by Angela Foxxe
“Is that why?”
“Why, what?”
“Torrance, he…” I couldn’t make myself say the words.
“You saw something, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sort of. I-I don’t know how to say it.”
She laughed a little. “You saw him change, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” I whispered the word. I was finally admitting it. Saying the word aloud, the reason why I had flown into the night and gotten myself into this mess. It wasn’t going to be easy to understand it all.
“That’s why you ran?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve grown up around shifters. I’m afraid I can’t quite understand the fear that you must be feeling, but I’ve seen others who have learned about our world. Most people can never quite adjust.” She thought for a moment before continuing. “I don’t think he wanted you to know. Maybe he was afraid that this was going to happen to you.”
“That I was going to get kidnapped?” I stared at her. “I don’t think that this was in the contract.”
“No, I suppose not.” She laughed at me a little. “You are feisty. I’ll give you that.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t care what you think about me.”
Her eyes glinted for a moment. “You should care about what I think about you. You should care about that very much. Your fate is in my hands young lady, and I choose what happens to you. Don’t you forget that.”
“And what exactly are you planning to do with me?”
“That depends on the child’s father.” She pointed at my stomach.
I scoffed. “This is some sort of ransom?” I stared. “Do you really think that anyone cares about a surrogate to pay out money to get me back? I can be replaced quickly and no one ever has to know that I existed. He isn’t going to pay you.”
“I’m not asking for money.” A sliver of light coursed through a dirty window above me. The sun must be coming up. The beam landed on her face and I could see the scars. She looked like someone had beaten her with a baseball bat that had been studded with nails. Still, through all of the scar tissue, through the broken bones I could see a sort of primitive beauty in her.
The marks only lent their power to her strength. I caught my breath for a moment as I stared. The woman seemed to be pure ferocity as I looked upon her countenance. A jagged scar stretched over her eye and I could tell by the whiteness contained beneath the lid that she must have been blind in that eye. A part of me wanted to ask how a woman not much older than I was, could have scars like that, but I knew better. It wouldn’t be right. I forced myself to stop staring.
“Do I frighten you?”
“No, that’s not it.”
She sneered. I could hear it leaking into her voice. “What is it then, little human?”
“I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful you are.” I figured that paying the woman a compliment couldn’t hurt my case to much.
“You lie, but it doesn’t matter. You just need to sit tight while we negotiate.”
“But what are you going to be asking for?”
“His pack will join ours. They will become lesser, omegas in our presence. If he wants his child back, he will do that. All of his pack’s assets will become ours. We will use his money and his land and he will hunt for us, doing what we need done when we need it done. He’ll stop pandering to the human laws and live among his own people, the way that we’re meant to live.”
“I don’t understand. You’re going to turn him into a servant?”
“Something like that.” With that, she left me alone in my little room. I hugged my knees and tried to wrap my mind around what I had been told. I didn’t quite get why I had managed to get myself dragged into this world. This was not a place that I belonged. I was paralyzed for a while, pacing and worrying, as I tried to decide what it was I was going to do.
Eventually, I pulled myself out of the stupor of fear. It would do me no good to sit around waiting for a rescue that I was certain would never come. No one would give up the kind of life that Torrance had for someone like me. I didn’t think that they would place me in a location that he knew about. I was trapped here and if I wanted to get out, I would have to do it on my own. I rubbed my stomach for a moment. “Don’t worry, little one. I’m going to get you out of here.” I made the promise and hoped that I could keep it.
My stomach growled and I looked around. There was a plate on a small table. I couldn’t tell what was on it and my mind immediately went to poison. If these people were capable of taking a young woman off the street, it would be easy for them to poison me. My knees wobbled a bit. Whatever it was, it smelled good.
My eyes crested the plate, and what I saw shocked me. There was bacon and eggs and toast and hash browns. The second plate held pancakes. It all was on a paper plate that had been covered in plastic. “Poisoned or not, I need to keep my strength up if I’m going to escape.”
While I ate, I tried to remember all of the things that I remembered about werewolves from the movies that I had seen. “Was the full moon out?” I thought while I devoured the pancakes first. Someone had thought to bring me syrup. “No, I don’t think so. They were able to change back and forth.” I started in on the other plate. “Only at night, maybe?” I hadn’t seen any evidence against that fact. The only changing that I had seen had been at night. “Silver?” I didn’t know.
“Well, they’re a little old fashioned, I guess.” I shrugged and stood on the bed, trying to see out of the dirty window above my head. It was a little too high. “Damn it.” I looked around. There was a chair there, but that was not going to work very well. “Too unsteady.” I had started talking to myself to fill the silence.
There wasn’t much to do there, other than try to figure out how to escape. The last thing I wanted was for police to storm this place. They wouldn’t know what to expect here and it would probably end up a massacre. I knew that the scarred woman hadn’t been one of the people that had taken me, so that meant that there were at least eight shifters in the vicinity. I counted them out and tried to remember all of the forms they had taken.
While I did it, I mused about what it meant to be kidnapped by shifters. “What kind of forms. Are they limited to one?” I didn’t know the answer to that, but my mind wandered. Maybe they could take the form of any animal. “Does the mind stay human?” Still I didn’t know. I groaned. There were too many questions forming in my head. I didn’t have the answers to any of them.
I looked back at the plate longingly. I had eaten every bite of it. What I would not give for a bottle of wine, a bubble bath and some of those fancy chocolates I keep stashed in the freezer. I licked my lips. For some reason, I did not think that my captors were going to provide me with the chocolate that had now wedged into my mind.
I knew that it was too early in my pregnancy for cravings, but this was strong. I wanted chocolate. Those little ones with the crispy shell and a hazelnut in the middle. All of it coated in chocolate. “Mmmm.” I looked back over the room, trying to figure out how I was going to look out of the window. That table was taller than the bed.
I started to work. The thought of food was keeping me from freaking out. There was something distracting about pregnancy cravings, if in fact that’s what this was. I didn’t know, but I was thankful for it. Whatever was causing this? Whether or not it was all in my mind, it didn’t matter. It kept the fear at bay. I kept my mind where it needed to be, on escape.
“Psychosomatic? Is that the word? Eh, I don’t know.” I tugged on the bed. It wasn’t much more than a cot and moved easily to the side. I pulled on the table. It was a little bit heavier, but I managed to get it into position.
I can’t say that I did it entirely without noise. The table made horrible scraping and creaking sounds as I pulled it across the floor in fits and spurts, pausing each time it made a sound, to listen to see if anyone was coming. No one seemed to have heard, so I finished out my mission.
I flipped the chair around and used it to climb onto the table,
kicking my empty plates to the side as I did so. I felt a twinge of guilt about the dirty paper dishes clattering to the floor, but scolded myself for it. They had taken me prisoner, after all. A little mess should be the least of my concern. I forced the mess out of my mind and climbed up to the window.
I took a deep breath; well it was more of gulp, actually. I stood on my tiptoes. What was immediately obvious was the fact that I was in a basement. This place seemed to have the classic basement windows, but when I looked through the window, I was confronted by a sight that belonged in my worst nightmares. There was a face staring through at me. A great beast, white and black.
It was a tiger. A tiger that happened to have great scars on its face. She changed before my eyes. I watched with wide eyes as the furry face was replaced by the scarred visage of the same woman who had met me before. So much about my theory that shifters could only change shape at night. The sun was out in full force as she looked at me. “Did you think we wouldn’t notice?” She stared at me. I could not make myself respond. “You made enough noise to wake the dead.”
I gulped. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“You just decided to see if you could escape.” She was grinning. “I thought it would take you longer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I figured that you would see if there was a way out of the room. You are not going to just give up. I’ll give you that. Once you have that baby, I might just give you to my brother. After all, Torrance can’t even get the nerve up to actually find himself a mate.” She was grinning and her teeth looked vicious, even in human form. There was something about the shiny white cutters that made me want to run in fear. I refused to listen to that little voice, however, and decided that I was going to stare her down. “Now be a good girl and climb back down. I’ll send someone down to fix the furniture.”
I followed her orders. I didn’t see much choice. I knew that I was going to be watched more now, but I was not going to stop trying.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Are shifters nocturnal or diurnal?” I asked myself the question as I contemplated my escape. I knew that this wasn’t something that I had a lot of experience in. “Maybe it has something to do with the animal that they can change into.” I thought about and tried to remember everything that I had heard about lions in the past. I tried to figure out what I was going to do, but I didn’t lose hope. There had to be a way out of here. There had to be an escape. I just had to find it. My gut was filled with an ominous feeling. Something was about to happen. I really don’t know how to explain it, but I got the feeling that there was going to be something terrible going on if I didn’t get out of there. I was honestly in fear for my life. I’m sure that was pretty much obvious by the situation that I had found myself in.
I wondered what it would be like to fight a shifter. I wondered if I even stood a chance to do anything about it. The introspection started, the curiosity about exactly what I was capable of doing. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I was missing something. It was just a matter of figuring it out. There was a strangeness that seemed to follow me around, lately. Well, that was an understatement. My life had been bathed in the weird lately and it was not a place that I particularly cared to be. I rubbed my belly and looked around the room, trying to find some way to make some sort of escape. “Don’t worry, baby. You can count on me.”
I could almost hear someone speaking back to me, but I knew that it wasn’t true. “I’ll get you out of here.” Something told me to wait, but I didn’t listen to it. I wasn’t going to wait. I just had to figure out how to get out of this place. I managed to find a light switch and turn it on. I waited, no one came running after me to turn the light back off. I was being given my privacy, and for that, I was grateful. I groaned carefully, my mind racing about what I was going to do. I climbed up onto the bed. I still couldn’t see out of the window..
Instead of searching, I sat down and thought for a while, slowly torturing myself as I wondered exactly how I was going to escape from this little room. I had a chance to look around. The table that I had eaten on the day before was one of those cheap particleboard pieces, the kind that I had in my apartment at home. A fake wood grain was just a sticker on the glued-together sawdust. Something about it made me feel a little more at home, like my tiny apartment was reaching out for me, wanting me to know that I would be safe as long as the discount store furniture was around. I knew it was a lie, but I took a bit of comfort in that feeling. Still, feelings weren’t good enough. There was no way that I could ever be safe in a place like this, being held by these “shifters” who seemed to be led by the woman that had come to me in the darkness earlier.
I remembered the scars on her face, the dangerous beauty that seemed to cover her entire demeanor. I remembered her and the thought of her seemed to invoke some terror deep down in my soul. Somehow, deep inside, I knew what she was capable of, of the danger that she could cause to me if I were to be caught. My mind flashed over the possibilities of my demise, carefully constructing images of my body being mauled by the giant scarred tiger that she shifted to from her human form.
I had watched for the day. I heard more movement during the night than during the day. Perhaps that was because they were more active under the cover of darkness. Still, I couldn’t imagine the kind of ingenuity it would take to get me out of the basement room that I could see myself in. I tried to channel some of my favorite characters from television and movies. These people seemed to have some sort of magical power, the ability to change shape. She had called them shifters.
They said that I was pregnant with a shifter. I didn’t quite understand it. That’s why they had kidnapped me. At least that’s what the crazy woman with the scars had told me, and I pretty much believed her at this point. I had seen too much to discount what I was being told. After all, I had seen Torrance change right before my eyes. That’s why I had fallen into the trap that got me here. Instead of asking questions, I felt the need to run away. That’s what I had done, and it had to be the stupidest thing that I did in my entire life. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty.” I shifted the table again. This time taking extra care to keep things quiet. It didn’t seem like I had alerted anyone. The cot that they had given me to sleep on was shifted easily, the table was a bit heavier, but it gave me the height I needed to see out of the window.
Still the furniture felt unsteady. Something about it just made me want to jump down off the particleboard monstrosity that barely seemed to hold my weight. To be honest, I didn’t expect it to hold me very well. I knew the quality of furniture that I was dealing with and when minimal money is spent on the item, it becomes easy to let quality slip. I had made those decisions before. I could have bought either one good end table or a cheap couch with two cheap end tables. Working on a limited budget at my apartment, it was easy to see which way my decision went.
I shook the musings out of my mind. I needed to focus. I peeked outside. The sky was starting to lighten. I had gotten some sleep, a few dozing hours, never fully letting myself relax. I couldn’t, not in this place. Instead, I peeked out the window. The ground outside seemed quiet, but I knew that I would never fit through there, not really. I needed a better plan. I got back down and carefully placed the furniture back where it belonged. Then I studied my surroundings.
The walls looked like they were made out of cinder blocks, painted white, but they were still cold to the touch. I touched them, my hand taking in the solid coldness. For some reason, it seemed to lend me the strength that seemed to shimmer into being. I could almost feel the power flowing through me, but after a moment, I could tell that it wasn’t coming from the wall. It was coming from the child.
“That’s enough.” I was talking to myself again. I’m pretty sure that it was the first sign of insanity. I fought with myself, wanting to know exactly what I was going to do. I needed some sort of plan. It was time to get to work. I checked the walls; everything seemed to be in order. There were no secret pass
ages that I could find, but I had only seen this sort of thing in movies. It was quiet on the other side of the door, but it was locked. I sighed; there had to be a way out of here, but I had to think about it. It’s not like I had ever been kidnapped before and things like this were just something that I watched in passing on television while I waited for a show I actually wanted to come on.
I groaned, and then heard some shuffling outside of the door. A man walked in. “Do you need anything?”
“I don’t know.” I threw up my hands. “Maybe some food and water.”
“Anything specific? I can get you anything that you want.”
“Chinese.” I knew then what I was going to do. I just had to wait for this man to leave. Once he was gone, I would be able to try to slip out of this little room. He locked the door behind him and I just had to figure out how to get through it. It looked like it was the only exit available.
I couldn’t get through the door. There was no way, it was way too secured. I had to get out of this room. It was time, but there was no way through the door. My only other chance was that window. I studied it carefully, and if I could get up there I could probably squeeze through it.
I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair. There were a thousand things that I needed to figure out, but there wasn’t going to be an opportunity for that. I’m not much for taking crazy risks, but when my life got taken over by the insanity that was my situation, I wasn’t exactly left with much of a choice. I saw two choices for myself—I could either wait for a savior that wasn’t going to come, or I could take the step to save myself. I already knew what I was going to do. I had to do something. It was time to change my fate.
I took a breath. My chest felt like it was shaking. I could feel the fear starting to sting my chest, like I was being stabbed by a thousand needles coated with venom. The world felt like it was slowly falling apart, but the truth was that I kind of liked the adventure. While I would have preferred the adventure to have a little more security behind me, but that wasn’t in the cards for me at that point. Still, I wasn’t going to let that kind of fear shut me down. There wasn’t time for that.