• Prologue



    With the moon and stars shrouded in clouds, the night was pitch black. If it weren’t for the man’s headlights, he would have thought he’d gone blind. He was a confident driver, though presently he curled his fingers of both hands around the wheel. He let a sigh out through his nose, listening to the steady patter of rain on his windshield and the smack-smack of the wipers. It was a dreadful night for them to call him back to the office. Something about a hacker getting through their firewalls. It was probably just another thirteen year old kid with too many brains and not enough sense.

    Bored with the steady pattern playing out a never-ending rhythm on his windshield, he leaned forward and poked a button on the radio, then turned the knob. The volume rose, but the music was overlaid with static. He hated static. He hated it almost as much as he hated thirteen year old kids that hacked into the company’s computers and wasted his time. Flipping through all the stations and finding each to be the same as the first, the man gave up and stabbed the power button. He was forced to settle with the steady patter-patter-smack-patter-smack in front of him. He swore it was about to drive him mad.

    No other cars were on the road at this hour. The man was completely alone; no lights were ahead of him, no lights were behind him, and no cars were rushing at him from the other direction. He rolled his neck, stretching his muscles.

    Patter-patter-smack-patter-smack.

    “This is how I will end. Driven to insanity by a little rain,” he muttered crossly to himself, just as his cell phone went off beside him. He reached for it on the passenger seat, but he ended up knocking it father away, and he had to lean even more to the right to reach it. Thankfully the caller hadn’t hung up before the driver wrapped his fingers around the device. He pressed the call button and put the phone to his ear. “Yup.”

    “Eric,” came a woman’s voice from the other end. “We have some issues here. The hacker—“

    The man interrupted her with a startled shout as a black figure suddenly darted out of the trees in front of him. He dropped the phone, wrenched the steering wheel sharply in both hands, and slammed on the brakes, all in the timespan of two seconds. The car screeched to a stop in the middle of the road. Eric clutched the wheel with both hands, knuckles white, and stared straight ahead of him. The only sound was the rain and the windshield wipers, and his own heavy breathing.

    He hardly remembered doing it, but he’d swerved left and then sharply back to the right, and now he faced the opposite direction he’d been driving in. Whatever animal had run out in front of him was still there. It was no more than a black silhouette in his headlights. He wondered why it wasn’t running. Had he hit it?

    Then he heard a faint, muffled voice from his feet, calling his name. Eric reached down, still shaking, and grabbed his phone. His movements were sluggish as he the put the phone to his ear. The second the phone touched his skin, he realized something. The form, which he’d first taken to be an animal of some sort, was a person. As the adrenaline started to wear off, Eric could see that it was alive, and it was on its hands and knees.

    “Eric? Are you there? What’s going on?”

    “I’m going to have to call you back,” Eric said quickly, and pressed the ‘end call’ button. He unbuckled the seat belt, flung open the door, and ran to crouch at the person’s side. “Are you all right?”

    He got no answer. The person crouched with head down and long, wet, tangled hair hiding the face from view. Eric realized the quick, shallow breaths were broken with chokes and sobs.

    “Are you hurt?” he asked again, a little louder this time.

    Again, he received no answer, not right away. He was about to stand and call emergency, when suddenly the person swung up to face him, grabbing his biceps with surprising force. Eric found himself staring down into the dirty, tear-streaked, and utterly terrified face of a young girl with the greenest eyes he’d ever seen.

    “Please,” she pleaded in hardly more than a whisper, her wild eyes boring into his. “Please. I don’t remember.”