A fleeting sense of calm washed over her. For the briefest of moments, she could see into the creature’s mind. What stared back at her was very much herself, though the parts she strove so hard to avoid. She saw the pain and frustration, the longing and dread, all of her fear and anger at the injustice of it all. A raging storm of all the negativity she’d harbored as she lay like an invalid, just struggling to stay alive, formed the soul of this horrid beast. The feelings she’d worked so hard to ignore were darker, more cancerous than the diseases that had been trying to kill her all these years. And then she’d come up here, a last chance at happiness, and her body and the treatment had stolen even that from her.

The treatment. The microwave feels.

Somehow that, combined with her frustration and Ryker’s instructions to manifest her thoughts into reality, had birthed a monster. It was the living embodiment of everything she hated about herself and her life. It was finally free, and it was happy here. How many times had she told Andrew she never wanted to leave the cottage? Now the creature wouldn’t let them leave. It couldn’t. Without her near, it would fade away and die.

Kate should have felt a sliver of kinship with it, but all she felt was a hollow space where all of those negative emotions had lived. She’d managed to exorcise the worst parts of herself. If she could only eliminate them entirely.

Just as quickly, the connection was severed. Her vision was filled with the suppurating sores on the creature’s back, her anger welling up as bursting boils on its flesh.

The cottage was well behind them. She wondered if it was finally listening to her and planned to take them both to the lake.

She had a strong feeling her mental commands earlier had been working. But when Nikki attacked her, its sense of self-preservation brought it roaring back. Kate might have accepted her fate at Nikki’s hands, but this creature wasn’t wholly her own. It might have been at one point, but it had changed…grown…since it had been birthed into the world. It wanted to live, and it knew it couldn’t if Nikki snuffed the life from its…its what? Was she a host? A power source? How could she, who could barely stand, be the source of energy for such a massive beast?

Kate tried to find a way back into its mind – her outer mind – but it either wouldn’t let her back in or the bridge between them was crumbling. The longer it lived in the real world, the less it relied on her, growing into its own poisonous persona.

I brought this on us. Please forgive me, God. I killed Ryker and Nikki.