4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
The Missing and the Marked
Some mornings start with coffee. This one starts with questions. Where's Chloe? Where's Cody? Why can't Gladys remember letting the cats out? Luke needs a number she doesn't have—except she does, hidden on a wine bottle she forgot about. Then the smell hits. Blood. Decay. Gone in seconds. But it leaves proof: a dried fingerprint on steel. Something happened in this house. And Gladys slept through it.
The memorial should have been closure. Instead, it's the start of something worse.
Gladys wakes exhausted, fragments of the night slipping through her mind like smoke. One cat returns. One doesn't. The kitchen feels wrong—cold tiles, overflowing glass, a fridge that hums with an odd vibration.
Luke's call is urgent. He needs to reach Cody. Now.
But how do you give someone's number when you've been seeing them for months and never thought to ask? When all you have is a cryptic note on a wine label you almost forgot existed?
Then reality fractures. A smell—thick, metallic, impossible—floods her senses and vanishes just as fast.
Leaving behind a single bloody fingerprint.
Not hers. Not fresh. But there.
The question isn't what happened last night.
It's what came into her house while she was asleep.
