The little girl keeps staring, smelling of burned porridge, and finally, I shoot. The bullet hits her between the eyes, but she barely budges, her black pits of eyes never leaving me. It’s like someone gouged them from her sockets, yet she still continues to stare, stare, stare, and I’d do anything to make her stop.
This place will destroy me.
I stumble, landing on something sticky, and I’m trapped. That’s when I glance left and right and find that I’m stuck on a spider web. The arachnid in question whizzes down on its thread, baring a long pair of mandibles.
I was never afraid of spiders, but I change my mind the moment I see this nightmare. Couple that with the helpless feeling of being trapped, and I’m crying like a little girl.
It’s too late for me. Even if the things can’t hurt me, they’ll still destroy me, bringing my worst fear to light. I already failed, and that right there is the one thing I fear the most. I failed to reunite with my monsters, and I failed to save the human world. All because I caved to the creatures of this land.
The creatures creep in on me, and I slam my eyes shut. I don’t want to see the moment they eat me alive. I just want to die peacefully. No wonder no one returns from the Abyss.
It truly is the land of nightmares. The place where happiness and dreams die.
There comes the sound of tearing flesh. Then a loud, guttural squeal rents the air, piercing my eardrums, and finally, I lose consciousness.
Maybe it was for the best that I blacked out.
At least then I won’t be awake when the things eat me.
Chapter two
Enzo
Iyanktheswordfrom the wraith’s chest, smirking as it writhes on the ground at my feet. Black blood seeps from its gash as it takes its true form at last, and now the chilling image of a haunting little child vanishes forever.
The little bitch preyed on my mate. I will destroy her.
She’s just some low-level wraith. They’re found at the edges of the Abyss, just a few miles from the human world.
All portals to our realm open along the fringes. So that is why the wraiths linger here. It’s the reason many humans don’t survive.
The wraiths will assume a form that the human finds most terrifying. They will look right into the person’s essence, finding everything that scares them all the way back to childhood, and it appears my little bell was afraid of demonic little girls with black pits for eyes.
I’ll admit, she was a scary one. I wouldn’t want that thing staring at me from the foot of my bed at night, but it’s just an illusion.
She’s not a terrifying little girl anymore, but a thin, skeletal wisp with no features. It’s quite often that many wraiths will hold onto their assumed forms, even long after they’ve finished with their human prey.
That explains why I am peering into the eight eyes of a giant tarantula. Belle never struck me as the girl who feared creepy crawlies, but spiders are a common fear with deep roots in human evolution, dating back to the days when they were still living in trees and covered in hair like an ape.
That’s why there are a few large predators around.
I spy a lion and a wolf snarling at me in the shadows, deeming whether I am worth the risk of a fight. A Rottweiler with froth around its mouth releases a low growl, and the hair rises at the back of my neck.
I’m not sure why a small tabby crawls out from the bushes and rubs against my legs, but I suppose humans can be scared of cats too. There are hundreds of mice and rats, and a flock of buzzards watching me silently in the trees.
But some wraiths will go a little further.
A psychotic clown and a masked serial killer gaze out from behind a tree, and I can seeHollywoodhas had a major part to play in a lot of human fears in this modern-day age.
There’s also a woman with all her teeth falling out, and a man lying dead on the ground. I don’t know who they are, but I imagine they were humans who got lost here. The wraiths just never bothered to change their forms after they were finished with them.
A little lazy, if you ask me, but it doesn’t matter. They can’t hurt Belle anymore. I’m here to rescue her.
I chase the spider away as I set my mate free from its web, and now I carry her back to our hideout.
My brothers will be so happy to see her.
It’s been a hundred years after all.