Tegan was born and raised in a small town in Illinois by a single mother. Her father had been an older man with an existing family, and he had no interest in getting to know the product of his affair. Her mother later re-married and had another child, Tegan’s little sister, and they lived a comfortable life in the suburbs.
Often overlooked by her peers for her strange features, she was a quiet and studious creature. She found herself envying the lives of other girls her age. She wanted to be like them: confident, happy, beautiful and full of life.
It wasn't until she met a girl named Annie in college that Tegan felt like she was finally living her own story. Annie was like the girls from her hometown, except she saw Tegan. They became fast friends, inseparable as they took on their new lives together as young adults. Tegan was learning she could be herself and everything she wanted, too.
It was one evening that Annie never returned to their dorm from a party that changed Tegan's life forever. A heavy thumping on the door woke Tegan from her sleep; she opened the door two the sight of two officers.
Annie had been found dead at dawn. Murdered. Someone had laid her down outside of a hospital, closed her eyes, covered her with a blanket, and tucked a battered stuffed toy under her arm. Her throat had been torn asunder and her body was drained completely of blood.
It was a sick display of savagery and love.
After intense questioning and searching, there were still no leads as to who killed Annie. Her face was everywhere: on the television, the computer, in the newspaper, on posters around campus– there was nowhere Tegan could go that Annie wasn’t.
Least of all in her mind.
The only way to quell her guilt was to act. She looked into everyone Annie knew, everyone at the party that evening, every person that could have possibly been connected to her. Every lead led to a dead end.
Eventually, Tegan found herself at the warehouse the party had been at. It was void of light and life. Bottles, cans and red cups littered the ground. There was nothing left behind that the cops hadn’t combed over, she knew, but if she followed Annie’s steps, she had to find something. Anything. She walked the same path as Annie would have, imagining herself in Annie’s place that night: party-weary, hot from dancing, the taste of beer on her tongue. The night was alive with potential rather than danger.
A weight slammed onto Tegan, taking her down onto the concrete. She heard screaming, shrieking, and she realized it was coming from her own lungs. Her head was yanked back, and her world bloomed with a pleasure unparalleled. And then darkness.
When Tegan woke in the darkness, hidden safely beneath a stairway, she was covered with a blanket and had a tattered toy resting in the space between her arm and torso. A stuffed doll, long since loved and forgotten by some child. Both it and the blanket were sticky with blood, as were her skin and clothes. But when she felt her throat, there was no wound. Just cold flesh.
“*You lived*,” a voice whispered, thin and soft. If Tegan’s heart had been beating, it may have stopped at that moment.
“*I didn’t think you would. The others didn’t.*”
Tegan’s eyes scanned the darkness as the voice continued, her weak limbs moving over the concrete floor to drag herself out from under the stairs.
It was then that she spotted the pale vision in the dark. A spindly woman with dark hair left in unclean clumps. She looked more ghost than human, and Tegan would learn why in time.
**“My daughter.”**