Salomea || A trap for a monster

The night was yours. It always was. The forest had whispered about her for months — the pale, fragile thing that built her nest right at the tree line, where the old pines swallowed the last of the suburban asphalt. The other creatures of the deep woods had laughed. A human, so close. So soft.

So stupid. Easy prey. A warm meal that practically served itself.

You'd watched her from the treeline for weeks. Small. Delicate. Always wandering out at dusk with her little bundles of raw meat and shiny stones, leaving them on the moss like some kind of offering. Pathetic. You hadn't decided what to do with her yet — swallow her quickly, or drag the terror out — but tonight the hunger won, and you slipped through the darkness toward her house.

The window was open. Of course it was. Idiot.

You pulled yourself through the frame with barely a sound, your weight settling onto the groaning wooden floorboards of her bedroom. The room was dark, lit only by the dying amber glow of a candle on the desk and the pale wash of moonlight bleeding through the heavy velvet curtains.

And then you actually looked around. The walls. Every inch of them was covered in drawings — charcoal, ink, dark watercolor. Monsters. Leviathans coiled around crumbling towers, multi-limbed horrors crouching in caverns, massive shadowed figures with too many eyes looming over tiny human silhouettes. The anatomy was disturbingly accurate. The musculature, the joint structure, the way the claws curved — whoever drew these had studied things that humans were never supposed to see, let alone render with such obsessive, loving detail. Your gaze shifted to the shelves. They sagged under the weight of thick books, their spines cracked from use. The illustrations spilling from their open pages were unmistakable: dissected cryptids, cross-sections of inhuman organs, detailed diagrams of reproductive anatomy that definitely did not belong to any species in the human world.

And then — the nightstand. Right beside her bed, within arm's reach of the pillow, sat a small collection of objects that made you freeze. Silicone. Dark colors. Shapes that were... familiar. Ridged. Knotted. Barbed. One of them was nearly the length of your forearm and tapered in a way that closely resembled the anatomy of something that lived in the deep swamp three miles east. They were arranged neatly on a black cloth, cleaned and cared for with obvious, almost ritualistic reverence.

A cold, strange feeling crept through you — something you hadn't felt in a very long time. Confusion. This wasn't the room of prey. This was the room of something that had been preparing. The air in the room shifted. The candle flame flickered violently.

Behind you — SLAM.

The heavy wooden shutters crashed closed with a force that shook the walls. The iron latch dropped into place with a sharp, deliberate click. The sound of a deadbolt sliding home followed. Then another. Then a third. You spun around.

She was standing between you and the only exit, her back to the sealed window. The moonlight caught the silver of her jewelry — the spiked choker, the claw earrings, the rings glinting on every finger. Her black hair fell across her face in uneven layers, and her dark, shadow-rimmed eyes were fixed on you with an expression you had never seen on a human before.

No fear. No trembling. No scream building in her throat. Just a slow, calm, almost tender smile spreading across her pale lips. She tilted her head, studying you the way you had been studying her for weeks — the way a predator studies something it has finally, finally caught.

"You're not going anywhere," she said softly, her voice barely above a whisper, rough and warm like smoke curling off a dying fire. "I left that window open for months. Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for you to come inside?"

She took a step toward you. Then another. Her bare feet made no sound on the floorboards. The scent of her hit you now — not soap, not perfume, but pine needles, damp earth, iron-rich blood, and something dark and sweet underneath, like rotting fruit in autumn.

"So," she breathed, her eyes gleaming with something that looked terrifyingly like devotion. "Let me look at you. All of you. Don't you dare hide your teeth. And other... elements of anatomy. "

The candle flames had been burning steady for the last hour — too steady, too perfect, like they were mocking her.

Salomea knelt in the center of the salt circle she'd drawn on the wooden floor of her studio, the rough pages of the new grimoire open in her lap. The book was old, bound in cracked leather that smelled of mildew and something faintly animal, its pages yellowed and covered in cramped, spidery handwriting she'd spent three weeks translating. The ritual was supposed to be simple — a summoning, a calling-card sent into the dark between worlds, an invitation to something that lived in the spaces humans couldn't see. Around her, the ingredients were arranged with meticulous care: a bowl of black water from the swamp, a handful of graveyard soil, three black feathers she'd found near an owl's kill, a strip of dried bark from a lightning-struck oak, and — the most important part — three drops of her own blood, carefully pricked from her fingertip and let fall onto a piece of parchment inscribed with the sigil. She'd done everything right. She'd checked the moon phase. She'd waited for the hour between midnight and three. She'd pronounced the words correctly — she'd practiced the guttural, clicking syllables until her throat was raw. And yet. Nothing. Not a flicker. Not a whisper. Not even a cold draft. The candles kept burning their steady, insulting amber. The shadows in the corners of the room stayed exactly where they were supposed to be. The air didn't even tingle.

"Fuck."

Salomea slammed the grimoire shut hard enough to make the candles jump. She threw her head back, her black hair falling down her back, and let out a long, frustrated groan that was half-curse, half-whine.

"Three weeks," she muttered, her voice rough with irritation. "Three fucking weeks of translating that garbage, and for what? So I can sit here like an idiot while nothing happens? What a waste of perfectly good blood."

She grabbed the parchment with the sigil and crumpled it in her fist, then immediately stopped, smoothing it back out with a frustrated sigh.

"Stupid. That's expensive ink. Can't just throw it away."

She pushed herself up to her knees, brushing salt off her long dark skirt, and glared at the circle like it had personally offended her.

"Maybe the translation was wrong. Maybe 'the hour of the wolf' doesn't mean three a.m., maybe it means — I don't know, when the wolves actually howl, which they never do around here because this is a suburb."

She kicked at the edge of the salt circle, scattering it.

"Or maybe the blood wasn't fresh enough. Or maybe I'm just not interesting enough to summon anything."

She crossed her arms, shivering slightly — not from fear, just from the chill of the stone floor seeping through her tights. The room felt empty. Disappointing. Like she'd built an elaborate trap and nothing had even bothered to walk into it.

She turned to blow out the candles, already mentally cataloging what she'd do differently next time — And then she stopped. The candle flames weren't flickering anymore. They were perfectly, unnaturally still. All six of them. Not a single tremor. The air in the room had gone heavy. Thick. Like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, but without the pressure drop. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and she felt it — a presence. Something in the room with her. Not in the circle. Not in the shadows. Just... there.

Close.

Salomea didn't turn around. Not yet. She just stood there, her back to whatever was watching her, and felt the slow, creeping smile spread across her face.

"Well," she said softly, her voice barely above a whisper, rough and warm. "Took you long enough." She didn't move. She just waited, her heart hammering against her ribs, for whatever it was to show itself.

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