The final bell rang, loud and shrill, a sound that always carried the metallic taste of release. Immediately, the school exploded into its daily ritual of motion.
Students poured out through the wrought-iron gates in chaotic, laughing waves—a tide of backpacks, shouted plans, and complaints about homework that would be forgotten by morning. Some walked in tight, gossiping pairs, others in loud, shoving groups, a few alone with their earbuds sealing them in silent bubbles. Bicycles rattled past on the pavement, chains clicking. A line of cars waited at the curb, engines humming with suburban impatience, parents behind windshields scanning the crowd. To almost every one of them, it was just another Tuesday afternoon, the brief horror of the morning news already fading under the mundane glare of the present.
Ace walked out by himself.
His backpack hung from one shoulder, the strap digging in, but it wasn't the weight of textbooks and binders that bent his posture. It was the anchor of his own thoughts, circling endlessly, relentlessly, around the same dark focal point—the old house on the hill. In his mind, he saw it not as a building, but as a silhouette against a bruised twilight sky, its windows like blind eyes, its porch a sagging jaw. Silent. Waiting. Knowing.
He stopped near the gate, under the skeletal shadow of a large oak tree, letting the stream of students flow around him.
A small, hushed knot of people stood just beyond the school boundary. Their uniforms were a different shade of navy—St. Caldron Prep. They didn't move with the frantic energy of escape; they were still, anchored by a gravity Ace recognized all too well. They looked exhausted in a deep, soul-weary way. Eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, not from recent tears, but from a sleepless void. Their voices, when they spoke, were hoarse scraps of sound.
One of them, a girl with a blonde ponytail that had lost its bounce, stepped forward as Ace approached. She didn't make eye contact; her gaze was fixed on the stack in her hands. She held out a sheet of paper.
Wordlessly, Ace took it.
The flyer was warm from being clutched. It showed a photocopied photo of Anthony Hayes—a yearbook picture, probably. He was smiling, a careless, easy grin that spoke of a life where the worst thing that could happen was a failed test or a lost game. His hair was messed up, his collar slightly crooked. Frozen in a moment before everything went wrong. Below the grainy image was a stark, brutal message in large, default font:
MISSING
ANTHONY HAYES
LAST SEEN NEAR THE OLD HOUSE ON BRIAR HILL
PLEASE CALL IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION
A local tip-line number was scribled in messy blue ink at the bottom.
Ace's fingers tightened around the paper, the edges biting into his skin. The smile seemed to accuse him.
The students didn't beg. They didn't break down and cry. They performed their quiet, desperate liturgy: hand out a flyer, meet a gaze, look away. Hand out another. And another. As if the mechanical repetition of the act could stitch reality back together, as if stopping would mean accepting the new, horrifying truth that their friend was simply gone.
"Hope you find him," a passing student muttered vaguely, not breaking stride, the words a polite social reflex.
Ace folded the flyer once, crisply, then once again, making a small, thick square. He slipped it into the front pocket of his jeans, where it sat like a stone against his thigh.
You don't even know what took him, he thought, watching the St. Caldron girl turn to the next clump of students, her movements robotic.
And you shouldn't have to.
The walk home felt longer than usual, the distance stretched thin by the weight in his pocket. The cheerful noise of the school faded, replaced by the sounds of ordinary life—lawnmowers, a dog barking, the far-off shriek of a kid on a swing set. Each one felt like a layer of insulation, normalcy trying to smother the wrongness. He walked past houses with neat gardens and parked cars, a world meticulously built to keep the dark at bay. It almost worked.
By the time Ace reached his street, a quiet cul-de-sac where the trees were older and thicker, the last echoes of the school day had vanished. He stopped in front of the familiar blue gate, its paint chipped in the same places he remembered from childhood. He pushed it open, the hinge giving its specific, familiar groan.
Inside the gate stood three identical two-story houses, arranged side by side like triplets, sharing the same wide, deep plot of ancestral land.
The one in the center, painted a faded eggshell white, belonged to Ace and his mother. To the right was his father's eldest brother's house, a shade darker. To the left, the middle brother's. Same land. Same blood. Different doors. A fortress of family, though the main defender was long absent.
Ace's house wasn't big, but it wasn't small either. It was simply home. Two floors. White walls dulled to cream by sun and time. A small, stubborn garden wrapped around the front, a riot of his mother's flowers—tough perennials and seasonal blooms she insisted on keeping alive through heat and frost, a quiet battle against entropy.
He stepped inside the gate and shut it behind him with a soft click.
For a moment, he just stood there on the flagstone path, breathing in the scent of damp earth and jasmine. This place was safe. It was normal. It was quiet. The air here didn't feel heavy. The silence was just silence, not a listening presence.
And somewhere not too far away, just beyond the ridge, something that didn't belong in this world of lawnmowers and swing sets had reached out from a place of rot and shadow and dragged a smiling boy into the dark.
Ace exhaled slowly, the sound shuddering out of him, and headed inside.
Ace climbed the stairs, the worn wooden steps creaking their familiar protests under his weight. He pushed open the door to his room, a space caught between boyhood and something else—shelves holding both trophies and well-thumbed field guides with no publisher's name. He dumped his bag on the floor, the heavy thud a period to the school day.
He shut the door harder than he meant to. The sound was too loud in the quiet house.
He stood there for a second, back against the door, breathing in the stillness. The folded flyer was a brand in his pocket. He could see the kid's smile on the back of his eyelids. Anthony Hayes. Last seen near the old house. The words were a loop, a taunt. He changed out of his uniform, the stiff fabric traded for soft, dark jeans and a worn grey hoodie—clothes for moving, for blending, for not being seen.
The sound of water sloshing in a deep basin greeted him as he descended. His mother stood near the large utility sink in the combined kitchen-and-wash area, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows, forearms glistening. She was wringing out a bedsheet with a fierce, practiced twist, the muscles in her back taut with the effort. The rhythmic slosh… twist… slap of wet fabric was the only sound. The room felt small, the air thick with the smell of clean linen and lemon soap. It was a scene of profound, defensive normalcy.
Ace opened his mouth. The words—Mom, I need to go out tonight—were on his tongue.
"No."
He stopped. The single syllable was a wall.
"…What?" he said, the protest automatic.
She didn't look at him, her focus locked on the sheet, her knuckles white. "I said no."
"What do you mean, no? I didn't even say anything yet." He kept his voice level, careful.
"I know what you're going to say," she replied, her voice flat, stripped of its usual warmth. It was the voice she used for bills and bad news. "I watched the midday news. I saw the footage of that house on the hill. I heard the name they kept repeating."
Ace shifted his weight, the floorboard beneath him groaning. "So you're just gonna shut it down without even listening?"
She finally turned to face him, dropping the heavy twist of fabric back into the soapy water with a splash.
Her eyes were sharp—a hunter's eyes, he'd often thought, though she'd never hunted a thing in her life. But underneath that sharpness was a raw, animal fear, the kind that couldn't be faked or reasoned away.
"You're not going," she stated, each word a nail driven into the conversation. "End of discussion."
Ace scoffed, a short, frustrated sound. "Mom, a kid disappeared. Vanished. From a place that… from a place that feels wrong." He barely caught himself before saying what he truly knew.
"And people disappear all the time!" she shot back, her volume rising. "They get lost in the woods! They run away from perfectly good homes! They make stupid choices with stupid friends and wind up dead in a ditch!" Her breath hitched. "It's tragic, but it's human. It's not… it's not yours to fix."
"You don't believe that," Ace said quietly, holding her gaze. The air between them crackled.
She looked away, her shoulders slumping. "You're right. I don't." She swallowed, her throat working. "But I don't want to believe what you believe, either. Because if I do, if I let myself think for one second that it's something from out there,"—she jabbed a wet finger toward the window, toward the hills—"then it means I'm right to be this afraid. It means the world really is that broken."
Ace took a step closer. The linoleum was cool under his socks. "This isn't new to me. You know it isn't. I've been on hunts before. I know the protocols."
Her head snapped up, her eyes blazing. "With your father," she hissed. "You went with him. He was there."
"Yes," Ace said, forcing calm into his voice. "And I came back every single time. In one piece."
She laughed then, a single, bitter, choked-off sound that held no humor. "So did he." She let the words hang, a specter in the soap-scented air. "Until he didn't."
Ace felt the old, familiar ache, a hollow space beneath his ribs. He didn't answer. There was no answer to that.
"You think I don't notice?" she continued, her voice dropping to a pained whisper. She took a step toward him, her hand lifting as if to touch his face, then falling back to her side. "Every time you leave this house, and you get that look… I see him. The same set to your jaw. The same way you walk, like you're already halfway to somewhere else. Somewhere I can't follow. Somewhere dark."
Ace clenched his fists at his sides, feeling the ghost of his father's hand on his shoulder, guiding his grip on a weapon he wasn't supposed to own. "He taught me how to identify signs. How to read tracks, how to spot residue, how to know what I'm dealing with before I ever deal with it. He didn't throw me into fights. He taught me to be smart."
"And where is he now?" she asked, the question so quiet it was almost lost in the drip from the faucet. "Where is that brilliant teacher?"
Ace didn't answer. The silence was his answer.
"You think the worry gets easier?" she whispered. "It gets heavier. Every time. Now I have two of you out there in the dark. One gone, and one…" Her eyes swept over him, taking in his readiness, his resolve. "One walking right toward it."
"I'm not going toward the dark," Ace said, the frustration breaking through his careful control. "It's already here! It's on our doorstep! It took a kid from a school ten minutes away! We don't go looking for nightmares—they come to us. And when they do, someone has to turn on the light."
She shook her head, a slow, weary denial. "You're still a child."
The words stung, but not as much as the fear behind them. "I stopped feeling like one a long time ago," he replied, his own voice softening. "Believe me, Mom. It wasn't by choice."
Silence fell again, deeper this time, filled with the ghosts of arguments past and losses yet to come.
Ace reached into his pocket. He pulled out the folded flyer, damp now from the heat of his skin. He didn't open it. He just placed the small, thick square on the counter beside the basin, next to a bottle of detergent. Anthony Hayes's smile, hidden but present. A life interrupted.
"I saw his friends today," Ace said, his eyes on the folded paper. "They were standing outside the gates, handing these out. Their hands were shaking. They looked… hollowed out. They were doing it because it's the only normal thing left to do. They think if they hand out enough paper, someone will have seen something. They don't even know what they're up against."
His mother stared at the folded square, at the tragic, mundane hope it represented. Her jaw was so tight a muscle flickered in her cheek.
"You think knowing the truth saves people?" she whispered, not to him, but to the ghost of the smiling boy.
"No," Ace said, meeting her eyes. "But it stops more people from becoming flyers."
She turned back to the basin, plunging her hands into the cool, soapy water. But her hands were shaking now, fine tremors that made the water ripple. She gripped the edge of the sink, head bowed.
"I raised you normal," she said, the words muffled. "I tried. School. Friends. Soccer games. A future that didn't involve… blood. Or monsters. Or whatever the hell your father dragged into our lives and then left for you to carry."
Ace felt a surge of love so fierce it hurt. He softened his voice to barely a murmur. "You did raise me normal, Mom. You gave me a home. You still do."
Then, quieter, with a gravity that belied his years: "The world just isn't."
She turned back toward him, and he saw the tears she'd been refusing to shed, glossy tracks finally escaping down her cheeks. "Every time you talk like this—with that calm, that certainty—it feels like I'm losing you, too. Like I'm watching you walk down the same path and I can't pull you back."
Ace stepped closer, into her space. He didn't hug her yet; the moment was too fragile. "You're not losing me."
"You don't know that!" she snapped, the fear erupting again. "I don't have your symbols or your strength or whatever magic it is you and your father share! All I have is this! This house! This laundry! And this terror that sits in my stomach every time you walk out that door after sunset!"
Ace nodded slowly, accepting the truth of her fear. It was her weapon, her only weapon. "I know. And all I have is the ability to act. To do something about the thing that causes that terror."
She closed her eyes, breathing deeply, in and out, as if steadying herself for a fall. When she spoke, her voice was scraped raw.
"You're asking me to let my fifteen-year-old son walk toward the same darkness that swallowed his father."
It wasn't a question. It was the core of it, laid bare.
"I'm asking you to trust that he prepared me for it," Ace replied, holding her gaze, letting her see no boyish bravado, only steady certainty. "And that I am not him. I won't be reckless. I won't chase glory. I will be careful."
She hesitated. The silence stretched, painfully long, measured in the slow drip of the tap and the frantic beat of Ace's own heart.
"…Fine," she said at last. The word was a surrender, and a crack in the dam.
Ace blinked, the sudden shift almost disorienting. "Wait—what?"
"You can go," she continued, the sentences coming out in a rushed, conditional torrent, as if she had to get them all out before her courage failed. "But you observe first. You don't fight unless you understand what it is. You don't chase it into the dark. You don't play the hero for anyone, you hear me?"
"I won't," Ace said immediately, the promise automatic and true.
"And the moment something feels off—the moment your skin crawls or the air goes cold or you hear a sound that shouldn't be there—you leave. You turn around and you run. I don't care if the thing is standing right in front of you, holding a door open. You. Leave."
"I promise."
She pointed a wet, trembling finger at him. "You go with Cedric. Not alone."
"Yeah. Always."
"And you call me. You call me before you leave our street, and you call me the second you're back on it. You don't text. You call. I need to hear your voice."
Ace felt a faint, strained smile touch his lips. "Deal."
She sighed, a deep, shuddering exhalation that seemed to drain the last of her resistance. She turned back to the laundry, but the fight had gone out of her movements. "If you don't come back—" she began, her voice breaking.
"I will," Ace said, soft but absolute.
She didn't answer. She just stood there, her back to him, small and suddenly looking older.
Ace hesitated for only a second. Then he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her from behind, resting his chin on her damp shoulder. She stiffened for a heartbeat—then her body crumpled against his, and she turned in his arms, hugging him back immediately. It was tight, desperate, a grip that spoke of a love so fierce it was almost violent, the fear of letting go greater than any fear of the dark outside.
Ace slipped out through the blue gate, the quiet click of the latch behind him feeling like the start of a mission. He headed straight for the neighboring house.
Cedric's place sat behind a tall green gate, bigger than Ace's family home but somehow seeming more cramped. Lights glowed behind curtained windows, and the faint, overlapping sounds of a TV and raised voices suggested a full, chaotic household. The air smelled of frying onions and damp concrete.
Ace barely had to knock. The gate creaked open before his hand touched it.
Chloe stood there, Cedric's older sister. She had her brother's sharp eyes, but none of his laid-back pretense. She crossed her arms, looking him up and down with an expression that said she'd already written the report.
"Cedric said you'd be coming," she stated. "You're late."
"Had to talk to my mom," Ace said.
Chloe nodded once, a short, understanding jerk of her chin. "Figures. Took a while, huh?"
"Yeah."
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "He's upstairs. Room at the end of the hall." Her gaze hardened. "And if you're dragging him into something stupid tonight, Ace, I swear—"
"I'm not," Ace cut in, meeting her eyes. "It's just a look. A check. I promise."
She held his stare for a long second, then the tension in her shoulders eased a fraction. She stepped aside. "You better be telling the truth."
Ace took the stairs two at a time, the worn carpet muffling his steps.
Cedric's room was a controlled disaster zone. Clothes formed soft hills on the floor. Empty energy drink cans stood sentinel on every flat surface. Band posters for groups no one had heard of were peeling at the corners. The low, constant hum of a high-end gaming PC filled the air.
Cedric sat at his desk, a headset crushing his hair, his fingers a blur on the keyboard. His voice was a rapid-fire snarl into the mic. "—bro, you sold the round, what were you—" He caught movement in his periphery and glanced over. His rant died. "Ace?"
Ace shut the door, sealing them in. "Log off. Now."
Cedric studied his face for half a second, then sighed. He ripped the headset off, tossed it on the desk, and tapped a key, muting himself. "Okay. That look means this isn't about borrowing notes."
"My mom agreed," Ace said, getting straight to it.
Cedric's eyebrows shot up. He leaned back in his creaking chair. "Seriously? How much begging did that take?"
"Some. There are conditions," Ace added. "Observation only. We look, we don't touch. We confirm, we don't confront."
Cedric grinned, a flash of white in the dim room. "Standard procedure. Always is."
The grin faded as quickly as it appeared.
"So," Cedric said, his voice dropping into a lower, cleaner register. The gamer was gone; the partner was here. "What's your read?"
Ace moved to the window, peering out at the long, stretching shadows of the late afternoon. "Too early for a solid read."
Cedric snorted. "That's your polite way of saying it's bad and you know it."
Ace didn't deny it. "The timing's the worst part. Disappearances this clean, this close to civilization… it's either something brand new, or something old that's gotten very hungry, very fast."
Cedric stood, grabbing a dark hoodie from the floor. "Goblin? They get aggressive when they're nesting. Could have dragged him in for… parts."
Ace shook his head. "A goblin wouldn't choose a rotting structure. Too risky. They like solid foundations, basements. That house is a collapse waiting to happen. They'd avoid it."
Cedric frowned, pulling on the hoodie. "Skinwalker, then? Moving into new territory?"
"No mimicry reports in the area. No strange animal behavior. Plus, they prefer deep woods, not hills on the suburban fringe." Ace's tone was clinical, eliminating possibilities one by one.
Cedric's expression darkened a shade. "Chupacabra? They're ambush predators. Quiet."
"Wrong region entirely," Ace said, turning from the window. "And they leave evidence. Punctures. Blood. This was… clean. A vacuum."
Cedric exhaled slowly, running a hand through his messy hair. "So what does that leave us with?"
Ace hesitated. The word felt wrong in the messy, normal bedroom. "Could be a blob-type entity."
Cedric grimaced, his nose wrinkling in disgust. "Ugh. Don't say that. Those things are the worst."
"I'm serious," Ace insisted quietly. "Low cognition, pure consumption. They ooze. They seep through cracks. They pull prey into a dark, wet nowhere. It would explain the silence. The completeness."
Cedric rubbed the back of his neck, a nervous habit. "That would also explain why the cops found zip. No traces. It just… absorbs."
A heavy silence settled between them, filled with the unpleasant image.
Cedric broke it. "You think he suffered?"
Ace was quiet for a long moment, his gaze distant. "I don't know," he said finally, his voice tight. "And I don't want to guess. Our job isn't to imagine it. Our job is to make sure it doesn't get a chance to happen again."
Cedric gave a single, firm nod. "Right. Okay. So. We scout. Full perimeter. Look for residue, for ground disturbance, for any sign of… leakage. Anything out of place."
"And if we confirm it?" Ace asked, watching him.
Cedric met his eyes, his own gaze steady and serious. "Then we go home. We research. We plan. We don't wing it against a blot. We come back prepared."
Ace felt a knot of tension loosen in his chest. They were on the same page. "I need to text my mom when we head out. She'll want to know."
Cedric smirked. "Must be nice. Mine just assumes I'll come back with a new scar and a weird story."
Ace managed a small, fleeting smile. "Meet me outside after sunset. We move slow. We stay quiet."
"Yeah," Cedric agreed. "Eyes open, mouths shut."
Ace turned to leave, his hand on the cool doorknob.
"Hey," Cedric said.
Ace looked back.
"You ever think," Cedric started, his voice uncharacteristically careful, "that this thing… showed up because your dad's been gone? Like, the local… balance is off?"
Ace's jaw tightened. The same thought had been a cold stone in his own gut since morning.
"…Yeah," he admitted, the word rough. "All the time."
Cedric nodded, accepting it. "Then let's make sure it doesn't get comfortable. Let's remind it this town isn't empty."
Ace stepped into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him.
Outside the window, the sun was a dying ember on the horizon, bleeding red light across the rooftops. The shadows in the yard were no longer just absence of light; they were solid, deepening pools.
Tonight, the house on the hill wouldn't be empty anymore.