Page 7 of Hunting Brooklyn (Stalkers in the Woods #5)

Chapter Three

Brooklyn

T here are certain nights when the moon becomes your enemy.

You close your eyes, but every line of light across your eyelids sketches a story, and you are always the girl in the third act, the one with her fate already written.

I should have expected this—my own heart is an unreliable narrator, and I don’t even trust the things I feel in my bones anymore—but I try to sleep anyway, stubborn as a child who doesn’t believe in monsters.

I shift, turn away from the window. The wind outside is busy with its own drama; rattling the pane, stirring the potted succulents I forgot to water, picking at the plastic vent of the air conditioner.

I listen for a full minute, mapping the pattern of sound, waiting for it to reveal the code beneath the ordinary.

I decide that I’m being silly, that tonight is no different than a hundred before it, that the only thing that can hurt me now is my own inability to let go.

With a sigh, I roll over and force myself asleep, because the world is always easier with my eyes closed.

The second time I wake, it’s not because of any pain or cold, but because something is wrong with the dark.

I sense it before I open my eyes: the air is different, charged with a new energy.

My face is turned toward the wall, and for a while I stay like that, a statue carved from sweat and fear.

My ears strain, desperate for a reason, and that is when I hear it—the soft, barely-there creak of wood.

The apartment is modern, but the floorboards near the entryway are traitors. There it goes again. Lighter. It comes again, this time closer, and I know with a certainty that is almost mathematical that someone is in the hallway.

I count to five before opening my eyes. A childish gesture, but I need the time to collect myself, to armor my mind against the possibility that I am not alone.

At first, there is only the dark, an uneven grayness, painted by the moonlight from the window, the shadows of books stacked along my wall, the shifting geometry of my own discarded clothes on the chair.

Then, as my vision sharpens, I see it: a shape in the doorway, so perfectly still that I would have missed it if not for the slow, deliberate narrowing of its silhouette as it shifts to retreat.

My heart does not so much race as rupture.

I try to scream, but my body rebels. I am a passenger in my own skin, paralyzed by the horror of being seen.

The shape lingers for a fraction of a breath, and I catch the white flash of an eye reflecting the moon, like a cat’s or a jackal’s, and then it is gone.

The silhouette is large. Impossibly so. Can’t possibly be human. What type of person was that big?

I gasp, finally, and the sound is wet and small.

My limbs unfreeze, and I scramble upright, clutching the duvet to my chest like a shield.

Fumbling for my phone, I swipe at the screen until the flashlight app ignites with a cold, artificial glare.

I swing it toward the doorway, but there is nothing.

Only my own trembling hand, the soft beige of the hallway walls.

For a moment, I sit there, afraid to breathe too loudly in case it draws the thing back.

I tell myself that this is a trick of the mind, a byproduct of stress and exhaustion and a day spent reading too many dead languages in the archives.

But I know what I saw. I know it the way I know the taste of my own blood, or the sound of my father’s voice.

“Fuck,” I whisper, my first word of the night.

The protocol is simple. Don’t panic. Don’t call for help unless you have proof.

Don’t leave the room. I listen for footsteps, for the sound of a window sliding open, for the metallic click of the building’s main entry.

There is nothing. Only my own pulse, the blood in my ears, the memory of that terrible, watching gaze.

Forcing my legs to work, one after another onto the floor, slowly, feeling every ounce of my body in the process.

My legs are unsteady, but I force them to move.

I sweep the beam of light across every corner—beneath the bed, the closet, the long line of bookshelves.

The penthouse is large, and every angle is familiar to me, mapped by a year of careful nesting, but it’s an open concept.

There are no hiding places, not really, except the bathroom or the pantry, both of which have doors that creak even louder than the hallway boards.

I check them anyway. Bathroom: empty. Pantry: nothing but instant noodles and stale rice cakes. I check the balcony, even though it is twenty stories up and the doors are locked with a key only I possess. I check the front door. It’s unlocked.

What the fuck?

No evidence of forced entry. No sign of anything amiss. My hand trembles as I lock the door and lean against it.

I must have forgotten to lock, that’s all. No one was here.

Except for the fact that I am here, in the middle of my own life, and I know with a certainty that someone was watching me sleep.

I go back to my room. I stand in the doorway and look at the dent in the mattress where my body was, the discarded blanket, the phone still clutched in my left hand.

I check the time—04:06—and feel a sick, childish pride that I survived the encounter without crying.

I sit on the bed, knees drawn up, and stare at the spot in the hallway where the shadow stood.

My skin prickles with goosebumps. I run my hands over my arms, soothing the hair flat, but it rises again.

I am not brave, not in the way my father was, but I have always known how to weather the aftermath.

He would have pulled out a gun and fired, but not me.

I was a pacifist. My breathing slows. My mind sifts through explanations—night terror, lack of sleep, the stress of mourning.

But none of these are true. I saw what I saw, and it saw me.

I check the locks on the windows and the door again.

I take inventory of my defenses… a small kitchen knife in the drawer, a can of hairspray I once read could be used as a weapon.

I line them up on the bedside table, because the performance of safety is sometimes the only thing that keeps the monsters away.

When I finally lay down, I don’t close my eyes. I watch the doorway, waiting for the shadow to return.

It doesn’t.

But I know, with the clarity that comes only at this time in the morning, that it will. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. But it will.

And next time, I will be ready.

When the sun finally drags itself over the Sandton skyline, I am still awake.

My body is leaden, heavy with the kind of fatigue that feels like a punishment.

I haven’t slept, not really. I watched the doorway for hours, waiting for the return of the watcher, until my eyelids betrayed me and I slipped into something like unconsciousness, a limbo where I dreamed I was awake and awake I was dreaming.

I don’t know when I stop pretending. But I do know exactly the moment my morning becomes a new kind of nightmare.

There is a flower on my nightstand.

At first I think it’s the one from my car—the pale blue-and-yellow wildflower, petals soft as apology.

I told myself I’d put it in water, but never did.

Except I left that one in the kitchen, in an old jam jar, and this one is fresh.

It’s also a white carnation, which happens to be my favorite flower.

My first reaction is denial. I rub my eyes, thinking I am still in the dream, but the bloom remains.

A single stem, almost luminous in the morning light, resting across the top of my battered paperback.

Right beside it: a piece of paper, lined and torn from a notebook.

A note. The handwriting is savage, a scrawl that digs deep into the paper.

I don’t touch it right away. I stare, trying to reconstruct the night. Did I leave the window open? Did I miss a hiding place, a crawlspace, a blind spot? I think of the shape in the doorway, and the memory makes my pulse stutter, my mouth go dry.

After a full minute, maybe longer, I reach for the note. My fingers tremble, a ridiculous, useless quaver, like I’m some waif in a Victorian novel. But I read it. I read it three times before it even makes sense:

"You’re mine, little fox, and you look like a whole fucking meal. Get ready, I’m coming back for you."

My first instinct is to laugh. The line is so over-the-top, so cartoonishly sinister, that for a second I think it must be a prank. But the handwriting is real, and the flower is still staring at me, and the ice that settles in my gut is too familiar to be anything but the truth.

I want to scream, or at least call someone.

But I don’t. Instead, I stare at the note.

The handwriting is clunky, but still elegant somehow.

As if the writer actually took the time to try and make it look neat.

I imagine the hand that wrote it—big, maybe, or scarred, or trembling with the same adrenaline that’s now poisoning my own bloodstream.

I try to picture the watcher in the hallway, hunched over a table, tongue pressed to lip as he writes.

A part of me is sickened. Another part is… not.

It’s not that I like being hunted, but there is a perverse comfort in being noticed. I am seen, even if it’s through the lens of a predator. There is a power in it, the way you can’t look away from a car crash, or the way a child presses a bruise to see if it still hurts.

The word meal echoes in my head. I am not thin, never have been, and the world has been kind enough to remind me of it at every opportunity.

But this is different. The hunger implied is not an insult.

It’s a promise. A hunger for me, not just a body but my body, as it is.

The thought is revolting, but also—God help me—a little bit thrilling.