Shadowlands (Shadowlands (Hyperion)) by Kate Brian

Maybe he just liked to stare. And all I’d do by confronting him was bring more attention to myself and come off like an egotistical idiot in the process.
    So, instead, I turned my back on him and headed up the beach alone, my chin tucked into the high neck of my sweatshirt.
    I’d gone about fifty steps when a gray mist started to swirl around my ankles. My heart skipped a startled beat, and then my feet entirely disappeared from view. The air around me seemed to be moving, curling in and out, undulating. Heart in my throat, I whirled to look back at the fire, but it was nothing more than a dull, glowing ball in the grayness. I couldn’t make out a single face, a single figure. The fog had rolled in and distorted everything.
    I turned around again, feeling utterly disoriented, and quickened my pace. I couldn’t see more than two feet ahead, so I veered right, looking for a landmark. A set of stairs came into view, leading up to one of the houses, but it wasn’t ours.
    The laughter came out of nowhere.
    I froze in my tracks, and a chill sliced down my spine. The sound prickled my ears. It was exactly like the laugh from my nightmares. Exactly like Steven Nell’s.
    “No,” I said under my breath. “No.”
    It came again, closer this time. Cackling. As quietly as I possibly could, I started to run. The sand beneath my feet made me stumble and I reached out, ready to fall, but my hand hit something hard. A scream rose in my throat until I realized it was just a railing. A railing to another set of stairs. I had no clue whether it was our house or a neighbor’s, but at that moment I didn’t care. I tore up the steps, taking them two, three at a time. All that mattered was getting inside. Getting away from him.
    As I reached the top of the stairs, I heard the laugh again. It hovered in the mist, nearly on top of me. I scrambled across the wood planks and found that I was on the deck to our house. After fumbling for the key in my pocket, I managed to slip inside and close the door behind me, turning the lock as fast as I could. The gray fog swirled against the windowpane as I backed away, leaving a wet trail of condensation. Just on the other side of the glass, the mist moved in tiny, bursting pulses. As if someone was out there, standing just inches away from me, breathing slowly in and out. In and out.
    I turned and raced up the stairs to the second floor, my heart pounding in my skull. At the top of the steps I heard a noise and paused, clinging to the wallpapered corner. But this time, it wasn’t laughter. It was something else entirely.
    Taking a breath, I tiptoed across the hall and stood outside the closed door of my father’s bedroom. He let out a sob so pained I felt it inside my heart. My father was in there, alone, crying. Yet another thing I hadn’t heard him do since the day we’d buried my mom.
    I stood there, my hand on the door, and listened. Listened until the fear faded away. Until I started to realize how irrational I’d been. How I must have imagined it all. How I’d let a natural weather phenomenon freak me out to the point of panic. None of that was real. This was real. My father’s pain. His finally breaking down.
    This was real. And as much as it hurt, standing there in the hallway, listening in on his grief, it gave me hope.

After breakfast the next morning, I decided to walk into town and see if I could find a newspaper. There wasn’t a single TV in the house, and I needed to know what was going on with the hunt for Steven Nell. Maybe the cops had found him. Maybe everything was fine and we could go home.
    Just as I put my hand on the knob of the front door, I saw something move in one of the windows across the way.
    “What’re you doing?”
    My hand flew up to cover my heart. “Darcy! You scared me!”
    “Well, why are you standing there frozen?” she asked, looking me up and down from the bottom step like she couldn’t believe she was related to someone so weird. She reached back