Manx- Kid Intro

The boy in the car looked close to death—or beyond death. His face was lunar in its paleness, except for the hollows of his eyes, which were bruise-colored. Black, poisoned veins crawled beneath his skin, as if his arteries were filled with ink, not blood, and erupted in sick branches at the corners of his mouth and eyes and in his temples. His hair was the color of frost on a windowpane.

  He blinked. His eyes were shiny and curious, the one part of him that seemed fully alive.

  He exhaled: white smoke. As if he stood in a freezer.

  “Who are you?” he asked. Each word was a new puff of white vapor. “You shouldn’t be here.”
...

  She reached over the back of the driver’s seat, into the rear compartment.

  He looked into her palm for a moment, his gaze thoughtful, as if he were attempting to read her future, or as if she had offered him a chocolate and he was trying to decide whether he wanted it. That was the wrong way for a kidnapped child to react, and she knew it, but she still didn’t pull her hand back in time.

  He gripped her wrist, and she screamed at his touch. His hand, blazing against her skin, was as bad as pressing her wrist to a hot frying pan. It took her an instant to register the sensation not as heat but as cold.
...

  “Let go! You’re hurting me,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  When he smiled, she saw that his mouth was full of little hooks, rows of them, each as small and delicate as a sewing needle. The rows of them seemed to go all the way down his throat. The horn sounded again.

  The boy raised his voice and shouted, “Mr. Manx! Mr. Manx, I caught a girl! Mr. Manx, come see!”

  Vic braced a foot against the driver’s seat and threw herself backward, thrusting hard with her leg. The boy was yanked forward. She didn’t think he was going to let go—his hand felt as if it were fused to her wrist, his skin frozen to hers. But when she drew her hand back across the rear divider, into the front seat, he released her. She fell back into the steering wheel, and the horn went off again. Her fault this time.
...

  Vic shoved the lawn tools off her. When she was on her knees, she looked at her wrist. It was hideous, a black burn in the rough shape of a child’s hand.

- Sleigh House: The Other End of the Bridge