You are still awake when it happens — sprawled on your bed, a familiar ache behind your eyes, the town breathing its slow, ordinary breath outside your window — and so you are the first to notice when the moon vanishes behind a wing.

It is not a cloud.

The thing is glossy black, vast enough to blot out the streetlamp across the way, and it is gliding in low over the rooftops like something out of a story you were never told. Then it screams.

The sound is not a roar. It is closer to a bell cracked down its middle — the kind of noise that makes glass hum in its frames and lampshades quiver. Down the row of identical houses, dogs start howling all at once.

The power dies. Security lights cut out. The town goes dark from end to end.

Heat rolls through your open window, carrying a smell you have never smelled before: scorched metal and something older, like struck flint.

Then it turns, deliberately, and it is looking straight at your house. At you.