Introduction

Teller Pricely was born on a dark and stormy night.
No, I’m not kidding. She really was. At precisely three o’clock a.m., on the dot, a teeny tiny baby was brought into this world. Unfortunately, not into a very nice part of this world. And not by particularly nice parents either, if one goes by the current parental standards. And on top of it all, on a dark and stormy night.
Things did not bode well for Teller, even from the beginning.
Her father, a Mr. Civil Pricely, had a job as a bank clerk in the Fileburg-Harcoin Joint Bank of America. He was a balding stump of a man with large eyes set behind larger glasses. He was a shrewd and successful money-maker, and very proud of it. He considered himself to be the epitome of the perfect clerk, aloof and (in his mind) a very dashing intelligent. Cool. Steely. Unafraid of large sums. Etc., etc. Mr. Pricely also had no imagination. And, although he did his best to hide it, he had no appreciation for any scholarly material at all. The only reason that he had been hired as a banker in the first place was because there was only the one bank in Fileburg, and clerks were scarce. He never understood his daughter till his dying days—he named her after his job, after all.
Teller’s mother was named Amanda Pricely. Many regarded her as the most beautiful and successful woman in Fileburg (which was really not that great of an accomplishment). For many years she had worked as an important businesswoman in her father’s corporation. Using her charm (which was great) and her wits (which were not so great), she could sell anything she wished to any company in the world. Of course, as her father owned stocks of every major company in America, this came as small surprise. Tall and willowy despite her disappearing youth, every moment of her waking life was with spent working on her job or working on her appearance. Mrs. Pricely also had trouble understanding Teller as she grew, wondering why she would rather read a book than find a boyfriend.
Teller’s parents often encouraged her to become anything she could be- as long as this included having a money-making job and marrying a money-making husband and making the money-making town of Fileburg proud.
Teller never bought a minute of it.
From the moment she opened her tiny brown eyes, her parents knew that she would be special.
From the moment she spoke her first word- “Paint!”- her parents knew that she would be…different.
From the moment that she chose to go to the library instead of the mall for her birthday, her parents knew that she was just plain weird.
And from the moment that Teller came home on her sixteenth birthday with applications for a year-round art school out of state, Mr. And Mrs. Pricely knew that she would never be accepted in Fileburg.

Now, this behavior may have been encouraged, even embraced, in almost any other town in the country. But in Fileburg, nonconformity was simply not accepted. Art didn’t advance the economy. Books didn’t attract tourists. Being unique didn’t pay the bills. In the end, the only things that got you anywhere in Fileburg were being successful and being just like everybody else.
After that first dark and stormy night of her existence, Teller Pricely endured sixteen long years of dark and stormy nights. But on the twelfth day of the second month after her sixteenth birthday, a singularly ordinary day, her story really begins.



Chapter One
I’m toast.
Now, this wasn’t the first time that I’ve thought this. In fact, normally it’s accompanied by a colorful expletive or two. But today I was feeling especially meek.
Which is probably why they decided to pummel me.
You know how they say that lions and tigers and IRS agents can smell fear? Well, Chuck Harvey and his gang must have some great olfactory senses, because they smelled me out even though I’d decided to be sneaky and use the side door of the school. Now they were closing fast and I had nowhere to go.
I am so toast.
“Hey, freak-o!” Chuck shrieked at me. Freako. The originality just bowls me over.
“Hey, freeeeako!” he yelled again. I didn’t slow down for a second. Maybe if I could make it to the trees, they’d give up and be too lazy to follow me through…
No such luck. One of Chuck’s hunky buddies lumbered up from behind a bush to block my path, a stupid grin on his face. I’m sure he was trying to be intimidating—he ended up looking like he had gas.
“Slow down there, Pricely,” he rumbled, cracking his knuckles ominously.
“You wouldn’t hit a girl, now would you Jason?” I asked, looking at him as if I had the power to cause lightning to strike him down then and there. He looked nervous, but didn’t budge. Chuck’s grunts never really do much other than keep his victims from escaping. Chuck’s the mean one. Dim, albeit mean.
I sighed a mournful sigh and turned to face the two-hundred-plus pounds of doom sauntering towards me.
“Where do you think you’re goin’, Pricely?” he sneered.
“Teller,” I corrected politely. Momentary confusion marred his handsome face.
“I’m Chuck, stupid.” He grinned at this revelation. A few of his buddies even guffawed. Whenever God was handing out brains, these guys were probably playing hooky.
“Yeah. I’m,” I pointed to myself, “going,” I made little walky-legs with my fingers, “home.” I pointed towards my house. I knew by now that no matter how nice I was to Chuck and his buddies, I was going to get crushed. I figured I might as well get a quip in.
Chuck frowned at me. “You think you’re real smart, doncha Pricely? Think you’re special.”
“Sure, Chuck. I’m not going to disagree.”
He ignored me. “Well,” he took a step closer, “I think that you’re just weird. A nobody. And we,” another step, “don’t like weirdoes around here.” He was right on top of me now. “In fact, we hate them. They’re useless. They’re creepy. We need to eliminate them.” He probably stayed up all night looking up that one. “Especially ones who have smart mouths like yours.” Squashed between two jocks. What a way to go.
I decided that I was going down, I might as well go all the way this time.
“Yeah, well Chuck, having a smart mouth sure beats having a dead brain.”
He totally didn’t get it, which made the ensuing punch all the less bearable.
* * *


It wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
I mean, I didn’t end up in the dumpster. They only ripped up my English homework, but I could easily make it up. None of my bones were broken—although I did have a black eye that would have made Rocky proud. At first it seemed way better than it should have been.
Until I spotted my journal up about thirty feet in the branches of a tree.
For a full two minutes I just stood there, looking up at it. Everyone at school had probably seen me with it at some point. It was my only outlet.
Wondering how they got it up there.
It was only a matter of time before Chuck and friends figured out that it was one of my major weaknesses.
Wondering how I would get it down.
I mean, it was just a journal. There are thousands of them, millions, billions. Piles and stacks and heaps of journals to choose from.
Wondering why it had to be me.
Why me? Why me. Why me.
But I didn’t cry. They might be watching.
I couldn’t fool myself. My journal was my life, my best friend, and my admirer. It was the only thing in this crummy little town who accepted me for who I was-no questions asked. My only relief from the screaming monotony around me.
Why me?
I was all set to climb it when the rain began. So I turned and left it getting soggy up there—I didn’t bother to hold in the tears now. They wouldn’t be able to see them in the rain.



Chapter Two
I was sopping wet and chilled to the bone by the time I got home. For a moment I stood shivering on the doorstep, trying to figure out how I would explain my latest black eye to my parents. I glared at our bright red door, which looked ridiculously cheerful compared to the gloom around me. It had no business being so happy. So I gave it a good kick on my way in.
My parents barely acknowledged my existence as usual. I clomped into the kitchen and took off my left sneaker. Splort. My right. Squish. My mother looked up at that, frowning horribly at the nasty sounds my feet made as they broke free of my soggy shoes. Dirt on her spotless floor was the kiss of death, believe you me.
“What,” she said coldly, “do you think you are doing?”
I kept my head down. “Cleaning up.”
“I thought so.” She went back to the onion she was cutting. My mother never refrigerated her onions—she made a point of training her tear ducts to ignore the noxious fumes. As a professional businesswoman, she wanted to gain total control over every emotional expression. She often despaired over my “complete lack of emotional control”. I often despaired over the fact that my mother was a robot. If there was anything that I could say in favor of my mother, it would be in defense of her tear ducts of steel.
I made the pretense of wiping up every single speck of mud on the floor in order to keep my head down. After about five minutes of very loud, obnoxious scrubbing, my father called icily from the living room; “Being a smart-aleck doesn’t get you anywhere with your mother, Teller” and my mother (pursing her lips to squeeze back the onion-tears) added that I was asking for it. So shuffled like Igor up to my room. I’d rather have a small spat with my parents than a huge ordeal over my “getting myself in another fight”.
After the first few times that Chuck and his gang used me for boxing practice, my parents tried talking to my teachers. I still haven’t figured out why they bothered. Not that my teachers particularly cared—I tended to have ideas that were too “revolutionary” and “disturbing”, so they in turn tended to look the other way when Chuck started picking on me. But they reluctantly agreed to at least keep him from making mincemeat out of me during class.
When I still came home from school looking like I had fallen out of a dump truck, my mother just suggested that I run away. My father told me to try being less of an eccentric so maybe Chuck’d loose interest. I wanted Karate lessons.
But since I wasn’t going to look like a coward, because I was never going to lower myself to Chuck’s standards, and especially because my parents refused to pay for Karate classes, I decided to compromise.
Meaning I got real sneaky.
Chuck and gang were mean and strong and popular, but they were also pretty brain-dead. Just using a different door in the afternoons threw them off for a whole week. I wore darker clothes (better to match the gloomy Fileburg backdrop), hid behind people and in groups, and once I even climbed a tree when I had to leave the building late so that they wouldn’t spot me. But once in a while they got lucky.
I managed to stay up in my room until dinner. Unfortunately for me I was never into the whole makeup thing so I had no foundation to conceal my bruise. My eye was still hideously purple when I sat down at the table.
My parents immediately launched into their familiar “I Told You So” speech. This basically entailed how this was a perfect example of the consequences of being an atypical teen, that if I was a nice, normal kid these things wouldn’t happen, I bring attention to myself and this is what I get for it, etc., etc.  I just sat there and felt miserable and wondered why I had to be born on this Godforsaken soulless piece of land.



Chapter Three
When I woke up in the morning, my black eye had swollen to the point that my face was almost unrecognizable. I decided that I might as well stay home from school today—my parents could really care less whether I was passing or failing and besides, maybe my absence would make Chuck nervous. He got in huge trouble last year for putting a freshman boy in the hospital, but the police told him that since it was his first offence, they wouldn’t put him in jail unless he hurt another kid pretty bad. I could just picture him squirming around in Math class, the stress of having to learn long division coupled with the prospect of prison melting his brain.
I waited until my mother locked the door behind her to go downstairs. My father got up at the crack of dawn every day to hurry to the bank--he believed that his work was his life. The fact that he often went for three hour stretches without customers didn’t faze him a bit. Luckily for me he never came home for lunch break.
My journal was waiting for me when I went out to get the paper.
I stood there for another two minutes, my second lapse of thought in twenty-four hours. But there it was, green and a bit soggy and very much there. I picked it up as if it might bite me. How could it have ended up here? On my doorstep. I didn’t hold on to it for very long, just in case Chuck had decided to rig it with some diabolical prank. Not that I believed that he had the mental capacity for diabolical, but you never know. Wonders never cease to amaze. So when I went inside I threw it onto the sofa and watched it as if it might explode for a while. Nothing happened. I sniffed it. Wet paper- normal. I poked it. Nothing crawled out of it or growled, so I cautiously picked it up and began leafing through the pages. There were all my notes and poems, my stories very much intact, even my little sketches and my dream journal. But when I got to the last page, it was black. Not just black like colored pencil black, but shadow black. When I tilted it in the light it didn’t change; no glare shone across its surface, no markings of any kind were visible. It was as if the light was just swallowed up by that one page and never got spat back out.  I shivered and closed the book, placing it down gently on the counter. For some reason, that black page scared me.
* * *
All through breakfast I stared at my journal and tried to figure out how it had landed back on my doorstep. At first I entertained the image of a great gust of wind plucking it up from the branches of that tree and carrying it to my house, maybe following the currents of air I displaced with my body on my trek home…But that was impossible and I knew it. Perhaps some kind citizen of Fileburg had spotted it and brought it here. Yeah, right-the wind thing was more probable than that. Having an imagination around here was more effective at keeping people away than having the bubonic plague. In my freshman year the city-county council almost managed to get me put under house arrest for vandalism after I drew the Sistine Chapel ceiling—Picasso style—on the school sidewalk. I thought it was clever. They thought it was graffiti.
That black page was even more puzzling.  It was like coming into a dark room from a sunlit hall-so dark that it pushed at your eyeballs and made you want to tear at it, make it lighter so that you could see. I made myself look at it again, but it scared me still and nothing about it was new or enlightening.
Eventually I gave up trying to figure it out and just sent a thankful prayer to whatever force had taken pity on me and given it back.



Chapter Four
We watched her all day.
In the morning she stepped outside and discovered the book we had placed on her doorstep. Her face changed from wonderment to confusion and then to suspicion, but she took it inside.
From her window we watched her open it.
From the black page we watched her face.
From every shadow we waited during that breathless moment, peering at her from the page, praying that she would keep it there.
And though her eyes were frightened, she did not tear it out. She left it there in the back of the book, and we sighed in relief.
All day, we kept fearful watch, catching her every movement, puzzling over every emotion on her face. Humans have very emotional faces—every trace of sadness and glee is trapped on it. In the eyes especially. It has taken us many years just to learn to read human eyes. Hers were especially hard to fathom, but we liked what we saw there.
Humans have a saying that curiosity killed the cat. Time will tell whether that statement is true.



Chapter Five
When my parents got home I lied and told them that I had been to school and that Chuck had left me totally alone. They might have cared, and they might not. It’s hard to tell sometimes—once in a while they want to know every detail about my day (mostly so they can moan about my nonconformities) and then most of the time they ignore my presence. You’d think that I was some kind of deadly organism that oozed around carrying disease.
I didn’t mention my journal.
I almost had a cow when my father picked it up from the counter. He absently leafed through the pages, and when he stopped on the last page I held my breath. For one crazy moment, I almost felt as if my journal was holding its breath, too. He frowned at it, but then tossed it back to me. I caught it bewilderedly as he said, “Take that thing back to your room. I don’t want to see your creepy…art.” He said the word as if he was talking about face-eating acid. I nodded and ran upstairs, thankful that my father was too unimaginative to know alien artwork when he saw it. As for me, I had decided by now that whatever had happened to that last page had had no earthly influence.
I stayed up late, watching that page. I was getting less and less afraid of it now, and more and more curious. By now, if I watched long and hard enough, I could see movement deep within it, as if black mist was swirling down far in the bottom of it. Once or twice when I looked away from it, I caught snatches of quick movement, but when I snapped my head back around to look there was never anything there. And when I cut off the light to go to bed, I left it open on my desk. I had nightmares that night about great eyes like moonstones staring at me, but when I hid in dark corners they only worsened…
* * *
The first morning after my journal came back to me (by now I was referring to it as if it had free will), I reluctantly made my way to school. I was so not looking forward to meeting up with Chuck again, although perhaps he would lay off since my eye still looked so bad. I could even milk it a little and limp as if I had a broken bone. Maybe I should have bandaged some part of me too. I was going to suck every ounce of mercy out of my teachers so that I could squeak past having missed yesterday.
All the way to school I kept seeing movement out of the corners of my eyes. In the gloom of the eternal twilight that seemed to be the year-round weather of Fileburg, things seemed to be stirring where there should have been stillness. I never saw anything directly, though, so I just figured that my black eye was messing with my vision. It was out of my mind by English class.
The day went by in the usual style of monotony—no one acknowledging my existence, getting tripped up in the hallways, having my lunch spilled in the cafeteria. In fact it almost seemed worse than usual, because the principal even lowered himself to shout at me for pinning pictures of Klimt’s “The Kiss” inside my locker. People just didn’t appreciate culture around here- I don’t think that Mr. Wingerton would recognize it if I shoved up his hairy nostrils.
By the end of the day I was back to my normal state of depression.
And the shadows were still following me on my way home.



Chapter Six
We followed her to school today.
Her name is Teller Pricely, we learned. She is quiet and cynical and she hates mathematics. Her teachers enjoy making fun of her. Her peers are afraid of her and they don’t know why. She likes toffee ice cream. She enjoys art. She draws the same picture in every class—a cat. There is a boy who watches her with eyes like Hunter’s eyes. She never cries, but she is sad.
We watched her every move and we think she is starting to see us now.
This is good.
Her journal is interesting—she is a great dreamer. She writes from the heart. She worries about never leaving this town, about being crushed under the weight of uniformity around her. She has the soul of an artist. She is braver than she gives herself credit for. She is very like us and yet very alien, and we do not understand her yet. But we have learned much, still.
We will show ourselves soon.
We pray that when her eyes are opened, she will consent to help us.
That it will not be in vain.
That we will be saved.



Chapter Seven
My parents were not home when I got to my house. I unlocked the door and stumbled grumpily in, slamming it shut behind me. That door has taken quite a lot of abuse from me. For a moment I almost related to it, and stroked its cool grain. I stood there, just touching it, until I realized how pathetic it was to have to relate to an inanimate object like a door.
I fixed myself a sandwich (peanut butter and honey, my binge favorite) and a glass of cranberry juice. Cranberry juice always helps me feel better. I must have a tremendously healthy bladder by now. I ate my sandwich like a starving hyena, gargling when I swallowed the peanut butter until I started to feel like I was being watched. I blushed, but then about smacked myself on the forehead. I had to get over this paranoia. I mean, no one was home but me.
Then this horrible fear crept over me, and the shadows swirled in the corners of my eyes, worse than ever. I froze, peanut butter stuck unattractively to my lips. Then I whirled and about punched a hole in the wall trying to cut on the light, and stood shivering against the wall until the shadows retreated. Then when I was sure I was alone again, I wiped my mouth and took a deep breath. Steady there, Teller old girl. You haven’t been afraid of the dark since first grade.
But I was still shivering.
So I pulled myself together and marched to every light switch in the house, flicking and turning and pulling until every light-bulb was glaring and no corners were left unlit. Then I finished my sandwich and did a little victory dance. Yay me! I slayed ‘em. But then I felt stupid again and grumped to the TV.
I only kept it on for a minute. I sighed and paced around. I drank some more juice. I doodled a picture of a horse under the kitchen table ( I wondered how long it would take my mother to find it.) I wrote a poem in the dust on top of my dresser. Ew. I need to clean in here. I did everything I could think of doing, even my homework, but still I felt restless.
So I walked outside. The sun had set by now, but a glow still lit up the heavy clouds in the sky. It was beautiful and eerie and I wished that I had someone to share it with. I wished I could tell my parents about it. I wished that I could be holding hands with someone here, so that I wouldn’t have to be alone. Most simply, I just wanted someone else to say, “Hey, Teller, what do you think of that?”, and I would actually have to think about it. To be wanted or needed for just that one tiny thing. For anything. That would be perfection.
That was the closest to crying that I had been in a long, long while. I even forgot about the shadows.
I never even noticed them gathering behind me, until I turned around.
And there stood Gan Nema.



Chapter Eight
After Teller got home we decided that tonight had to be the night. We could sense him coming, ever closer to finding us. There are too few of us, too few. We had to survive this night…
At first we tried in her kitchen, thinking that in the comfort if her home she might be less frightened. But at the last instant she panicked, and banished us with light. Then for what seemed like forever she paced about the house, doing nothing, afraid and confused. We began to despair…
But then she exited the house and stood still for a long time.
Long enough for us to gather.
Long enough for me to gather.
Then she turned, and saw me.
She saw me. For the first time in the centuries of her kind, in the millennia of ours, of the eons and ages and aching expanses of time, she saw me.
One of us.
One of them.
In that instant that our eyes met, two worlds came crashing together like droplets of water, like seas of mist merging after a storm, like fingers of flame meeting as one.
I thought that something more should have happened.
In fact, it seemed almost unremarkable. She just stood there with her jaw hanging open, fear sickening in her eyes. I just stood there, but thankfully my jaw wasn’t hanging open. I don’t think that she could have handled my fangs, anyway. Then she shut her mouth with a snap and closed her eyes. I waited. She opened them again.
Nope. Still there.
She did this a few times until I cleared my throat, and I thought that she might jump out of her skin.
“Teller Pricely.”
She gulped. “Ye…” it came out as a squeak. “yes?”
“My name is Gan Nema. I am the general of a race of beings that you will call the Hunted. We have need of your services.”
“Me? I mean, my what?”
I realized then that I must look terribly frightening to her, and she was barely older than a child. I softened my tone. “Child, we need your help.”
She blinked. “My help. Erm. Okay…” She looked at me for a moment more.
Then she fainted.



Chapter Nine
She was the most terrifying thing that I had ever seen.
Over six feet tall, no, almost seven even, she dwarfed me utterly. She was emaciated, horribly thin, her bones stretching the skin. I could count every rib, every vertebra. Her hip bones jutted out sharply, grotesque. Her skin was dry and brown, like old leaves, and seemed almost scaly but with tiny little scales like worn snake skin. But more graceful, if you can imagine graceful skin. She stood on two legs--but they were like no legs I had ever seen on a person, like dog’s legs or cat’s or horse’s,  with more than the normal number of joints. Her hands were long-fingered, clawed, deadly. Every muscle in her body was lithe and taut (at least the ones that were visible beyond the expanses of bone), every breath measured and quiet and deep.
But her face was truly strange.
It was like a skull, maybe of a horse’s. With lizard influence, if you will. The skin here was at it’s thinnest, and the horse-ears were almost like tiny horns. But it was an intelligent face, with an almost human look. And her eyes. Oh, her eyes! It was like gazing into two bright moonstones, fierce and impassive and terrible. I could see no thought, no emotion in them, and it terrified my more than her alien appearance because it was wrong...
I think she said something and I probably answered, but then I fainted.
How embarrassing. Contact with an alien race and I loose consciousness.
Well, not quite alien, as I would later learn.
* * *
I carried her back into her house, turning off lights as I went. When the rooms downstairs were completely dark, I set her down on the couch. She muttered something unintelligible. I sat down to wait.
Klitus Dai, my second-in command, whispered sarcastically beside me in the darkness; “Impressive.”
“Give her time. She will adjust. I think we have chosen well.”
“You mean you have chosen well. We didn’t have anything to do with it. And we don’t have time to waste waiting on her. General Kri is on the move…”
“I know!” I snapped. He fell silent. I took a deep breath. “I’m taking an awful gamble on this, Klitus. If this fails, we all die. I am responsible for every one of our kind, remember that, please. In everything I do, I consider them first. And there are so few of them, Klitus. So very few…”
There was a pause. “I know. This is…difficult for all of us. However, you seem to be more than willing to put the human’s life at risk. If Kri finds out about her, he will kill her.”
I closed my eyes.
“I know. And she will know too, in time. I only hope that we were right, and she will help…”
“In time?”
I growled. “Yes.”
“We have no time!” he hissed, and was gone.



Chapter Ten
I awoke to utter blackness.
I almost fell asleep again, until I spotted the moonstone eyes staring at me from the darkness. And then I was waaaay awake.
I sat up and opened my mouth to shriek, and a clawed hand was clapped over my mouth. It smelled like wet soil and lavender, and for some reason it comforted me (other than the first moment of total panic when I am not embarrassed to admit I almost wet my pants). A voice came from somewhere under those eyes;
“Be still. You are in no danger, Teller Pricely.”
“Yet.” Said a nasal voice, and a second pair of eyes (slightly above the first) appeared.
By now my eyes were adjusting to the darkness and I could see the outline of the two beings in front of me. They seemed somewhat less frightening in the shadows, as if they belonged there. I was not as afraid now—in the light they were too unnatural, like bats floundering in the sun. Here they were more graceful, more natural.
But still very, very frightening.
“She’s still petrified,” the second one said disdainfully. “By the time we’re able to move out, Kri will have us by the tails.”
I sat up more and cleared my throat, somewhat indignant.
“Better, but still petrified.”
I shook my head to clear it. I wondered how I could not be petrified, having two skele-horses hanging over me like vultures.
“Give her room to breathe, Klitus,” the first one said. Gan, I remembered, Gan Nema. What a strange name. Although mine wasn’t exactly standard, either.
“Are you alright now? I’m sorry I frightened you. I had no choice. You -“
“Gan!”, Klitus hissed, “He’s coming!”
Nema hesitated, glancing out the window. I turned too, but saw nothing. Then she looked gravely at me and said, “You have a choice. I have explained nothing. You know nothing. You are foreign, our concerns are not yours. But your eyes have been opened, and you must choose now. Although you do not know how or why—will you help us?”
It was the strangest question I had ever been asked. She was right—it was like nothing that had ever happened to me. An alien general asks me to help her without telling me what she means. She must think I’m crazy, wanting to leave my life for what? Something that doesn’t even exist? To do I don’t know what? For a person, er, thing, that I met five minutes ago?
So, naturally, I said yes.



Chapter Eleven
And my world exploded.
Well, actually, it was just the bay window that exploded. But considering the fact that I got pelted by glass pellets shrieking by at sixty miles per hour, I think that my assessment was forgivable.
I screamed, clapping my hands protectively around my head. Glass hissed around me like icy bullets, slicing my fingers and shattering on the furniture around me as chunks of debris whizzed past my face. As if in slow motion, I could see those beautiful little shards glittering in the air and the light of the moon, spinning and tinkling and turning into dust as they hit the floor in clouds of deadly spray. Tiny droplets of my blood bloomed in front of me like tiny flowers before being caught and becoming lost in the snowstorm of glass.
The whole room seemed to shudder. Then with a roar every window in the house was blown in, shattered glass flying into every room, tinkling on tile and skittering across carpet, booming and rushing and crashing.  I could hear fabric being ripped by the force of the explosions, shrieks of glass scraping against metal and plaster, even the frenzied whir of glass piling into corners and choking into crevices. It was a chaos of glitter and ice.
But just when I thought that my ears would explode from all of the horrifying noise, noise, noise! it stopped. It was over. A few lone shards tumbled down the stairs, and then everything was silent.
I took one shuddering breath. And another. Another.  Then I opened my eyes again, painfully unclasping my fingers from behind my head. Glass slid from my hair and pattered onto my lap, clinking onto the piles on the sofa. My hands had been cut furiously and my scalp was sticky with lines of blood.
But I was alive.
Shivering, I watched as Nema and Klitus pulled themselves to their feet, shaking glass from the hollows of their skin. Then they froze, every breath and muscle and gaze trained on a spot just over my shoulder. I felt the air around me begin to shudder, my eardrums pulsing as if the air itself was being concussed and forced out of the way of… something. I was too afraid to turn around and look.
Then Nema lunged for me and wrapped her long, bony arms around me. I could feel her heard pounding feverishly against her ribs, and that frightened me more than the storm of slicing glass had. She, a mighty general, was afraid.
We stood there for a sickening moment, until the glass on the windowpane crunched under the weight of an unseen monster and Klitus shrieked “Leave her, Nema! She’s not worth it…” Then there was a spat of gunfire and something screamed past my head and we were gone.
But not before I saw who was on the windowsill.
Outlined against  the night sky was General Adoxos Kri. Huge bat wings stretched like great sails behind him, a gun slung over his shoulder like a carcass. And a spark of red burned deeply in his moonstone eyes.



Chapter Twelve
It was undoubtedly the most bizarre way that I have ever traveled.
At first it was like being punched in the gut. Every ounce of air was sucked out of my lungs and whirled away into an infinite blackness. I opened my eyes and saw blackness. I closed them and saw blackness. The blackness pooled in my nose and mouth and in the folds of my clothes, thick and cold and horrible. I finally gasped for air, but only took in the shadows, drowning in them, breathing them, becoming them as they seeped into my skin, my lungs, my eyes…
I could feel every bit of light in my body dying away as the darkness claimed me as its own, swallowing my mewling like strands of smoke in a great cloud. I was floating, falling, then rushing through it as every particle of me came undone, unraveled, and I traveled as shadows will before a great light. Then we were there.
I came back into my own world, quite literally, with a bang. A tremendous report like a cork from a champagne bottle sounded, and I was on the ground. The sweet, earthy, smelly, dirty ground that stayed put and didn’t try to suck me in. I gasped and choked for air, clutching at my stomach as if it would flop out and run away. I expected to see darkness come pouring out of my lungs like water from a drowning person’s, but it didn’t.
I laid there like a dead fish for a moment as my eyes gradually weaned back into the light. I still laid there like a dead fish until I became aware of movement around me. Then Klitus’s remarkable face shoved up next to mine. I must have made an ugly expression because he sneered and drew back. Oops. Way to go, Teller.
“She lived. Pity, considering that now she’ll just have to wait for Kri to finish her off,” he said cynically.
I just grunted, too drained to make a comment.
“He saw her?” Gan asked, bending down to help me to my feet. It took a few tries but I got there eventually. Yay me.
“Oh, yes. In fact, he probably already has a plan for her extermination. His mind is ever so eager for those kinds of challenges, you know. He’s never had the opportunity to kill a human before. I’m sure he’s just frothing with anticipation.”
This guy was so helpful. I mean, he’d fit right in with the Fileburg crowd. Completely a glass-half-empty kind of guy.
“You’re not helping, Klitus. She just managed a fifty mile shadow-run without fainting. Let’s please keep her conscious.”
Yeah, please. Keep me conscious.
“I think she’s only still awake because she doesn’t have the sense to rest.”
“Hey…” I started.
He glared at me. “I don’t know why you chose her, Nema.” He leaned in close. I could see my grungy face reflected in his eyes. Sniff. “And she stinks.”
“All humans stink, Klitus.”
“Now wait just a second…”I started again. I pride myself on my personal hygiene. “I didn’t ask for you all to choose me at all, thank you.”
Gan Nema turned her great head towards me. I gulped. “You are right. But after we explain things, you will understand our reasoning.” Klitus coughed. It was a grotesque act for him, every rib shuddering and clacking together beneath his skin. I wondered how these people could stay together with so little between bone and skin.
Nema ground her teeth together. “My reasoning.”
All through this conversation I had been watching their faces, trying to catch some hint of emotion. Although their voices carried anger or excitement or (in Klitus’s case) extreme cynicism, and their faces gave some hints of thought, there was something very wrong with them. After Nema spoke I realized what this was—their eyes. No emotions, no thought, not even the tiniest hint of pain or pleasure was registered in those eyes; like watching dead people talk. It was very unsettling for me—all my life I had grown up reading faces, looking into people’s eyes for cues and hints about social handling. Here there was nothing. I was treading water.
“Alright,” I said meekly.
She stared at me for a moment longer, then gazed up into the sky. I glanced up there too. Hmn, cloudy. I waited a minute. She looked at the ground. I did too. Hmn, grassy. I waited another minute. I was just starting to wonder if I should start pinching myself to wake me up when there was a sound like a breeze of wind, and about twelve Hunted appeared into the tiny clearing. I didn’t really think of it as tiny until there were twelve tall aliens squashed into it. Funny how those things work, isn’t it?
They were all staring at me as if I was about to explode or have a rabid fit or something. I wondered if I really stunk or if Klitus had been joking.
“This,” Gan Nema said, rising to her full height, “is the human whose eyes have been opened.” There was a great murmuring that I didn’t understand, like leaves blowing across still water.
Then for the first time I saw a long, wicked knife strapped to Nema’s leg, a scar than ran down her heavily muscled calf. I looked at Klitus and noticed for the first time the great longbow in a case on his back. I gazed across the whole company and saw more knives and bows and weapons that I didn’t recognize, more scars, more evidences of a warlike life that was beyond my scope of experience. These people are hard and tough and they’ve probably killed before. And will again. They live this.
It hit me then that I was in something over my head here.
And I still had no idea what I was supposed to do.
But then I also realized that these people wanted me. Me. Little nobody chick who got her lunch money stolen and whose parents thought imagination was a medical condition. They wanted what I knew, my guts (if I had any), my imagination, probably everything that I had ever been discouraged from possessing. They wanted me for who I was.
No questions asked.
So I decided that whatever perfection was, this was close to it for me. And I would do what these people, these Hunted, wanted me to do.
Hopefully I would live to regret it.