Hath November
an excerpt

The entire neighborhood would have been wakened by the scream—Samantha’s, not Cathern’s. The overtly-possessed-by-something-not-of-this-world’s-making look that greeted her when Cathern had felt the excruciating warmth of Samantha’s hand on her arm, the deep black of the normally so vaguely brown eyes, had gripped at Samantha’s heart and gut on that whiter than white winter day.

And she had screamed. Not merely because of the soullessness that had seemingly clutched at her with ill-reticulated fingers, but because their nearest neighbor was more than a quarter of a mile away and half deaf. Which is why the neighborhood was not wakened; there were no neighbors around to hear the raw shriek that tore its way up from Samantha’s throat, so desperate to remain buried deep down inside, within the warmth, but pushed further upward and up until its own tenuous grip loosened and it was flung out into the winter white cold where the horror that had given rise to it in the first place surely awaited. With slavering fangs. Or not. This was, after all, just a scream, and screams don’t often tend to concern themselves with too much of anything, least of all slavering fangs.

Samantha also thought, for an instant, about the brief and dramatic life of a scream—born of trauma and fear, only to be snuffed out, invariably to be snuffed out, always to be snuffed out.

Samantha removed her hand from its hovering position above Cathern’s arm. Screw that, she thought. Her eyes shot across to the drinks cabinet, and she reminded herself to quietly remove the bottle of ouzo; only three shots of the liquor, all those many years ago, had driven Samantha into some tunnel in her own mind and left her there in the blackness of the blinding white snow.