(BLUE'S POV)
THE HOUSE
The front door was gone.
Not broken. Not ripped off its hinges. Gone-as if it had been erased from existence, leaving only a jagged, smoking outline where it used to be. The frame itself was charred black, the wood around it curling inward like the petals of a dying flower, and from somewhere deep inside the house, I could hear the faint, mournful creak of a structure that had been broken and was now slowly giving up.
The windows were shattered. Every single one of them. Glass lay scattered across the porch like fallen stars, catching the last light of the dying sun and throwing it back at me in cruel, glittering fragments. The walls were scorched-long, black streaks climbing up the siding like fingerprints left by something that had crawled straight out of hell. Deep claw marks raked across the front of the house, gouging through the paint and into the wood beneath, four parallel lines that spoke of something enormous and furious and hungry.
