SHADOWS IN THE BLOOD

SHADOWS IN THE BLOOD
(1935) PRASIT SUWANWEJ'S BODY (Age 19):
(1990) DR. LERT KANCHANAWONG'S POV (Age 26):

The pitch black didn't last long. The gravity didn't just drag me down this time. It literally felt like my skeleton was being ripped out of my skin. My eardrums popped. The darkness warped into a blinding white flash, and the floor just dropped out from under me.

I hit solid stone. I hit it so hard my teeth slammed together, and I bit completely through my bottom lip. Hot, metallic blood flooded my mouth instantly.

I wasn't sitting in a wooden chair anymore. The timeline had grabbed me and shoved me right back into Prasit's body, but it had skipped forward. It was freezing cold. The air was so thick with the rotting smell of old blood, unwashed bodies, and burning camphor that I actually gagged on the floor.

I tried to reach up and grab my throbbing head, but a blinding pain shot through my shoulders. Someone had tied my arms behind my back with thick, coarse hemp rope. It was pulled so tight the rough fibers were slicing straight into the meat of my wrists. My hands were completely numb. I was forced onto my knees.

I blinked the blurriness out of my eyes. I was kneeling dead center in the massive Clan Hall. Standing in a tight circle around me were the elders and shamans of the family. They weren't just looking at me with disgust. They were looking at me the way a butcher looks at a dead pig.

"Don't just snap his neck," one of the old men sneered. He kicked his heavy leather boot directly into my ribs, knocking the wind out of me. "That is too quick for a street rat. We are going to string him up in the courtyard by his wrists. Let the dogs chew on his legs while the whole compound watches him bleed out."

Another elder leaned over and spat a thick wad of phlegm directly onto the side of my face. "Ungrateful filth."

I felt sick. My stomach heaved. What the hell was going on? Why was I tied up on the execution floor? I twisted my head around, scanning the giant room. I just needed to find Thanawin. I held onto this completely pathetic idea that he would step out of the shadows and stop this.

I found him standing near the main altar. Our eyes met.

I looked at his face, and my lungs just stopped working. I didn't know the man looking back at me. The guy from the bathhouse was dead. The man standing by the altar just had these flat, pitch-black eyes. He wasn't going to save me. He looked like he was just waiting for permission to grab a blade and butcher me himself.

I opened my mouth to yell at him. I wanted to know what I did wrong.

But my throat didn't even make a sound before the floor underneath me just broke open.

Rotting, grayish hands shot right out of the solid stone. They smelled like a freshly opened grave. Their fingernails were caked with wet dirt, and they dug those dead nails directly into my windpipe and my chest. They violently yanked me backward, pulling me straight down through the solid floorboards into pitch black.

Then I was just sitting on the floor in a completely different room.

The ropes were gone. My hands were free. But my fingers were submerged in something incredibly hot, wet, and thick.

I looked down at my lap. My hands were completely coated in steaming blood. It was stringy and coagulating, dripping off my palms and soaking straight through my trousers.

As Lert, I had seen a lot of blood in the operating room. I had taken lives in my own time. But Prasit's teenage nervous system totally hijacked my brain. My chest seized. I started hyperventilating so fast the room violently spun. My hands were shaking so badly the blood was flying off my fingers and splattering the floor.

The metallic stench of copper was overpowering. I forced my head to turn, trying to figure out what was happening. Just feet away on the floor lay a heavy silver knife. The blade was completely drenched in fresh red.

Right next to it was Thanawin's sister.

My jaw locked so hard my teeth ached. Saengdao was laying flat on her back. Her eyes were bulging out of her skull, staring blankly at the ceiling. Her throat wasn't just cut. It was completely laid open all the way to the spine. Dark, almost black blood was still aggressively bubbling and pooling out of her severed neck, soaking her expensive clothes.

Did I do this? Did Prasit pick up that knife and butcher her while I was blacked out?

I completely lost my mind. I stared at the mutilated corpse of the exact woman I was currently trying to protect in my own timeline. The horror of it clawed at my brain. I wanted to scream. I wanted to violently scrub my hands on my clothes to get the sticky heat off my skin, but my fingers were cramping so badly they wouldn't listen to me.

"What is this?!" I screamed at the empty room. My voice cracked into a pathetic wheeze. I knew the old woman was watching. I knew the shaman was forcing me to sit here and look at this massacre.

Nobody answered. The room was dead quiet. The only sounds were Prasit's frantic, choking gasps and the wet, heavy drip of blood falling off the edge of the silver knife.

Then the wooden door slammed open.

It was so loud I physically jumped. Thanawin was standing right in the doorway. He was completely out of breath. His chest was heaving like he had been sprinting through the house trying to find me.

"Prasit, why are you hiding in here—" he started to ask. He sounded angry, but also worried.

But then he stopped talking.

His eyes dropped from my face, down to my dripping red hands, and then over to the floor. His face drained of all color. He didn't look angry at first. He just looked completely destroyed as his brain registered the silver knife and the gaping, bloody canyon in his sister's neck.

I held my bloody hands up. I wanted to beg him to listen to me. I wanted to tell him I didn't do it.

Thanawin lunged before I could even make a sound.

He didn't look human anymore. His massive hands slammed into my chest so hard my feet actually left the ground. He completely disregarded the heavy furniture behind me. I flew backward, my spine crashing directly into the sharp wooden corner of a heavy storage trunk. A blinding flash of white pain exploded in my ribs. I heard the bone crack. I collapsed onto the floor, choking on my own spit, totally paralyzed.

"Why?!" Thanawin roared.

The sound tore out of his throat like a dying animal. It was a horrifying mix of pure grief and absolute, murderous frenzy. He closed the distance between us in a single second. He grabbed a fistful of my blood-soaked shirt, dragged me up off the ground, and slammed the back of my skull against the wooden floor so hard my vision flashed black.

"I saved you!" he roared right in my face. Spit and tears flew from his face, but his jaw was locked in pure, lethal rage. "I pulled you out of the dirt! I gave you a home and treated you like my own family! And this is what you do?! You butcher my sister?! Say something!"

He didn't even give me a chance to speak. His massive hands wrapped directly around my windpipe. He squeezed.

The pressure was completely crushing. My airway snapped shut. I gagged, my hands flying up to claw desperately at his thick wrists, smearing his sister's blood all over his arms.

Treated you like family.

Hearing him scream that while actively choking the life out of me broke my mind. Was I really just a charity case this entire time? Did the touching in the water just stem from him feeling sorry for a pathetic, stray dog he picked up off the street?

His eyes were completely black. There was no hesitation. No love. No pity. I was staring straight into the face of a monster who was absolutely going to crush my throat until my neck snapped. I choked, kicking my legs violently against the floor, drowning in the crushing weight of a murder I didn't commit, and the terrifying realization that the man I trusted was going to kill me with his bare hands.

The floorboards underneath my spine violently buckled. The entire room shook so hard the bloody silver knife actually skidded across the wood. It felt like the foundation of the house was tearing in half, but Thanawin didn't even blink. His massive hands didn't loosen their grip on my throat. His mouth was wide open, screaming right in my face, but I couldn't hear him anymore. All the sound in the room just completely cut out.

A deafening, heavy static crushed my eardrums. Then the voices came back.

They didn't whisper this time. They were screaming directly into the center of my brain.

Kill him.

It sounded like a dozen people shrieking at the exact same time.

This is your chance. Grab the knife. Do it.

I kicked and thrashed, scratching frantically at Thanawin's thick wrists just trying to suck in one single breath of air. But the grip crushing my windpipe was nothing compared to the sheer, violating terror of those things crawling inside my head.

Then the temperature plummeted. The air turned to literal ice. I watched in absolute horror as a thick, pitch-black sludge started bubbling up straight out of the massive puddle of Saengdao's blood. It steamed and hissed, turning into this dense, rotting smoke that rapidly swallowed the floorboards.

The smoke didn't just float. It started pulling itself up into towering, jagged shapes. They looked like people, but they were completely hollowed out. Just towering masses of freezing ash with huge, gaping holes where their faces should be. Their jaws were stretched all the way down to their chests in silent, agonizing screams.

Thanawin couldn't see them. He just kept choking me, his eyes completely locked onto mine in pure, murderous rage.

But the shadow things drifted right up behind his back.

Long, freezing hands made of dirty smoke reached out from the dark. They wrapped their impossibly long, rotting fingers right around Thanawin's neck and shoulders, completely blanketing him. They leaned over his shoulders, peering down at me with those gaping, faceless holes.

Do it, the voices shrieked inside my skull. He is going to kill you. Pick up the knife and gut him.