Twin circles flashed in flat white, black, and green on the field of their night vision goggles. The hulking silhouette peered at them from the yawning arch of old blast doors left ajar when one of a matched set had conceded to disrepair and crumpled to the bare concrete floor. The creature was shadow in deepest shadow, cut in stark relief to darkness, sliced through with beams of yellow light petering through shattered windows and the grates halfheartedly erected to keep people just like them out.

Heron had been brought up to fear what should be feared but not to fear herself. This thing was nothing like her.

JL's voice trembled. "It's mapping on the SLS."

Hair stood up in a progressive wave all over Heron's body, shivers ran a marathon down her spine. Everything that was anything primal and alive, from her churning gut to the primeval instincts buried in the vestigial junk code of her DNA told her this was a predator and that this predator considered her its prey.

But in the dark she couldn't quite see it for what it was. These goggles had nothing on its darkness. Where they might otherwise turn night into a facsimile of day, there was nothing to see and yet everything to fear.

"Jaela, it's mapping in front of our eyes." She spoke quietly, too quietly to be heard on most quality directional microphones, not too quietly to be heard by most unearthly things, and Heron knew unearthly things. "We need to go."

JL's body did one thing but her mouth did another. "We can communicate with it," she said even as she shuffled into stagger-step with Heron, back toward the haunting night. This was not a security guard. This was not a prowler or another urban explorer going bump under the stars.

Great wonders lived in darkness but so did great horrors. Here was proof.

As a roll of organza unspools across a dressmarker's sewing table, their watcher unfurled in their direction. It breathed while Heron held her breath. The creature cocked its head–what might have been its head–wide and misshapen, reaching for the eaves like so many ye olde branches. Limbs that were more than limbs scraped at the walls. In creeping movement it dragged itself forward, creaking as old, warping floorboards creaked beneath sneaking children. Scuttling filled their ears. Too much scuttling for a single creature.

Do not look away. Heron knew with unfailing certainty that if she looked away it would devour her. Unhinge its unreal jaw and swallow her into the pit of darkness that lived inside things who devoured all light.

Too many legs for too many eyes, said the voice in her head that counted. That hunted when it needed to devour. That measured the exact distance between where Heron stood and the bottom of the food chain. How far she had to climb to ascend to the very top

Run away, urged her instincts, honed by generations of hardship and predators who looked familiar. This did not look familiar. She lifted her nose to the brisk, stale air. It did not smell familiar. She licked her glossed lips. The taste was earthy and sour. Rank. Zankha. Fetid.

Not dead.

Alive and ready to make that somebody else's problem.

Spores of something intrusive filled her throat and surged up her nose. It made her dizzy. Her vision grew fuzzy, orbs of green light populating her heads-up display, sure as she was they were all in her mind.

JL was narrating, absent commentary of her horror given voice. She was all brain and no survival instincts. Heron was the opposite. Street smart and a smart mouth. That's how they survived. As a unit.

All the stories about surviving creatures great and deathly said to stand still and move slow. Don't make eye contact. Freeze, hands up! Don't breathe. Be respectful. Be good enough and you'll live. Be lucky enough and you might even be happy you did.

The creature stretched itself in every direction, swallowing the cowardly light and the quailing dark.

Without warning, Heron grabbed Jaela by her denim collar and yanked her back the way they came. They didn't need words to warn each other. Run, escape, and don't look back. Not for anything.

Moonlight strobed across their brown skin, their painted nails, and the matching friendship bracelets they'd worn since they were fourteen. They were frayed and gross, grimy with a thousand trips to the playground and the chicken processing plant where JL had worked as she paid her way through mortuary school, the plant nursery where Heron had worked until she realized she hated retail. When all the beautiful growing things she'd tried to nurture had died anyway.

Scuttling crested behind them, a million roaches prowling in some great typhoon, legs whispering like so many crushed leaves, wings flapping, clacking, readying to take flight and land on their exposed skin like so many, well, cockroaches on the prowl, grown restless and tempestuous at the heart of mating season.

Heron stupidly shook her head, slapping at her braids where they brushed her face, obscuring her already impaired vision in the abandoned factory. She hated insects. Bugs. Creepy-crawlies and everything that mimicked them. The very idea of the Mothman made her shudder for its form though she respected its function. 'Woe betide any who encounter me and beware, for tragedy shall surely follow.' She'd had a cousin like that once. Tragedy embodied. In the end, he'd made himself a specter too.

Usually surefooted, she nearly fell. She stumbled into her best friend's back amid a forest of enshrouded paper machines. Jaela's breath was loud as a homing beacon; it drew Heron. It drew that thing too.

Heron shoved Jaela around a pulping vat, tearing through the folds of a ghostly white sheet billowing in an untimely breeze. Instead, it wrapped around her best friend like a spectral embrace. Jaela fell forward, her stringy limbs caught in the very fabric that set Heron free.

"Go, go," she wanted to shout. These adventures had never been about finding something to die for. It had been about finding reasons to live in a town that seemed determined to snuff them and all their history out.

It didn't want for monsters. It had them in ample supply.

Heron ripped at the sheets that felt like the only shield between her best friend and ruin, and death. And whatever they had found when they were looking for ghosts.

The scuttle grew in the distance but Heron didn't care.

Because Jaela had disappeared.