by JB Dutton
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I slept until 11:30 a.m. Guess I was exhausted. The apartment was so empty with just me there. I felt like ass, and despondently ate a bowl of cereal, staring at the kitchen cupboard door that had started the whole effed-up mess. As I munched and crunched, I glanced occasionally at my phone on the table in the hopes that it would ring or buzz with a message.
My friends back in Lancaster were posting the usual crap. School dramas, music links, funny pix... it all felt like it was a million miles away and a thousand years ago.
I drifted back to what Noon had told me about the Embodied. Had they really been on Earth for thousands of years? And if they had, why could I possibly have been so important to them? Kari Marriner, a schoolgirl from Wisconsin. A nobody. No special powers, no hidden identity, no secret destiny.
This wasn’t a fairy tale and I was all-too human. The reality I was living in was that my mother had been kidnapped. Was she even alive? The only person I could really trust in the whole world. The only person who had always been there for me. Would she ever be there again? I picked up my fuzzy bunny I’d carried around with me since before Dad had died and stroked its raggedy ears. But Noon’s revelation that he had also been with me my whole life totally bugged me. Was that the only reason I had all these feelings for him? Because he was some kind of extra-terrestrial stalker?