Some­thing went wrong here, Chapter 2

One week had passed. One week of… Rather pain­ful night­mares, which Hikaru never seemed to escape from unharmed. She was always a witch, always chased by someone and it always ended with the glowy-eyed man. Hikaru tried stay­ing up, but that didn’t work, she got tired and fell asleep any­way. Her brother was wor­ried about her. Haruki tried calm­ing her down by giv­ing her mas­sages, aroma ther­apy and what­so­ever. Noth­ing worked. Abso­lutely nothing.

And all this didn’t con­trib­ute to Hikaru’s school per­form­ances either. But she tried to stay happy and ener­getic. Her friends didn’t seem to notice. Nor did her teach­ers. So she could go on like noth­ing weird was happening.

It was a Monday. Lunch break. Haruki and Joëll were hav­ing an argu­ment about some­thing that related pizza. It made Joëll very flustered, and Haruki was con­stantly laugh­ing about it. Koibito and her boy­friend were still stand­ing in line for lunch, and Hikaru guessed they were dis­cuss­ing some­thing snow-related. She sat alone with her friend, who was shut­ting up for a change, allow­ing Hikaru to take it easy.

And then she noticed.

Yuugi was shut­ting up.

That was unlike him.

“Is there some­thing wrong?”, she asked him, nudging him with his elbow. Yuugi seemed to be spa­cing out a little, but when Hikaru nudged him he snapped out of it. “Oh, no. Just won­der­ing if you had a rough night with someone I don’t know.”, he replied, point­ing at the scratch that was on Hikaru’s left cheek. It left Hikaru speech­less for a while, before she slapped him against the back of his head. “Per­vert!”

Noth­ing was wrong with him after all. She was just see­ing things, because she was so damn tired.

-

She wasn’t run­ning this time. Actu­ally, everything was dif­fer­ent. No run­ning, no wounds on her body, no people chas­ing her.

She sat by a lake. In the moon­light. It was actu­ally a very pleas­ant change. A gentle and warm breeze flowed through the air.

So calm­ing. So beautiful.

Until she tried to move.

“You can’t go. No run­ning anymore.”

It was that guy again. But she didn’t see him. Where was he? What was he?

She felt panic rising within her. But there was noth­ing she could do.

“You are truly beau­ti­ful when calmed down. Too bad you’re a witch and all witches must burn.”

No. Why. And that was creepy, he was say­ing she was beautiful.

She felt some­thing. The wind stopped. It got dark. Man­aging to look down, the some­thing she felt appeared to be a knife.

Against her neck.

“I could make it easier for you.”

Hikaru woke up scream­ing once again.