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That was what I got for wishing on a damned penny that I should’ve kept. Hadn’t pop culture told me to be careful what I wished for? Wishing fora way outwas practically setting myself up to be abducted when a person had luck as shitty as mine was.
“The change will be completed shortly,” one of the guys told me. “Brace yourself.”
Brace my—
Oh, fuck.
Two
Sharp,hot pain cut through my chest, and I stumbled. All of the men stepped back—none of them reaching out to catch me before I crashed to my knees, hard.
At least it was sand beneath me instead of concrete.
I sucked in air like a drowning person while heat coursed through my body. I thought I was burning—that I was dying.
But then the heat faded.
A few minutes later, I managed to open my eyes.
“A phoenix,” the guy with the bicep tattoos and buzzed hair said, folding his arms over his chest. “Mine.”
“Careful, brother. You know she could belong to any of us,” one of the men behind me drawled. “Type means nothing.”
Type of what?
There wasn’t time to ask the question aloud.
“You have until sundown, little phoenix.Run.” The buzzed-head guy’s eyes bore into my fucking soul.
I didn’t wait for another invitation. Something about his words felt like a kick to the ass, anyway.
Without turning to check out the ocean I could hear violently crashing against the shore behind me, or the tall, skinny trees that reminded me of freakishly overgrown palm trees, I took off at a sprint into the weird forest in front of me.
My heart pounded like a freight train as I crashed through bushes, barely dodging rocks and tree trunks as I went. The trees only vaguely reminded me of the ones on Earth, the coloring of their leaves a much more vibrant green and blue than anything I knew. Their trunks were much thicker around, and they didn’t have the same roughness as the ones I’d seen—they looked shiny-smooth, and were all either black, white, or the same bright colors as their leaves.
The whole place smelled really fucking good; I was attentive enough to notice that as I ran for my damned life. It was like rain and the beach, and something fresh and light that I couldn’t put my finger on.
The sun was still shining overhead, but those guys hadn’t seemed like the patient type. If this was some kind of wife-hunt, they would probably be coming for me as soon as it was evencloseto sunset. I needed to make as much progress as possible, even though my whole damn mind was spinning.
To go from standing in that strip mall, tossing a penny in a fountain, to here? In a different world, on the beach and then running through the fucking jungle?
I was reeling.
Factor in the whole wife thing, and the big old bastards who would be hunting me…
The Wild Hunt.
Hadn’t I heard of that in a TV show or something? I was pretty sure it had something to do with mythology of some kind, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe that was something they taught the teenagers who got to graduate high school; not the ones stuck in fucking juvie for defending themselves from would-be rapists.
A sharp stick or rock cut up into my foot, through the massive fucking hole in the bottom of my shoe, and I muttered a curse as I kept running.
Damn old shoes
Damn shitty job.
Damn juvie.
Damn lawyer foster dad who thought he was such a fucking ‘good person’ for ‘helping those in need’ that he ‘deserved’ the ‘pleasure’ of raping me.
