Chapter 13: Fire Beneath Skin
Chapter 13: A Fire Beneath Skin
The next morning, the town woke wrong.
The light was off—not just dim, but wrong. Like it had filtered through something that didn't belong in the sky. The clouds didn't move. They sat like smudges of ash against a canvas that had forgotten how to be blue. No birds sang. No distant rustle of wings, no flutter of feathers in the gutters. Dogs barked—but only once. Sharp. Frantic. Then silence. As if they'd heard something no one else could. As if they knew something terrible was standing just beyond the veil of their senses.
Leah stood in her bedroom, staring into the mirror.
The girl that looked back wasn't her anymore.
Not entirely.
Her skin didn't just feel different—it hummed. Not with electricity. Not with heat. With presence. With purpose. Her eyes caught the light in strange ways now, and behind them, something old and impossible watched the world with eerie stillness.
The Beast wasn't inside her now.
It was her.
Not a parasite. Not a sickness. Not a wound that had festered.
A truth.
Long hidden. Now unearthed.
And it didn't wait.
It moved beneath her skin like smoke trapped in glass. Something ancient crawled along her veins, tasting the world through her senses. It whispered through her blood, spoke in pulses and hunger. It didn't ask for permission.
It had already been invited.
And Leah had set a place for it at her table.
She dressed slowly, methodically, every movement deliberate. Her hands no longer trembled. She didn't feel nerves or hesitation. Only clarity.
At school, she walked through the halls like smoke. People stared, but didn't meet her eyes. Something in them—deep, instinctive, ancestral—knew not to.
They didn't know what she was.
But they knew she was no longer safe.
Even the teachers, those tired gods of order, kept their distance. One bumped into her near the science lab. He muttered an apology, eyes averted, and stepped away so fast he nearly tripped. Leah heard his heartbeat spike. Smelled the fear slick on his skin.
Something primal in their bones remembered her. Remembered what she was.
Not her name.
But the shape of her.
Passed down from ancestors who had once fled from fire and teeth in the dark. Who had once seen a girl smiling at the edge of a forest and run because her shadow didn't match her body.
Clara didn't return that day.
Or the next.
But Leah could feel her.
Below the surface. Deep. Moving like a current beneath the stillness. Preparing. Changing.
The greenhouse had been boarded up.
Not by them.
Someone else—someone afraid—had tried to shut it down. To seal away whatever pulsed beneath its roots. Nails driven through wood by shaking hands. Warning signs hastily tacked to the frame.
It didn't matter.
Leah stood before the boards after school, her hair soaked from the ever-present rain, her hands bare.
She touched the wood.
And it splintered beneath her fingers like paper.
The Beast within her growled softly, satisfied.
The inside of the greenhouse was chaos and beauty twisted together. Vines had grown wild, curling up the walls, cracking the glass. Leaves as wide as hands. Petals like tongues. Flowers bloomed from the floor, their centers dark, their edges serrated and sharp.
Teeth.
The plants had teeth.
Some pulsed with faint bioluminescence. Others twitched when she stepped close, as if eager. Hungry.
The Beast remembered this place.
It remembered why it had chosen it.
Because it was never about the plants.
It was about what fed them.
Underneath the soil, Leah knew now, was a network of veins. Not roots. Not water. Veins—full of old blood and older truths. Carrying hunger. Feeding her. Feeding Clara. Feeding what was coming.
The earth here was alive.
Not metaphorically.
Not symbolically.
Alive.
And it had a name.
One that Leah still didn't know in words, but felt in the rhythm of her heartbeats.
She stayed there until nightfall. Breathing it in. Letting it wrap around her like a second skin. She knelt once, pressing her palms into the soil. The ground responded—not with a quake, but with a pulse. Like a creature waking beneath her.
The glass cracked behind her with a sound like bone splitting.
She didn't flinch.
Didn't turn.
Because she wasn't afraid.
She was ready.
When she finally left the greenhouse, her footsteps left no prints in the mud. The vines brushed her shoulders as she passed, parting like curtains for something holy. Her eyes glowed faintly in the dark, catching moonlight that had no business being there.
She walked home through streets that had gone too quiet.
Houses watched her with shuttered eyes.
Windows flickered, then went black.
And still, she smiled.
Back at home, her mother was waiting in the kitchen. The lights were on, but they buzzed weakly, like they didn't want to be. Something smelled overcooked. Oil burned in a pan. A prayer book lay open on the table, its spine broken, its pages stained with fingerprints.
"Leah," her mother said, trying for casual. "You didn't come home last night."
No response.
"I left food for you. And… and I called your school. They said—"
Still silence.
Her mother hesitated, then stepped closer.
"Are you okay?" she asked. "Did something happen?"
Leah turned to face her.
Just looked.
And her mother stopped speaking.
Stopped breathing—for a moment.
Because in Leah's eyes, she didn't see her daughter.
She saw the Beast.
And she remembered something old. Something from the stories her grandmother had told—back when stories were survival, not entertainment.
About girls who walked into the woods and came back wrong.
About creatures that wore faces like masks.
About names you weren't supposed to say out loud, because names had power.
About truths you weren't supposed to remember.
Because remembering meant they remembered you too.
Leah's mother took a step back.
Her lips parted.
But she said nothing.
Because she understood.
And Leah smiled.
Not cruelly.
Not kindly.
Just… inevitably.
Because the fire had started.
Not in the streets.
Not in the world.
But inside the people.
Small cracks forming.
Hairline fractures along their illusions.
Truth was bleeding through the seams of normalcy, seeping into prayers, into lullabies, into the static of old radios left on overnight. Children were waking with nightmares they couldn't explain. Dogs refused to go near the woods. Paintings peeled from walls as if the surfaces rejected them.
Something was coming.
No.
It had already come.
And Leah—Leah was its herald.
Its voice.
Its vessel.
She didn't need to shout. She didn't need to burn cities. The world would unravel itself in silence, one thread at a time.
And when Clara returned—
When they stood side by side again beneath a sky that no longer pretended to be blue—
The world would open its eyes.
And scream.
Because the Beast wasn't coming.
It had already arrived.