Page 6 of Alan

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Emelie

They carried me through the woods without touching me.

I just sort of… floated upright over the surface of the ground. If I came to a boulder or a log or something, I floated over it rather than hitting it.

It had to be a dream.

Of course! I was dreaming. That was all there was to it. I was back in my crummy little hotel, sleeping on the world’s hardest mattress, dreaming all of this up. Because things like this didn’t happen in real life.

Yes, that was a reassuring thought. I felt a whole lot better when I looked at it that way. More likely that it was a hallucination. Or maybe I did die, for real, and this was all an afterlife thing. It would explain why I couldn’t control my body anymore, and how I could float.

It’s funny how the brain goes crazy, trying to make sense of the nonsensical.

My four captors, whoever they were—witches, badass warrior chicks, I had no idea—walked in front of me. They didn’t even have to watch to make sure I didn’t hit a tree or anything. If I were them, I would’ve at least made sure the girl I had frozen in place and caused to float around the woods didn’t smack a tree, but that was just me.

“Should we have kept her eyes open?” the inked-up redhead asked as she threw me a look over her shoulder.

“It does not matter,” the leader said. “It isn’t as though she’ll be allowed to leave. And if she tried, she would only become hopelessly lost.”

I wouldn’t be allowed to leave. Terrific. They planned on either killing me or holding me hostage for the rest of my life. I wasn’t sure which of the two sounded better.

We arrived at what looked like a cave entrance, though it was pretty much all covered over with vines and crisscrossing branches. Like nobody—nothing—had been in or out in forever.

Until the leader lifted a hand and poof! The overgrowth parted like two curtains, and we continued through to the inside of the cave. All I could do was take this in as I floated behind them. There was no looking around or behind me to see what happened once we were inside. Though I would have bet my life that the curtains closed behind us and everything went back to looking the way it had before.

Along the wall was a row of what looked like wooden clubs, though I could only see them out of the corner of my eye, so the details were a little sketchy. The four of them each took one, and one by one the clubs burst into flame. Torches. Not clubs. Who knew?

Burst into flame. By themselves. Just like that.

It was a miracle I hadn’t peed myself yet.

The craziest part was the nonchalance. They didn’t seem to think there was anything, I don’t know, strange about the fact that they were capable of setting torches on fire with nothing but the force of their minds. Or the way they rendered me speechless and motionless.

This was just another day to them.

Who the hell had I run into?

The torches lit up the cave, which was really nothing more or less than I would’ve expected. Rock walls, dripping with moisture in some spots, craggy and jagged. I wondered how far up they reached but couldn’t look.

All I could see was the blackness in front of us. My heart beat like a drum, to the point where I couldn’t hear anything but the pounding in my ears. Where were we going? What would we find?

And were they right about my getting hopelessly lost in the woods if I ever tried to escape? Because there was no way I was staying in this damp, cold, dark place.

Only it wasn’t so dark anymore. The further we went, the lighter it became. I realized soon that there was more torchlight up ahead, points and points of it. More witches, if that was who had taken control of me? It might have been, I thought. And feared.

Up to this point, I wasn’t exactly a fan of the women who had taken me hostage.

The cave tunnel widened, turned into a room. At least, it looked that way from where I floated. There were torches along the walls, which was what I had seen as we approached. They glowed just as brightly as the ones the women carried, but I noticed there didn’t seem to be any heat coming from them.

“I’m sure she knows we’ve returned by now,” the leader muttered once we reached the middle of the room.

I saw a few more narrow tunnels leading from it, all going in different directions, and from them came even more women in the same black dresses, the same inked skin.

The same hostile looks on their faces.

I counted ten of them in all, including my captors, and they were all just as beautiful and fierce looking as the women who had taken me hostage. What did they have against me? What did I ever do to them?

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