Breaking Away (The Man in the Shadows) by Erin M. Truesdale

town called Edina, where the rich folks who ate organic food, ran marathons, and composted their own garbage lived. Why he lived amongst these types of people he didn’t know; he didn’t quite fit in with them. He was a struggling musician who worked at a hardware store in order to pay the bills. He wasn’t thrifty, he didn’t have enough money to buy organic or to buy a crossover hybrid. But his musical ability seemed to help him blend in with his neighbors a little better, and the bonfires he put on each weekend in the summer didn’t hurt, either.
    Chancing his safety in the name of saving time, he blew through several stop signs and took the fastest backroad shortcuts he could think of. In his exhausted state, he narrowly missed hitting a parked car, and he ran over a curb or two, but with every minute that lapsed, he grew nearer to finding out the truth. Soon he could hear the roar of the interstate growing louder, and knew he was almost to his destination. Right before the bridge that arched over the interstate, he took a sharp left and pulled into her apartment complex, a mid 1970s brown brick building, bland and colorless, with a less than stellar upkeep.
    Maika lived on the ground floor, so he jumped the locked metal security fence and ran, in a full on sprint, to her front door. It faced a modest courtyard, which encased many trees and small wild critters, with all the other apartment doors arranged in a circle around the small landscaped area. The birds were singing as the sun rose slowly in the eastern sky as Ethan came upon her door, and before he began to knock feverishly, he stopped to breathe, closing his eyes tightly, his hand frozen in mid air. He needed to compose himself and prepare for the worst. Unlikely as it was, his mind seemed to believe, irrationally and inconsolably, that to top off the horrendous night he’d endured, he would find her in some sort of awful state that was all his fault. He raised his hand to knock on the door and...
    His focus snapped through Maika’s front window, the one just to the left of her front door. Ethan could see her bed through the blinds, and, curiously, she was in it! Not only was she in it, but she was sitting up, and smiling. Squinting in order to see her face clearer, he found that she was pantomiming a conversation with someone. Upon closer inspection, no one was in the room with her to converse with... What was going on? How did she get home?
    Suddenly angry, he knocked on the door and called, “Maika! Let me in. This is important, Darling!!” All of the pain, all of the worry, all of his regret and guilt had been for nothing. Look! She was okay, and she had been completely ignoring him, all of his calls, all of his texts...
    As the words came out of his mouth, she fell back onto her bed, in the same way that a rag doll is dropped to the floor. This startled him, as he’d never seen anyone move quite like that. She dropped like she had been under a hypnotic spell, and the hypnotist amazingly commanded her, ‘Sleep!’ His instincts went on high alert once more, because there had to be something strange going on. This spectacle he had just observed was definitely not normal.
    “Maika!” he called again, this time rapping on the window pane, trying not to panic or become overly aghast by what he had witnessed. “I can see you! Please answer the door, it’s important, Darling!” As still as a statue, Maika laid sprawled upon her bed, as if someone had thrown her there in haste, a marionette thrown away.
    Flabbergasted, Ethan turned away from the window and began to pace the sidewalk that encircled the courtyard. His face flushed a bright red and a frenzy took him over, no longer able to keep it at arms length. It dawned on him then, perhaps the experience of entering the club had done something to her. Ethan’s power to conjure up things in his imagination was one thing, but to make his visions a reality and keep them stable, he needed the Père.
    He