Horror

In the southern summer, the air hung heavy with the scent of overripe peaches.
Yet that cloying sweetness couldn't mask the near-frenzied hunger of women crowding Grandma's shop—pushing, shoving, desperate for a slice of peach pie priced at ten thousand dollars.
I never understood why this tiny shop drove countless women into such frenzy, even to their knees, begging.
Until that summer night, when...

Maeve and I dragged a dying animal out of the rain. We thought we were saving a life. Instead, we invited a monster to our door for a blood oath. In my first life, I accepted the oath and died screaming. In the second, Maeve took my place and was skinned alive. This is our third chance.

Married to Declan Hargrove for three years, I kept my past locked away tight. I let no one near Greybell, and I never, ever mentioned the name Calloway.
Until Piper excitedly dug up the "incest scandal" between me and my own brother. The Hargrove family booked their flights that very night, vowing to fly to Greybell and tear my "white-trash" parents to shreds.
I knelt on the carpet, shaking and so...

"Sophie, come out for dinner."
Mom’s voice seeped through the crack of the door.
I walked over to stand behind the door, when my sister Susan suddenly sent me a message.
"Run away right now. Mom’s lost her mind. She’s going to kill you!"
I stared at those words, my heartbeat racing rapidly.
Moments later, my phone vibrated again in my hand.
The exact same message popped up one after another on the...

My mom ran an exclusive underground fertility clinic. Her dark red serum smelled like rotting blood, yet the rich still lined up with massive checks for her "perfect designer embryos."
I’d watch her lock desperate young surrogates into a soundproof room. A few minutes later, the whole floor would shake.
Strangely, when the girls stumbled back out—looking entirely drained and aged by years—they wou...

Sophia and I fought over who would wear that emerald ring to change our fate.
In my first life, I claimed the emerald ring, thinking I would become a billionaire heiress.
That was until late at night, when I accidentally opened that underground iron door and he strangled me to death with a piano wire: "Your pathetic wailing isn't her at all."
Given a second chance, I backed away and let Sophia tak...

In my previous life, my wife was addicted to black market gambling on football, which caused us to lose everything.
To make matters worse, a zombie horde then broke out.
We had no shelter and were quickly torn apart by a horde of frenzied zombies.
After being reborn, she planned to run off with all the money, then dump me and elope with her lover.
What she didn't know was that I had awakened the a...

In my last life, my younger brother made a contract with an S-rank ghost, but it turned out to be completely useless, while I contracted a B-rank ghost, the Starving Ghost, which could not only devour monsters but also consume other awakened humans' ghost servants to evolve.
Under my protection, my family went from scavenging for scraps to living in a luxury mansion inside the government safe zone...

A horrific car crash left me paralyzed.
The doctors said I'd never walk again. With no family left, my Aunt Martha and Uncle Thomas took me to their isolated farmhouse.
They cared for me, promising their treatments would help me walk again. After everything I'd been through, I thought I'd finally found safety.
Until today, when the feeling in my legs suddenly came back—but something told me not to...

My roommate provoked a demon, dragging me into a deadly hunt. Eerie mirror visions and ominous warnings kept coming. Just as I was on the verge of breaking, I discovered my roommate was hiding a shocking secret—and my being hunted was never an accident.

The system told me to do good deeds during the apocalypse.
It also said I should redeem the world with love.
I’ve always been quick to take advice. So I raised my blade and struck down every scum of humanity one by one.
The system went berserk, letting out a shrill roar inside my head:
"Ahhh Host! Why are you killing people?! This is wicked! You’ll get your points deducted!"
I flicked the blood of...

My mother had no medical license, yet wealthy socialites lined up to hand her fat checks.
I often saw her lead those women into the treatment room, where agonizing screams would pierce through the locked door.
But strangely, those same women emerged radiant, as if they'd shed twenty or thirty years overnight, pressing stacks of cash into her hands with tearful gratitude.
What baffled me more was h...

Deep in the Appalachian Mountains, there stands a Gothic manor.

That is where my family lives.

Every twenty years, we invite an "outsider"—a man not of our blood—to be our guest. They all share one thing in common: each is steeped in wickedness.

Ron was the eighteenth. And he was the key to whether I would successfully shed my skin.

He believed he had come only to inherit a fortune.

He did no...

"What kind of sick game are you playing?" my husband, Mark, snapped through the phone.
I stared at my heavy plaster cast and said nothing.
In my previous life, distant relatives brought a bag of cash to my clinic, begging me to bump my cousin up the surgery waitlist. I refused.
By morning, the money vanished.
Security footage showed someone in my scrubs, with my exact face, stealing it.
My colleag...

"You sure dispatch called this... natural causes?" I gripped the steering wheel, staring at the perfect suburban house.
"That's what they said," Gates muttered. The victim's father, Arthur, stood at the door in pressed khakis, weeping.
He swore his daughter, Grace, died in her sleep last night after eating vanilla pudding.
But the moment we stepped inside, a suffocating cocktail of cheap lavender...

Zombies surrounded the city. I charged alone through the quarantine zone and retrieved the vaccine.
All of humanity hailed me as their savior.
But Amy, my superior and fiancée, pushed me aside at the medal ceremony.
"Your hands are covered in blood. Stand back. Why can’t you be more like David?"
"A truly civilized person ought not to even bear the sight of bloodshed."
Just to live up to her defini...

When the apocalypse came, my materialistic ex-girlfriend not only complained that I only knew how to play games, but also conspired with relatives to poison me, cruelly steal my superpower crystal core, and degrade me into a hopeless cripple!
She thought that by taking away my power she could curry favor with the powerful and live a carefree life, but little did she know that not only did I not di...

As the only mute player in this horror game, I thought I was screwed.

Turns out the boss knows sign language.

Thank God! Perfect!

Then he gets everything completely wrong.

I sign "help me," he reads it as "you're hot."

I sign "danger," he thinks I'm saying "I like you."

I sign "get lost," and he goes, "You want me to come closer? Okay."

The worst part? I curse him out in sign language, call...

Siren's Reef only breeds women.
On this isolated island, Henrietta's orphanage takes in all fatherless girls. She raises us until our eighteenth birthday—the night of the "Coral Crowning," an annual coming-of-age ritual that supposedly earns the Sea God's blessing.
My sister Saffron and I are identical twins, raised wearing the exact same face.
But on this island, the same face doesn't spell the s...

I'm a folklorist. Folk traditions are my field.
At first, I thought it was just an ordinary rhyme, a scrap of oral history set to a tune.
"A rag doll in the mire, swinging high up to the sky..."
We all thought it was just a prank.
Until the first person drowned in the bog. Then the second fell from a tower crane. Then the third somehow drowned in a bathtub.
I stared at the black symbol surfacing o...