.
Ivan fired.
Maria fired.
Isabella screamed something and fired too.
The bullets went through it as if through fog punching through its body and embedding into the far wall. Not a drop of blood. Not a flinch. Not even a blink.
"Qué… demonio!" Ivan stumbled back.
The creature tilted its head again, and for the first time since entering, it moved….
Not with rage…
not with speed...
But with the quiet, deliberate grace of something ancient.
It lifted its hand.
The hall lights guttered.
Children began to scream, their voices shifting, warping, becoming layered with something guttural and monstrous.
Then the dead children moved.
The ones closest to the creature jerked upright like marionettes yanked by invisible strings. Heads hung limp at first, then snapped upright with sickening cracks. Their mouths opened, puppet-wide, too wide for human jaws.
From their throats came the same voice
the creature's voice
cut through with childish echoes.
Maria sobbed. "No… Dios, no…"
And then the husk-children attacked.
What followed wasn't a fight.
It was slaughter.
Parents trying to protect their children were the first to die. Husks tore into them small hands gripping throats, teeth gnashing, bones snapping under impossible force. Hunters fired desperately but the children wouldn't fall unless shot through the head, and even then some crawled, twitching.
Blood hit the walls in sprays.
Screams ripped the air.
The creature itself vanished simply gone, slipping between dimensions like fog.
Leaving its puppets to finish the job.
Matteo barely dodged a lunging eleven-year-old husk whose face was permanently twisted in terror. The child's nails raked across Matteo's arm and he stumbled…
A dead girl no older than seven tackled him, pinning him down with inhuman strength.
Matteo screamed, fighting, but her fingers curled around his throat.
Her eyes were sightless.
Her breath cold.
Ana saw him.
For a split second she froze, the same instinct that made any mother hesitate from killing a child, no matter how wrong the child had become.
But Matteo's voice shattered everything.
"Ana…! I….can't….breathe!"
The husk-girl tightened her grip.
Ana lunged.
She grabbed a piece of shattered bench and slammed it into the girl's skull.
The crack echoed through the hall.
The girl fell sideways, body twitching once before going still.
Ana's hands shook violently.
"Lo siento… lo siento…" she whispered even as she dragged Matteo to his feet. Tears burned her eyes. "You're safe. You're safe. Stay behind me, hijo."
Matteo didn't correct the word.
He just nodded, trembling.
Across the hall, a man was ripped apart by three husks at once. A woman fled only to be tackled by two more. Hunters fought, shouted, fired, screamed. Injured bodies piled up.
And still
More husks streamed toward the doors.
Toward the woods.
Toward something calling them home.
"IT'S ESCAPING!" Ivan shouted. "THEY'RE FOLLOWING IT!"
Manuel grabbed Francisco by the collar. "Can you feel where it went?"
Francisco swallowed hard, shaking. "Yes."
"Then lead."
Francisco hesitated, guilt slicing through him. "I failed last time."
Manuel's grip tightened. "You didn't fail. IT tricked you. Now stop doubting yourself and RUN."
Francisco nodded…
and ran.
Isabella followed.
Manuel, Ivan, and Bruno behind her.
As they sprinted out, Manuel turned back toward Ana, Maria and the wounded hunters.
"Hold the hall!" he shouted.
Ana nodded, tears still streaking her face. "Just bring them back alive."
The forest was alive with sound, but none of it was natural. The snapping of branches under frantic boots, the ragged breathing of hunters, the soft, eerie rustle of the dead children moving with unnatural coordination,it all blended into a symphony of dread. Francisco led the charge, propelled by the strange, magnetic pull that he could neither resist nor fully understand. Behind him, Manuel's hand stayed on his musket, knuckles white, eyes scanning the shadows for any sign of the creature.
Isabella stumbled over a root and swore under her breath, catching herself before falling. Francisco's small frame ran with a speed that seemed almost impossible, yet he didn't stumble. Every fiber of his being screamed fear, grief, and determination.
"They're faster than they should be," Ivan muttered, musket pressed tightly to his chest. His eyes darted constantly, catching every movement. He fired once at a husk-child darting across their path, but the bullets passed through it like mist. The sound of the shot startled them all, but it changed nothing, nothing that could save them.
A scream tore through the night, higher and sharper than anything before. It wasn't a child screaming. Not entirely. It was a mixture of shrill panic and a guttural echo, something human and inhuman entwined. Francisco flinched, nearly tripping over a root, but he kept running. "It's close," he gasped.
Ahead, the forest opened into the same narrow ravine, steep walls framing a jagged, shadowed pit. The husk-children moved with disturbing precision, funneling toward a single point at the far side. My stomach churned. "They're leading us… to the ravine," he said. His voice was a growl, low and tense. But we couldn't keep up, the children were miles ahead.
The hunters slowed slightly as they approached, each of them sensing the unnatural stillness that now hung over the ravine. There was a smell here, metallic and sickly sweet, the unmistakable stench of decay mingled with smoke from distant torches.
Then we saw him.
A hunched over figure kneeling at the edge of the ravine, over the lifeless bodies of the husk-children. His back was rigid but bowed, like a marionette pulled taut by invisible strings.
The pale light of the moon caught the strange symbols carved into his hands… the same "death and rebirth" mark that had haunted their hunt for days.
He didn't move when they arrived. Didn't look up. But that build, that stature…. There was no mistaking it, it was ...
Theo.
He began to whisper at first, they were faint, almost drowned out by the wind through the trees. Then they grew louder, overlapping in multiple tones that were both human and utterly alien. Francisco froze mid-step, feeling a cold hand of recognition curl around his heart. "It's… it's him," he whispered, voice trembling.
I raised his musket, aiming at Theo's back, but my finger hesitated. Ivan did the same. We had all been through so much, seen the unthinkable, and yet nothing had prepared them for this. The voices
Theo's whispers….weren't just noises. They were layered, inhuman and childlike at the same time, as though the husk-children themselves were speaking through him.
Isa's hand flew to her mouth, her body frozen in horror. Her father tried to comfort her.
No one moved for a long, tense heartbeat. Then Theo slowly lifted his head. His eyes were blank, white as snow, staring at nothing or perhaps everything at once. The hunters flinched. Even Francisco, who had been closest to the pull, instinctively took a step back.
"This isn't him," I said under my breath. "It can't be. It's using him…"
But the others didn't hear. All they saw was the boy they knew or at least thought they knew standing over the bodies of the children, hands stained and glowing with the mark, whispering in a language no human should know.
Ivan's gun wavered in his grip. "Shoot him?" he asked, voice cracking.
"No!" I snapped, stepping in front. "He's not the monster. We don't know what it's doing, but if we kill him, we lose our only chance to figure it out!"
Theo tilted his head, and the whispers grew louder, layering over themselves until it became almost impossible to think. The overlapping tones of children, broken words, and guttural inhuman sounds filled the ravine. Francisco clutched his ears, staggering back. "It's… all of them… all the children…"
Almost immediately, he fell…. Not dead, just unconscious
And the same question raced through all our minds
Is he the monster ?