She raised the shotgun. “You took my sheep.”
“Haylo,” it breathed. Not a question. An introduction returned.
“Now you belong to me.”
It started with the cattle. They’d stand at the far edge of the north pasture, shoulder to shoulder, staring into the treeline. Not grazing. Not sleeping. Staring. Then the sheep vanished—twenty-three head in one week, with no blood, no tracks, no scent of coyote. Just… gone.
The world turned inside out. She felt her name peel off her like a second skin— Haylo tumbling into the void, Kiss flowering in the thing’s chest. For one eternal second, she was nothing but the space between heartbeats. Haylo Kiss
The creature staggered. Its featureless face rippled. Where her lips had touched, a crack formed—thin, fragile, human. And from that crack, a single word bled out: “Why?”
Her father, a man of hard hands and harder whiskey, blamed rustlers. Her mother, who read her Bible by candlelight, blamed the end of days. Haylo blamed neither. She knew what she’d seen on the third night of the disappearances: a shape that walked on two legs but bent like a broken wishbone, its skin the color of mud and moonlight. It had stopped at the edge of the hayloft’s shadow. And then it had kissed the air—a wet, smacking sound—and the nearest ewe had simply dissolved into mist. She raised the shotgun
Now, at seventeen, Haylo stood in that same hayloft, a shotgun in her hands and a circle of salt around her boots. The moon was a thumbnail paring. The thing was back.