My fingers dug into his wrist, his skin too cold, too thin — like paper stretched over bone. His eyes flickered with something that wasn’t mine, wasn’t human.
“They’ll come,” he rasped again, voice barely a whisper.
“Let them,” I said, and yanked him forward.
The mirror didn’t shatter. It exploded.
The world lurched sideways, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure which one of us was being pulled through. The room twisted, colors bleeding together, sound stretching into a low, vibrating hum.
And then we hit the floor.
I gasped, chest heaving, lungs burning like I’d been underwater. My head pounded. The room was spinning.
But I wasn’t in the room.
I was in the hallway.
My hallway.
The boy was gone.
No, not gone — I was him now.
I looked down. My hands weren’t mine. Smaller. Paler. His.
My throat tightened, panic clawing its way up. I stumbled forward, nearly falling. My legs didn’t feel right — too light, too fast.
I reached for the wall to steady myself. My hand passed through it.
Oh God.
A sound behind me made my heart stop.
Footsteps.
Slow. Heavy. Not human.
I turned, my breath caught in my throat.
The shadows from the mirror weren’t shadows anymore. They were here. Crawling out of the broken glass, dragging themselves into my house. Their faces shifted and blurred, too many mouths, too many eyes — all staring at me.
The closest one tilted its head, the movement sharp and jerky, like a puppet with its strings cut.
It smiled.
And in a voice that wasn’t its own — wasn’t even one voice — it spoke:
The Stranger In My Photos 48 🤔🤔