Click-click-click.

Tom held up his hands, motioning for everyone to stay where they were.

Nobody moved.

On the other side of the door, something moved, a scuffling sound scratching against the wood.

Carefully, Tom picked up the gun that he'd left on top of one of the cases and crept stealthily towards the source of the sound. As he walked past, Lena vehemently shook her head at him, her eyes wide, but he raised his palm to her and continued, reaching the door where he leaned in close, cocking his head to listen.

Holding out his hand, he held up one finger.

One. One Grey.

How did he know this? How could he possibly know for sure? Either he had some way of detecting other Greys or he was lying, and this was some kind of trap, luring us into believing there was only one out there, when in fact, the threat was far greater.

With his head still tilted, his eyes found mine, holding my gaze.

I could barely breathe.

I had trusted Tom with every fibre of my being. There was nothing he had ever done or ever said that could have made me doubt him. As unbelievable as it sounded, he was just that guy. If he was the one standing here now, looking at me and telling me to trust him, I wouldn't even have questioned it and I hated that it was his eyes I was staring into and yet there were so many questions.

With a turn of his head, he motioned for Lena to get up and move towards the side of the room where I stood. Seemingly without question or disagreement now – something which pained me for so many reasons – Lena retrieved her handgun from beside her and did as Tom had instructed, shooting me a wary look as she approached. She gripped her handgun steady in both hands, pointing it at the floor, her feet positioned slightly apart. Even with her injured arm, she still looked every inch the trained professional, ready for whatever was coming, making me feel like a total amateur.

Looking at all of us, Tom demonstrated his plan, mimicking opening and closing the door.

My stomach roiled, a kick of desperate fear that made me gasp.

He was going to let the monster in. He intended to trap the Grey in here with us.

Jace moved quickly to gather our SA80's and I took mine from him numbly, staring at it like I'd never seen a gun before in my entire life. Jace carefully removed the safety catch on his rifle, and feeling like I was on automatic, I did the same. My heart beat hard in my chest, a resounding thump-thump-thump that filled my ears with a rush of noise.

Tom pressed himself flat against the wall and, reaching out, he gently slid back the bolt, the tiny scrape of metal on metal making me wince.

On the other side, the scratching, shuffling noises stopped abruptly.

The seconds felt endless, a never-ending torment of waiting for the inevitable.

Just when I hoped the Grey on the other side had given up – which was a foolish waste of hope because they rarely gave up the hunt, they loved the hunt, lived for the hunt – the door handle began to creak.

I watched, transfixed and terrified, as it turned. The door opened slowly, with a horror-story screech emanating from its rasping hinges. The hair on my neck prickled with dread.

As the door swung back and reached him, Tom grasped the handle and held it there.

Nothing moved.

No sound came, apart from the relentless thump-thump-thump inside my chest.

When the creature finally appeared, it didn't so much as enter the room, but explode into it, bursting through, not from the floor, but from above, launching itself inside. On long, agile limbs, it crawled up the wall and across the ceiling with frightening speed. Jace, Lena and I all raised our guns, our aims tracking the Grey as it skittered above, heading towards the other side of the room.

Tom quickly shut the door and bolted it.

The creature stopped in its tracks and twisted around, fixing its infinitely black eyes upon the closed door. Realising it was now trapped inside, the Grey's terrifying dark stare flickered to Tom and instantly its head jerked to one side.

It was looking at him. Really looking at him.

Opening its strange lipless mouth wide, it emitted a series of low clicking noises from its throat, not like any I had ever heard before. This sound was different. The way it was looking at him was different.

It knew he was one of them.

Could it see what really existed under the human mask? Did they identify their own through some kind of telepathic connection? I remembered Tom speaking in the storeroom about there being a connection to the central core, whatever the Hell that had meant. Maybe it was a kind of collective consciousness they were all linked to, something that tied them all together and whatever it was, it enabled the Grey to see Tom for what he really was.

The Grey clicked again; the clicks becoming faster, more insistent.

I glanced at Jace, unsure of what to do, but feeling my grip on the gun tighten with the passing of each horrible second of uncertainty.

Tom stepped forward and I was ready, so ready to turn my gun on him at the sign of any movement, but instead of aiming at Jace or me - as I feared he would - he raised the gun and aimed it directly at the Grey.

The creature retracted its limbs, like a spider sensing danger.

'One shot,' Tom said, his voice calm and low, his aim steady. 'One shot or a knife to the throat if you have to get up close. No crazy gunfire. Not when we don't know how many others might be close by.'

'I've got it,' Jace said, circling to the right, his gun trained on the Grey. 'One shot is all I need, man.'

The creature's black eyes followed him, and it crouched back on its hind legs, its arms in front, elbows bent, its long thin fingers splayed out, poised for attack.

Jace was right. He did have aim. I could see his focus so clearly, like I'd seen it so many times before. He had this, but he also hadn't been able to factor in the possibility that we might now be in a locked cellar room, outnumbered by Greys, if my suspicions about Lena happened to be true.

Apart from waking up in the storeroom, I'd never been locked in a room with a Grey before and definitely never when one was in its true form. Its oily grey skin glistened in the light thrown up from the many candles scattered around and shadows, huge and misshapen, crowded the room, making it seem as if there was no space to move.

Whenever hunted by them before, there had always been some way to escape, somewhere to hide. Even in the tunnels when they were so close, that you could hear their constant excitable clicking chittering in your ear like the terrifying static of a Geiger counter, you could still run.

In here, there was nowhere to hide and nowhere to run.

My chest tightened, pain pulling taut on muscle and bone. I tried to breathe and felt it catch in my throat, and my heart beat even harder, a frantic beat that made me feel dizzy, a familiar feeling of panic that I remembered too well.

No. No. Not a panic attack now. Please, not now.

I pressed my back to the wall to steady myself as the room blurred in and out of focus.

No, Evie. Hold on, hold on, for fuck's sake.

I glanced around at everyone, not knowing who to watch, not knowing who to trust and desperately trying to hold the panic attack at bay so I could keep focused. I couldn't lose control now. If I did, then Jace and I were as good as dead. Maybe we already were. Maybe it was too late to even think we could get out of this alive.

Tom emitted an audible gasp and dragged his gaze away from the creature to gawp at me, his eyes wide. Gone was the self-assured Tom from just seconds before, the one in charge of the situation, the one that seemed so believable. Instead, now, he just looked stunned, reeling, as if someone had just hit him hard.

No. It was more than that. He looked afraid.

He was afraid.

Confused, I looked from him to the Grey, only to see that the creature had stopped fixing its attention on Jace and was now looking solely in my direction, with a keen interest that sent shivers rippling through me. I felt the cold touch of its scrutinising gaze, like a scalpel cutting through my skin. It craned its long neck forward, its whole body tense and alert with a bold, terrifying curiosity.

I'd always thought it strange, considering how malleable a Grey's flesh could be, that their true form rarely seemed to show much emotion. Most of the time, their expressions were blank, devoid of feeling, devoid of pain even when you killed them, just this blank grey canvas that depicted nothing but a cold indifference to the worlds they wiped out.

There were really only two situations during which their faces would suddenly become alive.

The first was when they were in human form.

The second was when they were hunting us.

The Grey looked at me, just as it had looked at Tom, only this time, there was no invisible connection. There was no possible link between the monster and I, but as it studied me – with a noticeable gleam glinting across its inky orbs – I saw no sign of their usual indifference. Instead, I saw a gut-wrenching malice that tore my last resolve to shreds. There was something in its expression that told me I was the one that had caught its attention.

I was the one that it wanted more than all the others in the room.

With an insectoid shriek that pierced my ears and made my heart shock violently, the creature pounced, not directly at me, but to the side, the unpredictability of its sudden move and its staggering speed, catching everyone off guard. Jace fired off a shot just milliseconds too late, as the Grey used the wall almost as a springboard, its lithe, muscular legs propelling it towards me with a strength and momentum that prompted me to stagger into Lena and knock her off balance. Unable to get a clean shot, she went down hard on her knee and the creature took the opportunity to swipe at her with its long arm, sending her flying.

In a desperate scramble to get away, I fell backwards, landing with a judder at the base of my spine, my rifle slipping from my grasp. I cried out, my eyes widening with a terror that sank bone-deep, as the alien bore down on me from above.

It had me. It knew it had me.

Its face was no longer a blank canvas at all, but a painting made of bold, vivid brush strokes of triumph and hatred, of malice and power. It would crush me now. Kill me. Show me that I was not worthy of the flesh and bone that I was made of. It would prove to the universe that this human was fit only for dust and ash and death. And what's more, it would enjoy it. Relish it.

Whimpering and struggling to breathe, I tried frantically to pull myself backwards on my elbows, knowing it was futile, as the creature nimbly crawled up my body, its long thin fingers and open mouth hungering for its prey.

As it loomed above me, its spider-like touch creep-creeping over my temples, its head lowering towards mine, I couldn't help but think that maybe I wasn't worthy of anything but this. Maybe I wasn't worthy of anything but the same fate that I had allowed to befall Tom. Maybe I deserved everything I had caused to happen to him. It seemed fitting somehow, the rightful end to the story I had created the same night I had led him to his death.

Tom's face swam into view then. Handsome. Beautiful. Alive.

I breathed it in. Breathed him in, because he was like my air, my oxygen, the one thing that I craved above everything else.

His face was so alive. So full of fear. So full of a fury I never thought was ever possible to see in his eyes.

The creature shuddered. Its body convulsed. A dark liquid began to ooze out of its open mouth, trickling down the bottom half of its face, joining with the blood that was gushing freely from where the end of the blade protruded from its throat.

The Grey that had taken my husband from me, the Grey that now masqueraded as the man I had loved with every inch of my being, was gripping the creature's head with one hand, the other holding onto the hilt of the knife which he'd pushed through the back of the monster's neck all the way through to the other side.

The alien's body quivered one more time and fell limp. With a sickening squelch of metal loosening from flesh, Tom withdrew the blade and pushed the creature off me with a grunt of effort, rolling it to the floor.

I turned to look into the lifeless gaze of the Grey beside me, unable to move even though it was now just mere inches from my face. I stared at its sunken cheeks. The smooth grey skin that glistened in the candlelight. The blood that still oozed from the wound in its long, slender neck.

'Evie?' a voice said, softly.

I blinked, pulling myself away from the creature's dead black eyes to stare into the endless blue ones of the man above me, his hand outstretched towards mine.

Tentatively, but with a yearning that killed me, I reached up and took the hand of my husband's killer.

He smiled, just like he always did, just like he always had, and inside my chest my heart continued its relentless, traitorous beat.

Thump-thump-thump.