I woke up with the feel of cold steel pressed against my cheek. Goosebumps covered my arms, chilling me to the bone. Disoriented, I slowly lifted open my eyes, fluttering against blackness. A musky dampness filled the air, tickling my nose.
I blinked, which to my annoyance didn’t really do much.
There was a heaviness to my lids that made it difficult to keep them open. A fog snared inside my brain. When the cloudiness lifted and my vision finally cleared, I wished for blissful darkness again. Nothing made sense.
What happened to me?
Where was I?
Because I was pretty sure I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. And if this was Oz, where were my ruby red slippers? Had I slipped down a rabbit hole and landed in Wonderland?
All fairytales start with a bump on the head and as I sat up, I was damn sure I had one of those. Cursing, a stinging pain shot through the back of my head and made me gasp. I rubbed the tender spot and got my first glimpse of my surroundings. It wasn’t a palace.
Nothing in a million years would have prepared me for the sight at which greeted me. This was far from a Never Never Land and there weren’t going to be any dwarfs at my rescue. Not in a room this tiny.
I looked around the closet size room wildly, my blue eyes going wide. There was nothing but a metal bed bolted to the floor and a door with thick bands of bars. It was a cell. My stomach knotted unbearably. Stark fear rose in my throat like bile, coating it with pure panic.
Reality descended upon me all at once.
I was trapped.
Captured.
A prisoner.
This was the kind of thing that only happened on CSI. Only happened to other people. Not me. I did not want to make the local news. I was not that girl on the side of the milk carton who’d been abducted, whose mom was frantically going out of her mind with worry.
Mom.
She was going to be beside herself. What would she do without me? I hated having to think about her mourning for me. What she would go through? How long would it take her to notice I was missing? Sometime days went by without us really seeing each other, just a text here and there to make sure I was alive. I knew Devin would take care of her, but it had always been just her and I. She needed me.
I needed her.
Desperately.
Right now I would have given my right arm to see her, just one more time before I left this life, because surely this was the end. I had no plan. No means of escape. No one probably even knew I was missing.
Not true.
Chase.
He would have known something was wrong. I had to believe that he would have felt something. At the very least, he would have sensed that I was no longer near. For the first time, this soulbond meant something more than just a nuisance. It might save me. At least it gave me hope.
I’d barely had time to bask in the glow of being in love with Chase and now…
Would we ever see each other again? I was glad now more than ever that I’d actually had the gumption to tell him how I felt. It had surprised not only him, but me. Picturing his face, his silvery eyes, that impossible smirk, his dark and deadly voice, I missed him miserably.
My chest began to pang from being separated, knowing I was moments away from extreme panic. Memories of the woods, of voices, and the little tabby kitty I’d wanted to save came crashing back like a bad train wreck. I thought back, racking my brain for an explanation. I remembered someone sneaking up behind me. I remembered fighting and thinking if I could just scream Chase’s name, but I’d never gotten the chance.
I had been silenced. After that it was just blank, like a gaping wormhole. There were a few brief seconds where I remembered a nasty, rancid scent.
It must have been chloroform.
That explained the quick and sudden blackout. What kind of sick and crazy person would kidnap me?
Really only one name came to mind. Yet I was still having a difficult time believing that this was real. It was too much of a cowink-a-dink that I just so happened to know a girl who had been missing for year and out-of-the-blue returned. Now her one mission in life was to kill half-demons, moi included.
Deep down I really wanted to believe that the old Emma Travis loved, fought for, was still in there. However, under recent developments, I was going to have to think Chase might have been right all along.
Emma was gone.
And by gone, I meant in the sense that the person she used to be had taken a hike, checked out, gone over the deep end. She was a ticking bomb, a loose cannon, and utterly deranged. This was my professional diagnosis.