What happened to my parents?
Are they looking for me?
Or were they hurt, too?
I close my eyes tighter and try to remember to breathe. I can’t do anything about it. I can’t stop anything bad from happening to my family. I can’t stop anything bad from happening to Darin.
I need to start breathing before I completely freak out.
The man moves faster, jolting me around as he moves. He’s holding me tightly to his chest, so the movement is minimized, and I wonder why he’s doing this for me. Why is he being gentle and caring? Why is he trying to keep me dry if he’s only going to murder me?
If he’s going
to torture me, it won’t matter if I have pneumonia.
He turns down another alley, and then another. After a few minutes, he ducks inside a building and walks through, then exits through a different door.
“Secret passageway?” I ask quietly, wondering what that was all about.
“Something like that,” he says.
“You don’t want to be followed, do you?” I suddenly realize why he’s taking so long to get us back to his home. “You want your home to be a secret, right?”
He doesn’t say anything, but I just know I’m right, so I settle back in for the rest of the ride.
And then he stops.
“Be very quiet,” he says, and I hear him press a few buttons. Then a door opens. He carries me inside and I keep my eyes closed tightly shut. I don’t really want to know where we are or what kind of torture chamber we’re walking into. If this is the kind of place that ends with me being hurt or killed, I don’t want to know what it looks like. Then I’ll have to deal with being scared on top of being hurt, and that’s not something I’m interested in.
He moves quickly through the building, and after a minute, I forget to be cautious. I open my eyes. Nothing. There’s nothing. I can’t see anything at all. After blinking several times, I realize there’s nothing wrong with my eyesight. The room is simply shrouded in darkness.
“No lights,” I say, and he grunts.
He can see in the dark, then. He has to be able to. That must be it. I don’t know much about where he’s from or what type of extraterrestrial he is, but he’s moving silently through a pitch-black building in the middle of the night and he’s not tripping or falling or bumping into anything.
He can see in the dark.
Definitely.
That’s it.
“How can you see in the dark?” I ask, whispering. I probably shouldn’t be pressing my luck, probably shouldn’t be trying to get information about him. If I was stealing someone, I wouldn’t want to give them any information.
“My eyes are better than yours, human,” he grunts, and I nod silently.
“Can you turn on some lights?” I squeak out. “So I can see, too?”
He doesn’t say anything and for a second, I think he’s going to ignore my request, but then he moves, still carrying me, and I hear him pressing several buttons. Then the lights come on and my jaw drops open.
I can’t believe what I’m looking at.
Chapter 6
Quinn
I can smell the fear radiating off the little human and by the time we get inside the warehouse, she's practically catatonic. Then again, I'm not sure if it's the fear or the cold that's making her shiver. I can tell she's trying hard to calm herself down, trying hard to convince herself her situation isn't that bad.
Unfortunately for her, it is that bad. She should be scared. She ought to be afraid. She was stolen and sold and she has no idea what's going to happen to her. This isn't the time to put on a brave face. This is the time to be petrified.