Nita sighed, dropping the paper, unable to bring herself to care at the moment. Her mind wouldn’t focus.
She bit her lip, fingers hovering over her pocket for a moment before she sat up. She found her mother’s bag and pulled the laptop out, logged into her email, and composed a message to her father. I think I did something really stupid. I’m scared. I’ve never seen Mom like this before.
There was no response. But then, there wouldn’t be. Dawn was just breaking outside, and there was no way her father would be up yet. The US had just started daylight saving time, which meant she was in the same time zone as her father. The same far-too-early-in-the-morning time.
Nita closed the laptop. She really wanted to talk to him.
Maybe she should just call and wake him?
But she had no cell phone. Ugh. She could Skype him, if he was awake. But the fact that he probably wasn’t awake was the problem.
Nita rolled over and smushed her face into her pillow with a groan.
The snick of a key in the door lock made Nita sit upright in bed. Was her mother back? It couldn’t have been half an hour since she’d left.
The door didn’t open.
Nita’s heart began to race. This wasn’t her mother. She didn’t know why or how she knew, but she could feel it, as surely as she could feel the itchy polyester blanket on the bed beneath her.
Shit. Had they been followed?
Getting to her feet as silently as she could, Nita looked around for a weapon. Her eyes skittered from one corner of the room to another, but all she saw were pillows, blankets, and a backpack full of clothes. Creeping forward, she picked up the broken picture from the floor. The frame was made of some sort of wood—or cardboard painted to look like wood, the cynical side of her said. But it was all she had.
She watched the door, trying to keep her breath shallow and quiet. Waiting. The door creaked open an inch, and Nita took a step back, picture frame at the ready.
She was so focused on the door in front of her, she didn’t even notice the person come in through the open window behind her. Not until a needle stabbed into her shoulder and she spun around to see a young man’s blurry face. Black hair, dark eyes, white smile.
Nita could feel the chemical sliding through her body, and she tried to prevent it from slipping through her bloodstream by blocking receptors and flinging white blood cells at it. But it was too fast, skipping through her body and attaching to the glutamate receptors in her nerve cells.
Nita swung the picture frame at the face in front of her, but her arms were too heavy, and she couldn’t lift them more than waist height. He blocked her easily, and she stumbled back, trying to get away. If she could just reach the bathroom, she could lock herself in and wait for her mother to return. Her mother would take care of these people in minutes.
No matter how she strained, her legs wouldn’t obey her, and instead, her knees folded and she fell to the floor.
She felt like her heart should be speeding up to match the panic jittering through her skull, but everything was slow and blurry. Her chest hurt like it had been hit with a meat tenderizer. Only her breathing obeyed her, coming fast and harsh, and she made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a sob.
How had they found her? She’d thought they hadn’t been followed.
Her whole body began to tingle and go numb, until she couldn’t even feel where the needle had gone in. She struggled to crawl away, desperate to stall for time until her mother got back, but she only managed to creep a few inches. The sound of shoes on floor reverberated in her skull as her face pressed into the ground.
The world spiraled into copies of itself as her vision doubled, then tripled. A few seconds later, everything blurred into darkness.
Eight
NITA’S HEAD HURT. She thought she might be awake, because it hurt, but she wasn’t sure, because the ground was buzzing, and she was twitching, and someone was singing, but maybe that was just a dream and when her eyes opened the world was a Dalmatian. Before she slid back into unconsciousness, she realized the roar and the shaking might be from an engine. A really loud one, like on a plane.
Or muscle spasms and a headache.
When she woke up next, she thought there was sky above her, but she also thought she was on the sky, or maybe falling into it, and the clouds seemed to copy each other. There was still a roar and a buzzing, so maybe she was still on the plane. If there was a plane. Did planes have sky? Was that sky?
Obviously you’re looking out the ceiling window of the plane, idiot.
Planes don’t have ceiling windows, idiot.
But then the blue resolved itself into gray, so maybe that wasn’t the sun, but the overhead lights.
Before she could follow the train of thought any further, she lost consciousness again.
This time, when she woke, she stayed awake. Her head throbbed, and her breathing was short and rapid, like she’d been running. Her skin was clammy and itchy with dried sweat. Her T-shirt stuck to her body where she was lying on the cot. Some of her hair had glued itself to her forehead, and she raised a trembling hand to peel it off.
She held out her arm in front of her, but it wavered and twitched. She tried to raise herself onto her elbows, but felt dizzy and had to lie back down. What had they given her?
Nita squeezed her eyelids together to prevent the tears burning behind them, but there was no moisture left in her body to cry with.
What were they going to do to her?
Her imagination supplied her with all sorts of ideas.
All. Sorts.
Panic tried to claw its way up her throat, but she choked on it with a croaky gasp that should have been a sob.
Calm down, Nita. You won’t do yourself any favors panicking. You don’t even know where you are. Assess. Analyze.
Calm. Right. She could be calm. Panic could come later, when she realized the scope of her situation.
She tried to concentrate and push the drugs out of her system—after all, what was the use of having the ability to control your body if you didn’t use it? But it was too hard; Nita couldn’t focus well enough to do anything, and trying just worsened her headache.
Swallowing with a dry throat, she tried to gauge how long she’d been out. A while. She turned her head to get a better view of where she was, but her vision was still double and the world was tilted sideways, making her nauseous. She closed her eyes, hoping it would pass.
Trying to relax her breathing, Nita focused on pulling her thoughts together. She’d been kidnapped, that much was clear. The major question was: Was this a random kidnapping, or had she been targeted?
If random, then they would be holding her for ransom. And while her mother could pay the money, Nita thought she was more likely to track down the kidnappers and slaughter them. You didn’t get to be a professional unnatural hunter without some detective skills.
If the kidnapping wasn’t random . . . that would be bad. For them to have found her at the hotel, it meant they’d been watching Nita’s apartment, tracked her to the hotel, and waited until her mother had gone. That implied some knowledge about who Nita and her mother were, and whatever these people wanted, they’d be suitably careful with Nita’s mother involved.
A nasty thought tickled Nita’s brain. What if this is Mom’s punishment?
Nita shied away from that idea, not wanting to believe her mother would go that far.
There was a click of plastic against concrete, followed by a scraping sound. Nita forced herself to lift her head and locate the source. It was hard to focus, with everything splitting into two and combining all the time.