Chapter 2: Thirteen Candles
Leah didn't believe in birthdays anymore. By thirteen, she believed in much darker things.
The day she was born felt like a distant echo, muffled and foreign, as if it belonged to someone else. Birthdays were a reminder of something lost—something she'd never had the chance to truly understand. She wasn't sure if the absence was her own fault, or if it had been taken from her. Either way, it didn't matter. By the time she was thirteen, she no longer cared about silly things like cake, or presents, or even smiles. People didn't understand her; no one ever had.
She woke early, long before the sun scraped the sky with its pale fingers. Her room, despite the slivers of light creeping in through the blinds, was still wrapped in shadow. The corners of the room were packed with the unseen, the forgotten things she had long ago stopped fearing. Shadows lingered like old friends, familiar and safe in their dark embrace. The rest of the world outside stretched thin and brittle, its pulse weak and fragile. Leah stretched, slow and careful, as if her bones were blades, something sharp that she had to keep hidden—well out of sight.
There would be no celebration today. No balloons or cake. No happy birthday song, not even from her parents, who would likely forget, like they always did. They had never been the kind to remember anything that wasn't on a screen. Their phones, a constant hum in their hands, were the only things that mattered. Leah didn't mind. The quiet, the absence of noise, gave her the space to think. Space to feel the Beast stirring beneath her skin.
It was there, always, like a whisper in the back of her mind, an animal that knew the way the world tasted. And today, it felt particularly hungry.
The morning passed in a haze of routine. Cereal in a chipped bowl, her parents too absorbed in their texts and calls to look her in the eye. It wasn't that they hated her—at least, Leah didn't think they did. They just… forgot. They forgot the way she looked when she woke up. They forgot the way she moved when she walked. They forgot what it was like to have a daughter who didn't smile at their jokes, or ask them about their day. And that was okay. Leah didn't mind. She had her own things to focus on, things far darker than their meaningless chatter.
The school bell rang, and Leah shuffled into the halls like she had done every day for the past year. Everything felt… wrong. The hallways seemed narrower, as if the walls themselves were pressing in on her. The students around her, the ones who laughed and talked in clusters, looked smaller. She walked among them, unnoticed, like a ghost, but not a harmless one. They didn't know she could see their thoughts, feel the warmth of their blood pulsing beneath their skin. It was all she could hear, the constant rhythm of life, so fragile and yet so loud in her ears.
Leah's fingers tingled with the sensation of holding something sharp.
The teachers spoke, droning on about things she didn't care about—things that had no relevance to her world. Algebra, history, biology. Who cared? She could have taught the class if she wanted to, could have shown them the truth in the way their blood thudded, their eyes darted, and their hands trembled when she stared too long.
She could feel it now—the shift in the air when she passed by someone. They'd glance at her, wide-eyed, then quickly turn away, pretending she wasn't there. It made her smile without meaning to. She liked it. The way she could bend the world around her, make it contort and tremble with just a glance.
At lunch, the cafeteria was packed as usual, the buzz of conversations washing over her like a distant hum. She didn't sit at a table, not because she had no friends—she didn't care about friends—but because no one wanted to sit near her.
Except Anna.
Anna was new. She had tried to sit next to Leah once, on the first day of school, with that stupid, hopeful smile that made her look so naive. Leah hadn't spoken to her. She didn't need to. She just looked at Anna, with those cold, glassy eyes of hers.
Anna's expression had changed in an instant. Her smile faltered, and then her cheeks turned white, the kind of pale that only comes when someone realizes they've made a mistake they can't take back. She mumbled an excuse, something about needing to find a friend, and hurried away.
Leah watched her go, but she didn't chase. She didn't have to. The Beast inside her was pleased. It liked the way people could shrink away under her gaze, the way they could sense the hunger she carried without understanding what it was.
That night, the hours felt long. Leah sat cross-legged on the floor of her room, staring at the walls that seemed to close in around her. She reached for the matches beside her bed, the thin cardboard box with the picture of a matchstick girl. Her fingers moved with purpose as she struck one, watching the flame flicker and burn before she let it die on the floor. One match. Two. Three. Each one a tiny flame, a whisper in the dark. She didn't count them out loud. She didn't need to.
By the time she had struck the thirteenth match, the air in the room was thick with smoke, each hiss and crackle like a voice from the shadows, a reminder that something was always watching, always listening.
Leah opened her black notebook—the one with no lines. She had no use for structure. No use for the neatness the world demanded. It was all chaotic, twisted, just like the drawings inside. On the pages were images of things only her mind could conjure: mouths full of nails, spines bent into trees, eyes wide open but empty. Faces twisted in ways they shouldn't be. But none of these were as real as the one she'd drawn last night, the one that haunted her.
A girl, stitched together from shadows and bone. The ink was thick, heavy, like it had weight and substance, even though it was just a drawing.
She labeled it: Me.
And beneath it, in the smallest, sharpest letters, she wrote: I remember everything.
Her fingers trembled as she closed the book, the weight of her own thoughts pressing against her skull like a vice. There was so much she remembered. So much that had been buried beneath layers of lies, of denial. The Beast—the thing that was both a part of her and not—kept whispering its truths in the back of her mind.
But she wasn't ready. Not yet.
Tonight, she wouldn't sleep. She couldn't. The Beast was too loud inside her, the hunger too strong. It wanted to come out, to claw its way free, to rip through her skin and stretch its claws into the world around her.
The wind howled outside, scraping against the windowpane like a warning, but Leah didn't care. She let the wind speak, let it scream and moan outside the house, where no one would hear. She was alone in her thoughts now, alone in the dark.
Soon, she thought. Soon. The day was coming when she would stop pretending. The day when she would let the Beast take over, when she would no longer hide behind masks or games. When the scream she kept locked behind her teeth would tear free and silence everything.
And they would all see.
They would all see what she had become.