Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 116220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
“Can you stop—” Kyle grunts, anguished. “Can you stop feeling a certain way? I’m honestly not enjoying your emotional state right now.”
Alas, the figure does not stop feeling a certain way.
Kyle struggles to sever his connection, regretting having made one at all. He grimaces as the stinging strengthens, grabs his chest, fights back. But like a warm hand on a frosty steel bar, he’s stuck, skin glued to the metal, trapped, unable to let go.
The next instant, the figure whips past Kyle’s face so fast, he barely sees it.
An ice-cold strike to his body.
Kyle flies backwards with a shout, launched high into the air, legs and arms flailing, then lands on his back at the end of the alley—the shadowy figure, vanished.
A searing, excruciating pain ripples out from his hand.
Kyle lifts his fingers to his face, wide-eyed, screaming.
Upon his pinky, a silver ring.
22.
I Probably Deserve This.
—∙—
“Get it off, get it off!” screams Kyle.
He’s in tears, kicking on the floor of the kitchen, gritting his teeth so hard, they might break.
“Hold still!” shouts Leland. “Careful, careful,” hisses Becks from the other side.
Every effort Kyle already made himself was fruitless. The second he touched the ring with his other hand, he screamed out in agony. All he could do was barge in through the back door where he collapsed on the kitchen tiles in hysterics.
The ring is as tightly squeezed on Kyle’s pinky as a twenty-year-old wedding band, flesh puffing up around it, trapping it.
“Get it off! OFF! OFF!!” he screams, over and over.
Even Cade is in the kitchen. “Use butter! Oil! Dip his hand in oil and slide it off, for fuck’s sake, it isn’t rocket science!”
Leland continues to pry with both his hands, sweating from his brow, panicked. Becks scrambles around the kitchen for oil, rattling spoons, bowls, plates, on a mission. Kyle can barely see anything through his curtain of stinging tears, can barely hear anything past his own shouting, his nostrils filled with a sick, vile odor of metal and boiling flesh.
“In here!” orders Cade. “Put his hand in here!”
The kitchen is a total blur as Kyle’s arm is tugged one way, then another, and finally his hand is submerged in butter, oil, grease, whatever they found. Even with his hand dunked, the searing anguish persists without relent, like a jigsaw having its way with his pinky, only it never cuts through.
Something squeezes Kyle’s finger.
Kyle yells out.
“PULL! NOW!”
He flies back, the ring at last freed. He cradles his hand to his chest at once and curls onto his side, shivering. The pain is gone, but memories of it bite where the ring cruelly sat. Kyle dares a peek at it, as if expecting the finger to have been ripped off entirely. Amazingly it’s still there, though the skin is like blood, as if the ring was replaced with a red one tattooed on.
The room settles. Kyle’s face is a mess of tears when he gazes at his saviors—Leland, Cade, and Becks, who stare back. A pot sits on the floor between them, filled with oil. Cade holds a set of pliers, the silver ring still caught in its bite.
“Kyle?” comes Cade’s voice, soft, faraway.
He blinks away tears, still holding his tortured finger to his chest. “S-Sorry,” he chokes. He wipes his eyes, suddenly feeling embarrassed. “I … I didn’t … didn’t mean to worry you guys or anything. I’m sorry. Uh … th-thank you,” he quickly adds.
“What happened?” asks Leland, wide-eyed. “Is this some kind of cursed ring or something?”
“No,” answers Kyle, paying no mind to how casually he just answered such a question, as if cursed rings are now a thing everyone must be wary of, like scorpions, or diarrhea. “It’s not a cursed anything. Just a simple silver ring … a silver pinky ring. Harmless to you all. Not so harmless to someone like me.”
“Silver …” murmurs Cade thoughtfully, as she turns it over and over with the pliers, inspecting it from all angles, as if still not daring to touch it. “How is silver so harmful to you?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”
Cade makes a face. “With all due respect, I doubt that’s something any normal doctor knows either.”
Leland stares off, wide-eyed. “Do you think there are non-normal doctors? Like … supernatural ones …? Whoa.”
“But if you know silver hurts you, why did you put it on?” asks Becks, confused.
Kyle thinks of the figure in the alley. The way it was able to move so fast, he couldn’t see it. The way it stood there so silent, so empty, without a single discernable feature. Is this what that figure came here to do? To return his brother’s pinky ring in the most cruel way imaginable, to force it upon his finger in the space of half a second? How was that even possible?
And why did it do that? Who is that damned shadow?