Wake Up [semi-closed]

The entire school was still and quiet as a graveyard at this time of night, and she was the ghost haunting the halls, footsteps ringing across the tile for no one to hear. Jane kept her eyes low, just listening to the squeak of her worn out sneakers against the polished floor. They were scuffed, splotched with old stains from old accidents. Sheesh... Clothes weren't so bad. Despite the cliche, blood washed out of the fabric easier than most people expected, at least when you did it right. Shoes were a different story. It wasn't so easy to just pick up a new pair. A pair of some used Mary Janes to fit the old fashioned school uniform, sure, but the closest thing approaching a fashion outlet was the old rundown thrift shop down the road. It wasn't exactly the high peak of fashion for just casual clothing. Formal dresses were the best stock they had, and that time only came around once a year. My own fault, I guess. She should've been more careful where her own clothes were concerned, but she'd never been one to put thought before action.

Splat.

It was just too easy to take that leap. Humans were fragile, bags of blood held stitched together by muscle and bones. Poke them and they spilled everywhere and all over your shoes. She sighed and kept walking, her thumbs hooked into her blazer pockets.

Someone had died.

They'd tried their best to keep it on the down low, but corpses didn't tend to go unnoticed, even in a place like this. Some girl in another house she'd never met. Her name had gone through one ear and out the other as soon as she'd heard it. There were about a dozen different rumors about how she'd bit it, and none of them could agree on a single detail. Murder. Suicide. Accident. Power feedback. In the end, it didn't matter, did it? Dead was dead. It'd piqued her interest, but she was numb to the news.

Just pile on another corpse. This school was full of those kinds of ghosts.

Moonlight filtered through the tall windows, casting long shadows across the floor. Peaceful night to die, wasn't it?

A crash. Glass shattered as something, just a dark shadow, went careening through the window to smack into the wall on the other side. Jane's gasp caught in her throat as she stepped back, reeling, mind racing. A rock? Some kind of animal? What kind of...?!

It took a few moments for her eyes to make out the huddled broken shape slumped against the shadows. "Mrs. Harper...?" Her heart was thumping, thumping, thumping. She could feel her head start to spin, dizzy spells almost sending her toppling to the floor. The guardian's signature ponytail looked like it'd been ripped off her scalp.

Jane swallowed the panic rising in her throat and stepped back, breathing out a ragged whimper.

A shape stepped through the broken window, glass crunching under its boots. The moment it walked in, it was like all the oxygen had flooded out from the room. Would it be right to call it a woman? She was so pale her skin looked sculpted from the moonlight beaming in through the shattered glass, and her hair had faded to a grayish strawberry blonde.

She turned, and two ruby eyes the color of blood peeked out from behind her bangs. Jane couldn't do anything else but stare.

Wind whistled through the gap in the wall, a draft filling the hall. "You have a distasteful stench." Her voice was water. It was ice. Every word tumbled through her like an avalanche. Jane tried to step back, tried to look away, but her stare seemed to lock her in place like a deer in headlights. "I can almost taste the death on you."

Run.

Jane wasn't scared of dying. She wasn't scared of anything.

Run.

But she'd never felt fear like this.

Run.

"The fact that you breathe disgusts me." A silver flash, a hypnotizing twirl in the blood-eyed woman's hands. "Such creatures deserve to suffer."

There had been maybe ten feet between them, but the woman closed that distance in an instant. She spun like a dancer, a whirl of gray and black.

Run.

---

---

"What in...?"

William had to hold back vomit. At first he couldn't make sense of what he was seeing, until he forced himself to look closer through the tears in his eyes.

The corpse was pinned to the wall like a portrait, hanging an inch off the ground, the hilt of a blade reaching out from where the girl's eye had been. A curtain of blood had washed over her face and down her neck, staining her school uniform. Just a child. What kind of strength did it take to pierce a knife through a skull and lodge it so deep into brick and concrete?

A pale shadow stood watching the body swing.

"Such pathetic hubris," the demon murmured. "Death rejects her."

It wasn't a trick of the light. The corpse was twitching, convulsing, every small movement tearing more and more at the frayed eye socket.

He crossed himself and drew his sword.

---

---

Pain.

There wasn't enough conscious thought left in her brain to process words. Pain. All that were left were the basest signals left to her, the most basic signals that flashed throughout her body. Pain. Pain. Pain. She couldn't see. She couldn't think. Pain. Her identity was gone, her memories were gone, everything that made her a person was gone. Pain. Pain Pain. That was all that was left. Pain.

Foreign steel had invaded her body.

Pain.

Life passed her in flashes like a strobe light, but nothing any normal person could recognize as life. Pain. Her organs would restart, flooding sensation back into her body, waves and waves and waves and waves and waves of pain, just for a moment before her body would give up again. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain.

---

---

The demon finally lifted her eyes from the spasming corpse. "This grows tiresome. How many more bodies is your master going to put between us?"

Run. The instinct was burned into every muscle. Run. He had a daughter. He had a son. He had a wife. He had too much in his life to throw away. It wasn't a play. No one would celebrate if he gave his life here, even if to buy a moment of time.

William leveled the sword at the demon across the hall, drawing in a deep breath.

Run.

But he couldn't run.

"Who are you? What do you want?"

"Arrogant kine like you are full of questions. I don't owe answers to mewling animals."

That was it then. There was only one course of action in front of him. William lowered himself down, like a sprinter, as the room began to shift and bubble around him. One step, pushing off, and he shot through the air like a bullet, light as a feather as gravity disappeared. She'd be skewered before she could blink.

Crack.

Spinning.

He was spinning. His limbs splayed at awkward, unnatural angles as he was flung twenty feet down the hallway, gravity slamming back into effect like stone weights in his gut. William hit the ground with a tumble, bouncing across the floor until he crashed into the wall behind him. His vision blurred. The pain hadn't caught up to him yet. It was that instantaneous.

The sword, shattered in two, slid along the floor to rest at his fingertips a few moments later. His arm was bent ninety degrees in the wrong direction.

"Troublesome."

The woman with no name turned without another word and continued down the hallway.

---

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Pain. Pain. Painpain. Pain. PAIN. Pain. Pain. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAINPAINPAINPAIN. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. Pain. PAIN. Pain. Pain. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. Pain. PAIN. Pain. Pain. Pain. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. Pain. Pain. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. PAIN. Pain. PAIN. Pain. PAINpain. PainPAINpainpainPAIN. Pain. Pain. Pain. PAIN. Painpain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. PAIN. PAIN. PAINPAIN
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The blade snapped, still buried in her skull. Her body crumpled to the floor like a sack of bricks.

Just a moment later, it began to twitch again.

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