Page 107 of Specters & Spotlights

He had no mouth. Not one she could see. But she felt the grin stretch across the space between them. It was sharp. Feral. Cruel.

Elise squared her shoulders, summoning every scrap of steel she had left.

“You need to leave,” she said. Her voice was steadier than she felt. “You don’t belong here.”

The figure laughed.

It was not a human sound. It was dry and jagged, like claws scraping the inside of her head.

He took a half-step forward. Just shy of the threshold. As if daring her.

Graham stepped up behind her, silent but solid. His hand found her shoulder, grounding her. A tether in the storm.

The shadow noticed.

And lost it.

The room practically shrieked with the sound of him. Not words, not even threats—just violent, roiling fury. It clawed at the edges of the doorway, slamming against the invisible barrier like a rabid animal testing the cage.

Graham’s hand tightened. Elise stepped back into him, her spine meeting his chest.

For one breathless second, she wished she had taken Kevin’s advice to run. This thing—this nightmare—was beyond her. It always had been.

She’d been foolish to think she could face it alone.

Before she could decide what to do next, the shadow went still.

No more hissing, no more rage. Just… stillness. Calculated. Controlled. It was somehow worse than the outburst.

His head tilted slightly, as if listening to something distant. Then his gaze zeroed in on a specific point in the space just in front of him. He raised a hand.

And reached out.

Elise felt her pulse in her throat as his long, inky fingers brushed the invisible boundary. There was resistance—she could feel it in the air, hear the subtle crackle—but he didn’t stop.

He wriggled his fingers like a crowbar in a lock. Testing. Probing.

And then⁠—

A slip. A tear.

Someone gasped behind her—Lark. “He’s found a seam,” she whispered, horrified.

The shadow worked faster now, clawing through the weak point like he’d been waiting for it. Like the web that Cici had used to contain the Seamstress’ rage years ago, except the Specter was an entirely different class of powerful. It took only seconds of concentrated effort for him to create a hole wide enough to thrust his entire arm through.

Elise felt Graham’s hand move from her shoulder to her waist, pulling her backward just as the figure’s outstretched hand breached the threshold.

She stumbled a step. Her eyes locked on that hand—that hand—and everything else melted away.

The room. Graham. The theatre. Kevin. Lark.

Gone.

She was back there again.

Frozen.

That sickening sense of being watched, followed, cornered. The breath-stealing paralysis of knowing escape might be impossible.