A Different Kind (33 page)

My thoughts grew wild with how much I wanted more of him. I wasn’t sure if it was because his musky cologne was driving me absolutely crazy, because the excitement of the amazing night we already shared, or because my heart was pounding with such raw fervor that it felt as if it could explode.

One minute we were all alone, Gavin’s hands up my shirt, my lips trailing along his neck, and the next he flew off me and disappeared into the darkness.

His scream came out of the darkness somewhere on my left. Horrible raw, gut-wrenching sounds of torture. They streaked right down to the pit of my stomach, releasing an inherent fear unlike anything I had experienced before. I ran blindly to him, screaming his name, tears streaming down my cheeks. A cluster of white smoke tendrils appeared in the distance, curling around the tree trunks and growing like a cancerous weed before sucking inward and disappearing. Everything went silent.

My chest rose and fell hard. I ran to where the white haze had been.

And froze.

He was no more than two hundred feet away, torn as if he had been mauled by a grizzly.

“Gavin?”

His beautiful eyes stared up into the starry sky, dull and lifeless.

“Gavin?”

My knees hit the soggy soil.

He was...

Staring up into the sky.

He was...

“
Gavin
.”

Never to blink again. I remember blood still oozing from his wounds as I numbly pressed my hand to his chest, praying for the murmur of a heartbeat that never came. Blood oozed from between my fingers, saturating his shirt, saturating my hands, saturating the forest.

The police were summoned to the woods with my incoherent 9-1-1 call. Although they found Gavin lifeless in my arms, my sweatshirt and hands smeared with his blood, I still wasn’t ever considered a suspect. For weeks after that night I was repeatedly questioned on what happened, even though I didn’t have much to tell them and never thought of anything more to add. They basically wrote off every oddity I recited about that night, saying I was “in shock”. The details of his death were never released to the public at the request of his mom, and no one ever spoke of it again. Sometimes it feels as if the attack never even happened.

Call me crazy, because pretty much everyone does by now, but I
know
something inhuman killed Gavin. And I know there are sinister beings out there, hiding in the shadows, waiting to feed on humans or rip us to shreds, like the thing that murdered Gavin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L A U R Y N  A P R I L

has been writing all her life. She is currently studying Psychology at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where she also lives and continues to write exploring the intricacies of the adolescent mind; and how feelings of loneliness and judgment affect young adults.

http://laurynapril.blogspot.com