The call arrives just as the sky rips open.
"Hellooo Mom!" I respond in a singsong voice, attempting to conceal the dread tightening in my stomach.
"Where are you?" Her voice crackles across the speakers, brittle from panic. "Angela, you should return home. Right now."
"I'm on my way to Shel's," I answer, trying to keep my voice quiet. "It's simply raining, Mom. I'm driving slowly."
However, the rain is not usual. It isn't simply falling; it's pounding on the windshield like fists. Even at maximum speed, the wipers cannot keep up. The world outside is a haze of gray and shadows.
"Sweetheart, please." Do not go to Shel's. Just come home. Something's—"
The light goes green.
I ease into the crossroads, glancing both directions. "Mom, I will be alright. It's not even pouring right now—"
A black pickup truck bursts through the red light.
Time fragments.
The sound is indescribable. Metal shrieks, glass shatters, and bones fracture. My body is weightless, weighty, and then nothing at all. I'm thrown sideways into the storm.
Impact. Darkness. Silence.
I'm standing.
I am not lying. Not broken. Standing.
Rain streams through me rather than on me. I look down.
There I am.
My body is twisted, partially submerged in a ditch, with limbs contorted at inconceivable angles. Blood combines with muck, creating a dark halo around my skull. My eyes are open, yet they do not see.
I guess I screamed. Or perhaps I simply open my mouth and nothing comes out.
"Help!" I scream. Nothing comes out.
People run towards the opposite automobile. The driver, inebriated and stumbling, comes from the cab with a gash on his forehead and a bottle of whiskey rolling out. They swarm him. They see him.
But not me.
I rush to them, waving and shouting. "I am here!" "I am right here!"
A woman brushes past and through me. Cold rushes my chest. My hands are trembling as I reach for my face. I don't feel anything. I am nothing.
I turn back toward my body. It has not moved. The rain pools in the ditch and rises around my legs. Around her legs.
Then I saw him.
A person with a hooded sweatshirt crouched beside my body. He isn't helping. He is watching. His head tilts, as if he were trying to solve a paradox.
I move closer, kicking a stone over the wet, slick tar of the road.
His head snaps upward.
His frigid, ancient eyes focus on mine.
He sees me.
He is no longer looking at the broken body lying in the ditch. Me. The part of me that's still standing, yelling, and attempting to comprehend.
Walking slowly toward me, he extends his hand, not to help, but to touch. His fingertips hover just above my chest, and I feel a pull, like a thread unraveling from the core of my being.
"Angelia," he whispers.
I flinch. "That's not my name."
But he only tilts his head, as if I'd said something stupid. "It is."
The rain slows. Not stops, but slows. Each drop floats in the air like glass pearls, suspended in time. The world freezes, and I'm the only thing that moves.
"What are you?" I ask.
He moves back, revealing the door's darkness—an emptiness that pulses like a heartbeat.
It sits standing in the center of the road, aged and rotting; its wood has darkened with age and something worse. The surface is etched with symbols like spirals, eyeballs, wings, and things I don't recognize. Things that make my stomach turn.
The door is open.
Beyond there, there is no light. No sound. It is simply an emptiness that pulses like a heartbeat.
"You're not alive," he states. "Not anymore."
I return to my body. Paramedics are presently dragging me out of the ditch. One of them is shouting. Another is pressing something against my chest. The phone, still connected and reverberating from the car's speakers, carries my mother's voice.
I want to run towards them. I want to scream that I am still here.
But my feet will not move.
The man in the hood moves closer. "You've been here before."
"No," I reply. "I haven't."
Something is in the air, silent, ancient, and as sharp as the edge of prophecy.
"You don't recall. That is part of the curse."
"What curse?"
He motions toward the door. "You were given a name that did not belong to you. A life borrowed. A fate delayed."
I shook my head. "You're insane."
"Am I?" he asks, and then he's behind me, leaning into my ear. "Or are you just waking up?"
The rain resumes.
But it isn't water anymore.
It's ashes.
Ash falls like snow, gentle and silent, covering the ruins in a pale shroud. The world remains motionless, as if holding its breath.
The cloaked man stands near the door, his eyes hazy and gray. He looks at me, not with recognition, but with interest. As if I were a question he could never answer.
"You shouldn't be here," he explains.
"I didn't ask to be," I yelled, the pain in my gut escalating. "What is this?" "What is happening to me?"
He does not respond right away. Instead, he moves aside, displaying the door with the ancient, rotting, and carved symbols that appear to shift when I look too long. The air around it now hums, as if a thousand voices are whispering just out of reach.
His eyes blaze like twin stars. "You're waking up."
"This gate," he said with a velvet seduction, "was never forged for you. And yet... it opens now, promising the kiss of relief that your curse has always denied."
I stare at the door. "What's on the other side?"
"Truth," he declares. "Or madness. Sometimes both.
The pain in my stomach intensifies, twisting like a knot. I drop to my knees, gasping. The ash binds to my skin and seeps into my pores.
"You were never supposed to be born," he whispers softly. "Your mom concealed you. From me. From them."
"From who?"
He knelt near me. "There are rules. Names that need to be written. Lives must be accounted for. But yours was never recorded."
I gaze up at him, trembling. "What does that mean?"
"It signifies you do not belong in this world. Or the next."
The markings on the door begin to light, first faintly, then more brightly, like veins of fire coursing through the wood. The whispers become louder. I hear parts of a language I can't identify, yet they stir in me like a memory I wasn't intended to lose.
"You are a fracture," he explains. "A tear in the fabric. A question that the universe cannot answer."
I shake my head, my voice cracking with desperation. "No. I am just a girl. I've got a life. Friends. A mother who loves me—"
"Who lied to you," he interrupts, his tone neither nasty nor compassionate, but inevitable. "Who shattered the laws of life and death to keep you caged in a life you were never meant to live."
The agony in my stomach has become intolerable. I scream and grab my side. Something inside of me is moving. Shifting.
"You can't stay," he explains. "It is not like this. The gate is open. It's calling you."
I crawl toward the door, not because I want to, but because I need to. The draw is magnetic, ancient, and unavoidable.
"What happens to me if I go through?" I whisper.
He doesn't respond.
Instead, he raises his hands and draws back the hood. His midnight black hair falls loose, dark and shining like the boundless night sky, and for the first time, I see his face. His icy blue eyes were like twin stars amid a blizzard, drawing me in even though they chilled me to the bone. His features are nearly faultless, freakishly symmetrical, and the type of attractiveness that feels like a trap. He had the appearance of having been fashioned from stone and then brought to life by the gods. He was godlike, terrifying, and irresistibly alluring.
His beauty chills me, immaculate and exquisite, yet beyond the dread lies a truth I cannot ignore: I have known him, loved him, long before this life.
"You were never meant to belong among them," he says, his voice booming but weak.
The door creaks wider. Darkness spreads like ink across the sidewalk, accompanied by whispers I nearly comprehend. They call my name, not the one my mother gave me, but the one that the stars recall.
Some part of me knows that once I cross, there is no turning back.