The bullet never hit her.
It stopped mid-air crumbling like ash before it reached her chest.
Rev. Graves stood frozen, eyes wide with terror. "What… are you?"
Elora wasn't breathing. She wasn't blinking. Her body was still, but the room moved around her. Shadows stretched across the walls like claws. The light in the hallway behind Graves flickered violently.
Then she spoke but her voice echoed, layered… as if someone else was speaking through her.
"I didn't ask to be born this way."
A mirror on the far wall shattered. Not from impact but from something inside it. A dark shape, tall and disfigured, stepped forward in the shards, mimicking her every move.
Clara's doppelgänger crawled across the ceiling, upside down, whispering:
"Choose, Elora. You burn… or we all do."
She could feel it. The darkness she thought had followed them home was not separate from her. It was her.
She had brought it because it had never truly left.
Elora looked at her own reflection broken into a thousand pieces across the mirror shards. Each shard showed a different version of herself: innocent… afraid… furious… powerful.
She took a deep breath.
"No," she whispered. "I'm done running."
She stepped toward Clara's crawling form and spoke with a calm so deep it silenced the house.
"You don't control me."
Clara's body contorted. Screamed. Shattered like porcelain. The house groaned, the walls bleeding black smoke.
Rev. Graves dropped his Bible. "You've awakened something. You don't know what you've done..."
"I know exactly what I've done," Elora said, her voice steady now. "I chose myself."
Outside, the fog that had clung to their home for weeks began to lift.
But the sky didn't brighten.
It only turned darker.
Because something ancient… something buried… had been released.
And Elora?
She wasn't running anymore.
She was becoming.