"Helloooo Mom!" I answer in a singsong voice, trying to mask the unease curling in my gut.
"Where are you?" Her voice crackles through the speakers, brittle with panic. "Angela, you need to come home. Right now."
"I'm on my way to Shel's," I say, forcing calm into my voice. "It's just rain, Mom. I'm driving slow."
But the rain isn't normal. It's not just falling—it's slammingagainst the windshield like fists. The wipers, even on max, can't keep up. The world outside is a blur of gray and shadow.
"Sweetheart, please. Don't go to Shel's. Just come home. Something's—"
The light turns green.
I ease into the intersection, glancing both ways. "Mom, I'll be fine. It's not even raining that—"
A black pickup truck explodes through the red light.
Time fractures.
The sound is indescribable. Metal shrieking, glass shattering, bones snapping. My body is weightless, then weightful, then nothing at all. I'm flung sideways, through the passenger window, into the storm.
I hit the ground with a sickening crunch.
Then silence.
I'm standing.
Not lying. Not broken. Standing.
Rain pours through me, not on me. I look down.
There I am.
My body is twisted, half-submerged in a ditch, limbs bent at impossible angles. Blood mixes with mud, forming a dark halo around my head. My eyes are open, but they don't see.
I scream.
"Help! Please, someone help me!"
No one hears. No one looks.
People rush to the other car. The driver, drunk and stumbling, emerges with a gash on his forehead and a bottle of whiskey rolling from the cab. They swarm him. They see him.
But not me.
I run to them, waving, shouting. "I'm here! I'm right here!"
A woman brushes past me—and through me. Cold floods my chest. My hands tremble as I reach for my own face. I feel nothing. I am nothing.
I spin back toward my body. It hasn't moved. The rain pools in the ditch, rising around my legs. Around her legs.
Then I see him.
A figure in a hooded sweater crouched beside my body. He's not helping. He's watching. His head tilts, studying me like a puzzle he is trying to solve.
I step closer, kicking a stone across the wet, slick tar of the road.
His head snaps up.
His eyes, those glacial, ancient eyes, lock onto mine.
He sees me.
Not the broken body in the ditch. Me. The part of me that's still standing, still screaming, still trying to understand.
He doesn't speak. His lips move, but the rain swallows the sound. I step closer, drawn to him like gravity. The closer I get, the more the world around us distorts. The flashing hazard lights blur into streaks of red. The sirens become a low, droning hum, like a funeral dirge played underwater.
He reaches out a hand, not to help, but to touch. His fingers hover just above my chest, and I feel it: a pull, like a thread unraveling from the center of my soul.
"Angelia," he whispers.
I flinch. "That's not my name."
But he only tilts his head, as if I've said something foolish. "It is."
The rain slows. Not stops, slows. Each drop hangs in the air like glass beads, suspended in time. The world freezes, and I'm the only thing still moving.
"What are you?" I ask.
He doesn't answer. Instead, he steps aside, revealing something I hadn't seen before.
A door.
It stands upright in the middle of the road, ancient and rotting, its wood blackened with age and something darker. Symbols are carved into its surface, spirals, eyes, wings, and things I don't recognize. Things that make my stomach twist.
The door is open.
Beyond it, there is no light. No sound. Just a void that pulses like a heartbeat.
"I'm not dead," I whisper.
"You're not alive," he replies.
I turn back to my body. Paramedics are there now, pulling me from the ditch. One of them is shouting. Another is pressing something to my chest. My mother's voice is screaming through the phone, still connected, still echoing from the car's speakers.
I want to run to them. I want to scream that I'm here, that I'm still here.
But my feet won't move.
The man in the hood steps closer. "You've been here before."
"No," I say. "I haven't."
Something is in the air, silent, ancient, and sharp like the edge of prophecy.
"You don't remember. That's part of the curse."
"What curse?"
He gestures to the door. "You were given a name that doesn't belong to you. A life borrowed. A fate delayed."
I shake my head. "You're insane."
"Am I?" he says, and suddenly he's behind me, whispering into my ear. "Or are you just waking up?"
The rain resumes.
But it's not water anymore.
It's ash.
Ash falls like snow, soft and silent, blanketing the wreckage in a pale shroud. The world is still, as if holding its breath.
The hooded man stands beside the door, his eyes dim embers in the gray. He watches me, not with recognition, but with curiosity. Like I'm a question he's never been able to answer.
"You shouldn't be here," he says.
"I didn't ask to be," I snap, the pain in my stomach flaring again. "What is this? What's happening to me?"
He doesn't answer right away. Instead, he steps aside, revealing the door again with the ancient, rotting, and carved symbols that seem to shift when I look too long. The air around it now humming, like a thousand voices whispering just out of reach.
"This gate," his tone was a velvet lure, "was never gorged for you. And yet... it opens now, offering the kiss of release your curse has always denied."
I stare at the door. "What's on the other side?"
"Truth," he says. "Or madness. Sometimes both."
The ache in my stomach deepens, twisting like a knot. I fall to my knees, gasping. The ash clings to my skin, seeping into my pores.
"You were never supposed to be born," he says softly."Your mother hid you. From me. From them."
"From who?"
He kneels beside me. "There are rules. Names that must be written. Lives that must be accounted for. But yours… yours was never recorded."
I look up at him, trembling. "What does that mean?"
"It means you don't belong to this world. Or the next."
The symbols on the door begin to glow, faintly at first, then brighter, like veins of fire running through the wood. The whispers grow louder. I hear fragments of a language I cannot name, yet they awaken in me like a memory I was never meant to forget.
"You are a fracture," he says. "A tear in the fabric. A question the universe cannot answer."
I shake my head, desperation cracking my voice. "No. I'm just a girl. I have a life. Friends. A mother who... who loves me—"
"Who lied to you," he interrupts, his tone neither cruel nor gentle, only inescapable. "Who shattered the laws of life and death to keep you caged in a life you were never meant to live."
The pain in my stomach becomes unbearable. I scream, clutching my side. Something inside me is moving. Shifting.
"You can't stay," he says. "Not like this. The gate is open. It's calling you."
I crawl toward the door, not because I want to, but because I have to. The pull is magnetic, ancient, inevitable.
"What happens to me if I go through?" I whisper.
He doesn't answer.
Instead, he lifts his hands and pushes back the hood. Midnight black hair spills free, dark and gleaming like the endless night sky. For the first time, I see his face, ice blue eyes burning like twin stars in a storm, pulling me toward them even as they chill me to the bone. His features are flawless, unnaturally symmetrical, the kind of beauty that feels like a trap. He looks sculpted from marble and then breathed to life, god-like, dangerous, and devastatingly alluring.
His beauty chills me, flawless and divine, but beneath the terror lies a truth I cannot deny; I have known him, loved him, long before this life.
"You were never meant to belong among them," he murmurs, voice resonant yet fragile.
The door creaks wider. Darkness spills like ink across the pavement, thick with whispers I almost understand. They call my name, not the name my mother gave me, but the one the stars themselves remember.
Some part of me know: once I cross, there will be no turning back.