Page 5 of Alan

“Must we waste time this way?” she sighed as she advanced on me.

I scurried backward, still sitting, hands and feet moving as fast as I could get them to move. This couldn’t be happening.

“It is rather tiresome,” a voice behind me agreed. “Simply check the back of her neck, and we can be finished with this.”

“Wait, wait!” I threw a jab with my elbow, with my knee, anything to keep them from touching me. But it did nothing. I might as well have been fighting a brick wall. The redhead hauled me to my knees while the blonde pushed down on the back of my head until my neck was exposed.

“Damn it.” I lifted my head in time to see the blonde shaking hers.

“She’s not the one, after all,” the redhead lamented.

“What do we do now?” one of them asked.

The leader stood in front of me, glowering. “And we were so certain. This will anger Selene.”

The redhead still held onto my shoulders, keeping me on my knees. I was too terrified to fight—and it would’ve been pointless. Her hands were like steel bands. “What should be done with her, then? We cannot let her go.”

That shook me out of my silence. “Wait. What the hell are you people talking about? I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you. What do you mean, you can’t let me go? What are you going to do to me?”

They would kill me. I was never so sure of anything in my life as I was sure right then that they would kill me. I would die there in the middle of the woods, and no one would ever know.

Kiera was the only one who would’ve cared, and I doubted by then that she was even alive.

“Take care of her,” the leader muttered, turning her back.

A strange sense of peace came over me then. Not panic, not anger over missing out on the rest of my life. Just peace.

And then I realized it was because one of them had done something to me without touching me. I couldn’t move.

I was breathing. I could see. But I couldn’t move an inch. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream.

“Come. Selene will wish to know what came of our search.” The leader’s icy green eyes met mine. “Why did you have to be here?”

Funny. I was just asking myself the same question.

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