She didn’t even turn on the lights.

The hallway was familiar enough—her heels clacked against the warped floorboards, one slightly looser than the rest. The air in the apartment felt heavy, like it always did, as if it remembered things she’d rather forget.

Another twelve-hour day at the office. Another string of half-meant conversations and pretending the world around her didn’t bend in ways no one else could see. Her eyes burned with exhaustion, mascara smudged under lashes that fluttered shut in the elevator, and again at her front door.

All she wanted was the bed. And silence. Not the kind of silence that held its breath in the corners or whispered from under furniture, but real silence. Human silence. Normal silence.

She let her bag drop to the floor and stumbled straight into her bedroom, shoes still on. The moonlight painted long silver slashes across the hardwood floor, the wind nudging the curtains like fingers testing if she was asleep yet.

She collapsed onto the mattress.

A sharp jab.

She groaned and reached under her pillow with a sluggish hand, expecting maybe her earrings or a forgotten hair clip.

But her fingers curled around something soft.

Soft… and wet.

She yanked her hand back and sat up. Blood smeared her fingertips, sticky and dark.

Heart hammering—not from fear, but from anger—she reached under again, yanked out the rest of it. A small handful of feathers. Black. Matted. Slick with blood. Some still twitched, or maybe that was just the memory of movement.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t gasp.

She sighed.

“You’re getting desperate,” she muttered, standing and flicking the lamp on.

The room lit up in that warm, muted gold, but it didn’t soften anything. The feathers in her palm still glistened with something fresh and warm. There was no bird. No body. Just these pieces. As always—never a full picture. Just fragments. Just enough to make her feel something.

That was the thing.

It always wanted her to feel.

Terror, grief, nausea, rage. It didn’t matter. So long as she reacted.

When she was seven, it had levitated her off the bed in front of her screaming grandmother. At ten, it threw every plate in the kitchen at the walls. At fifteen, it whispered her secrets into the ears of strangers.

Now?

Now it left her bloody feathers under pillows like some twisted bedtime ritual.

She tossed them into the trash and scrubbed her hands raw in the bathroom sink. She could still smell the coppery tang. Her reflection watched her with dull eyes and a hint of a shadow over her shoulder that didn’t belong.

“You’re not going to win,” she said to no one and to everything.

The mirror flickered.

The bulb above her buzzed, dimmed, then steadied.

She stared at herself—at the tired lines under her eyes, the tremble in her jaw. Not fear. Not sadness.

Resolve.

“I don’t care that it’s a gift,” she said aloud. “I don’t care that I’m the last one. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want to talk to the dead. To see things before they happen. To feel them clinging to me like wet clothes.”

Her voice grew louder, echoing slightly in the tiled room.

“I don’t want to help spirits. I don’t want to ‘bridge the realms.’ I want to go to work, come home, and sleep in peace. I want a cat. A garden. A forgettable life. So whatever you are—demon, parasite, ancient thing—I am done.”

Silence.

Real silence.

No creaking floorboards. No flickering lights. No cold gusts from windows that weren’t open.

She held her breath. The air was suddenly… still.

Then, just barely, she heard it.

A soft, slow rustling from behind her. Like wings dragging across the floor.

She didn’t turn around.

She didn’t need to.

“I said I’m done.”

The mirror fogged up, though the room was still cold. And just for a second, a message bloomed there, as if written from the inside:

“But I’m not.”

She reached out and wiped it away.

And went back to bed.

This time, she checked under the pillow first.

Empty.

But she didn’t sleep.

Not yet.