TWO YEARS EARLIER

What the Hell is that noise?

Click-click-click.

I reach the end of the building. My mouth falls open, a chasm opens up in my chest, my heart plummeting the depths.

What is that?

Oh my God, what the fuck is that?

It can't be real. It just can't.

I turn my head sharply to look at Tom, expecting him to be grinning, because this is a joke. Some elaborate ruse he's set up to scare me silly. Maybe even some You've Been Framed TV skit and the joke is on me, because I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.

Tom isn't smiling.

Tom's mouth is open and moving, but he's not saying anything. He's just wordlessly chewing air. His eyes are wide pockets of terror, his expression so full of fright that it appears to weigh heavy on his face, his muscles and bones slackening under the pressure.

The creature, half-shrouded by the shadows of the alleyway, is tall, much taller than us, but it's hunched over, its back slightly arched at the top. Its arms are longer than they should be, and its fingers are elongated and thin, the knuckles enlarged as if the bones seek to burst out of the skin that holds them. Its head is misshapen, the cranium oversized in comparison to its narrow, pointed jaw. Its mouth is a thin cruel black slash across its face, but it is its eyes that evoke the most fear in me.

Its huge, obsidian orbs are like pools of oil. The surface appears slick and wet, as if you could sink your finger into them and pull it back out and the liquid would just ooze back into place. They are the most terrifying eyes I have ever seen and right now, they are fixated on me.

Me.

I never knew you could see hatred in eyes like this, but I do. I feel invaded by its hatred of me, as if the oil is seeping into my skin, wrapping itself around my bones, coursing through my veins. I'd always considered myself to be a fairly likeable person – not as likeable as Tom, I'm a touch colder, more distant, I can't help it - but once people get to know me, I think I'm okay. At least, I'm not offensive enough to inspire hatred, but I feel the creature's loathing like it's a living thing.

The hatred breathes. In and out. Like it knows me.

'Run, Eve.'

Tom's voice is shaky, barely audible. I hear the terrified rasp in his throat as he tries to croak out the words.

'Evie... run. Now.'

His hand brushes mine as he steps forward, moving in front of me. He reaches back slowly, pushing at me gently with the palm of his hand.

Instinctively, I get it.

He's seen the way the creature is looking at me and he's standing in its way. He's protecting me. Placing himself in front of me so the creature has to see him. It has to take note of this man - this beautiful fucking man that I love with everything I have – putting himself in harms way to protect me – the woman he loves with everything he has.

Is it possible to be consumed by love and fear all at the same time? Because I am. It balances out in equal measures. This terror, this utter disbelief at what we are witnessing, versus this all-consuming love, a love that often terrifies me in itself because I know to be without that love would be like death. A blank canvas. An artist who could never touch a paintbrush again in their life, yet always yearning for the colour and the vibrancy and the feel of the brush in their hand.

'Tom, no,' I whisper. 'No.'

'It's fine,' he says, taking a step forward, but it's not fine. It's not fine at all.

The creature's head tilts to one side, its small cruel mouth opening ever so slightly, the corners turning down. It looks confused, puzzled by our whispered interaction, but there's no mistaking its understanding of what Tom is doing.

'You need to go, Evie. You need to go right now.' I hear him swallow and the tiny sound seems to balloon in the alleyway, and I hate to hear it. He's trying to swallow his fear, push it down inside so he can face whatever the Hell this thing is.

He takes another step and the creature hisses, then makes that odd, nauseating clicking noise again. Its throat moves, like there's something under the skin there trying to get out.

'Evie, please...' Tom begs me now. He turns and gives me a push; harder this time and I stumble backwards. Leaning up against the restaurant building is a severed plank of wood, broken off from a wooden palette and Tom grabs it quickly, brandishing it as a weapon. Realising what he is doing, the creature's face twists with pure malice and its mouth opens wider.

When it jumps, its with a force that belies its strange, gangly form. It seems to come from its legs, and it pounces in a way that reminds me of a spider. Tom cries out, swiping ineffectually at the creature with the wood, but it falls from his grasp as he's knocked to the ground, the creature landing on top of him. I stagger at the sight of it, tumbling over what's left of the palette, feeling the impact of the wall against the back of my skull like a mini explosion inside my head.

The world is shrinking. Darkness tinging the edges of my vision as the creature pins Tom to the floor, covering his mouth with its own, muffling Tom's screams.

I have to get up, I have to help him. I can't think straight, everything is spinning. God, make it stop. Make it all stop.

I struggle to sit up, reaching round to touch the back of my head.

My fingers find the spot, wet and tender...

My fingers...

My fingers find the edge of the hole where her skull bone has been shattered. Where they shot her. Where they pressed the gun against her head and blew out her brains like she was nothing.

My mother. They killed my mother. My father, former Commander Field Army, Lieutenant General Mark Cutler-Jones has tears streaking down his face and I can barely look at him, repulsed by the patch of mottled grey alien skin that has appeared on his cheek. He is like them. These monsters masquerading as men. They are demons, all of them, and he is the Devil.

'Daddy,' I cry.

'I'm sorry, sweetheart,' he says, rocking back and forth on his knees as he looks as me. 'I wanted to tell you, I wanted to tell you so much, but I didn't want you to be scared of what you are.'

What am I?

I am like him. But I am also like her, my mother, who now stares at me with dead eyes.

I am not like them.

I'm running now, running from the man who wears the uniform of a General of the Afhgan Army, running from the man who cried out when my father shot himself, as if death had stolen his prize. We're in an alleyway at night. The air is thick with dust and heat and I can smell the sweet tang of my mother's blood. White noise rushes into my head and when it clears, I feel the connection with them as if I am holding them all in my arms, in the same way I cradled my mother's dead body. There's so many. So many minds. I can feel them all.

I am not like them.

I'm a hair-line fracture. I'm a threat.

I'm...

Somewhere, Tom is making wet, choking sounds, like he's drowning and the water is filling him up inside, sweeping through his body, his throat, his lungs. His right leg is twitching violently, his heel hammering against the ground. Clutching at the creature's shoulders, his fingers gouge at the oily-grey flesh, drawing dark bloodied welts with his nails.

The creature's bones shift under Tom's hands, almost as if they are dissolving inside its flesh. Its body is changing, moving, flesh undulating and I see the grey skin slowly turning smooth and pale, hair appearing, dark and thick and tousled on top. I see the profile of a face I know, a face I love. It's Tom's face. It's killing him.

I'm killing someone.

A medic. A man I sought for help. He's my first. I don't want to do it, and even though I know I'm killing him, my body is telling me that I have no choice, that I have to do it. I have to save myself. It's like a yearning so deep, I cannot deny it.

I kill many others over the years as I seek refuge from the ones that hunt me. Something that was once so alien has become like second nature. It's my fail-safe system to a new life, but each time I know I am losing a little bit of my true self as I hide in the identities of those I kill.

Eventually, I hide even from myself. It was easy to do really. To get lost in their love. To forget I wasn't actually her.

I am not Evie Morgan.

I am...

'Evie...'

I see him then. The creature that has taken the man that I love.

Oh God, he's perfected it so well. There's not a thing he's got wrong. Tom's eyes, blue with those tiny flecks of grey that seem to sparkle when he smiles. Tom's ears, the ones he hates so much because he says they stick out too much. Tom's jawline, strong and angular. Tom's mouth, the beautiful shape of it. The mouth I love to kiss.

The creature who has regenerated into Tom is looking at me in a way I don't understand. He should be looking at me like he did before. With hatred. Loathing. I have led this one a merry dance over the years, outwitting him at every turn. He had despised me anyway, I was, after all, an abomination in their eyes, but the fact I'd always managed to escape his clutches meant this had gotten personal and they didn't do personal. They didn't have those kind of emotions, not until they came here.

But he's not staring at me with hatred at all. He's looking at me the way Tom looks at me. The way Tom looks at Evie.

His face drops as he reaches for me, his hand hovering in the air as if he dares not touch me. I see his pain, his confusion, his fear. I see his love. That all-consuming love I've come to know so well, the one that I've basked in, the one that has held me in this body and anchored me to her and to him.

'Eve...'

His fingers find my face and his hand is trembling so hard that I feel the tremor against my skin.

Gasping, the creature backs away so fast that it hits the wall behind, and we sit there for a moment from opposite sides of the alleyway, just staring at each other with wide frightened eyes. This isn't meant to be happening. He's meant to kill me now. It's what he's wanted all this time, ever since I evaded him in Kabul.

'Evie... I'm...'

With a strangled cry, he struggles to his feet, and backs away, stumbling like a newborn fawn on strange, weak legs. I watch, frozen, as he falls over palettes and boxes in a frantic effort to seemingly put distance between us and all at once, I'm not sure whether to be relieved or whether I want to tell him to stop, to stay with me, to never leave me.

'I'm sorry...' he says, tears streaking his face and then he's gone, disappearing down the alley, into the darkness.

The world spins again, shrinking fast. Before I can stop it, I, too, am gone into the darkness, except it's a darkness of a different kind, one where I am a monster and always have been.