[Sarafina POV]
When I woke up, the first thing I felt was… warmth.
Soft. Familiar. Wrong.
My fingers curled instinctively around fabric, the smooth cotton of my blanket. My cheek was pressed against my pillow, the faint scent of lavender detergent drifting up as I inhaled sharply. I sat upright so fast the room spun.
My room. My bed. My sheets. My breathing. Alive.
For a few seconds long, stretching, impossible seconds I couldn't move. I could only stare at my own hands, waiting for the world to correct itself, to glitch, to dissolve, to do anything that would make sense of this. But it didn't.
The early morning light streamed through my window exactly as it always did. Birds sanged faintly. My neighbor's dog barked downstairs. My phone buzzed on the nightstand with some mundane notification. Everything was normal. Except I wasn't.
My chest rose in a panicked breath and I froze. No pain. No blood. No wound.
My fingers flew to my side, searching, pressing, running over skin that should have been shredded open. The memory hit me all at once with brutal clarity: The blade. The cold ground. The world darkening. My heartbeat dying. It wasn't a dream. I knew dreams. Dreams faded at the edges. They lost color. They blurred.
This memory was crisp. Sharp.
Every detail imprinted.
"No," I whispered. "No, no, no…"
My breathing quickened. I stumbled out of bed, nearly tripping on my blanket as I shoved myself toward the mirror on my closet door. I lifted my shirt. My skin was completely unmarked. Not even a bruise.
I stared at my reflection, eyes wide, trembling, pale. My pupils looked too dark. My skin too smooth. My hair was exactly the way it had been yesterday morning. As if last night had never happened. But it had.
I remembered the metallic hum. The men. The blade. The pain. The cold quiet of dying. I gripped the edge of the dresser to steady myself.
"Get a grip," I whispered. "Just… calm down. Think."
But that was the problem, thinking made it worse.
Because no matter how many times I replayed it, no matter how rational I tried to be, I couldn't reach a conclusion that made sense.
Either I had hallucinated being hunted and murdered on my birthday…
…or something impossible had happened. My throat tightened.
I pressed both hands against my face and exhaled shakily. "Okay. Okay. Let's start small."
I checked the time.
6:14 AM.
The same time I usually woke up.
Exactly like a normal morning.
I reached for my phone. Notifications lit up the screen.
Clara:Alive? Or are you hungover and dying?
That word "alive" hit me too hard.
I typed back with shaking fingers,
Me:Alive. I think.
Her reply came instantly.
Clara:Wtf does that mean lol???
I didn't answer. I couldn't. Not when my own brain didn't understand what happened.
I forced myself to go through the motions, shower, teeth, hair. Everything felt off. The water felt warmer than usual against my skin. The sound of the faucet was sharper. My own heartbeat echoed faintly, a steady rhythm I could almost count.
My senses weren't normal. Should I say" heightened"? Adjusted? Or awakened?
As I dried my hair, the faintest vibration stirred under my skin like the hum from last night had curled up somewhere deep inside me and gone quiet, but not gone. It was still there. Waiting. My stomach twisted. What was happening to me?
By the time I left the apartment, the city felt different too.
Not visually, everything looked the same. But the atmosphere had a strange clarity to it. I could hear conversations from across the street as if they were closer. Car engines sounded deeper. Even the wind felt heavier on my skin. I wrapped my jacket tightly around myself as I walked toward the bus stop. Every step felt like walking through a world I recognized but didn't fully belong to anymore.
The memory of the knife. The blood. The cold.
It clung to me like a shadow.
I kept touching my side, half expecting the wound to appear again. It didn't.
When the bus pulled up, I hesitated. Yesterday I'd boarded this bus thinking it was just another day. That everything in my life was predictable, manageable, normal.
Today, everything felt like a lie.
I climbed aboard slowly and took my seat. The hum of the engine vibrated through the floor, and I flinched. Too loud. Too deep.
The morning sunlight reflected off glass buildings, scattering into sharp beams. For a moment, one of the reflections flashed, bright and blinding and the image of the blade slicing toward me flooded back.
My hands trembled. Was I losing my mind?
My brain offered no comfort. Only silence.
At school, the kids' chatter sounded louder than usual, like someone had turned up the volume on the world. I forced myself to smile, forced myself to greet them, forced myself to pretend I wasn't unraveling from the inside.
"Ms. Ainsley?"
One of my students tugged on my sleeve. "Are you okay? You're looking pale."
"I'm fine," I lied. "Just didn't sleep well." Understatement of the century.
The day crawled by in a haze. I taught. I graded. I answered questions. But every few minutes, the faint hum under my skin flickered, like a warning I couldn't interpret.
During lunch, I sat alone in the teacher's lounge, tracing the rim of my coffee cup. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Just once.
Exactly the way the streetlamps had flickered last night, seconds before the men appeared. My heart stopped. No one else in the room reacted. I swallowed hard.
No. No, this wasn't my imagination. Something was happening. Something real. Something connected to last night. To the blade. To the words. To the man who hesitated. To the man who killed me.
My throat tightened. I pressed a hand over my chest.
I died and the memory wasn't fading, wasn't softening, wasn't blurring like a dream.
I remembered the coldness creeping into my limbs. I remembered the world dissolving. I remembered my blood..singing?
And then nothing. Well, until this morning. Alive. Whole. Untouched.
The contradiction made my stomach churn.
When school ended, I stood outside, staring down the street as students ran past me laughing and chatting. Life moved on like nothing had happened. But the world felt tilted. As if something was waiting just out of sight.
As I walked home, a sudden breeze cut across the street and I froze. A sensation washed over me. Not sound, not touch, not sight.
A presence. Faint, distant, watching.
The same one I felt last night. My heart pounded. I scanned the street.
Cars. Shops. People. Normal. Nobody staring. Nobody approaching.
Nobody holding a blade.
But the sensation didn't vanish.
It lingered light as breath on the back of my neck.
I swallowed hard and forced myself to walk faster, refusing to look over my shoulder even though every instinct screamed at me to run. By the time I reached my apartment door, my hands were shaking. I closed the door behind me, locked it, slid down to the floor, and buried my face in my arms.
"What is happening to me?"
The hum inside my blood pulsed once more soft, vibrating, alive.
I wasn't imagining it. I wasn't dreaming.
Something inside me had changed when I died.
And whatever it was, it wasn't done with me yet.