Keira used to tease me about my awful sense of direction. She once told me I could get lost on my way to the bathroom.

And she wasn’t wrong. Even if I had a detailed set of directions, I’d find a way to mess things up. No matter where I was going.

Moving to New York wasn’t helpful, either. It took a solid six months for me to get the hang of the trains and subways and transfers and all that. Good thing I worked from home, or I would never have made it to my job on time.

Because at least I could make it from my bed to my desk without having to check a maps app.

All of this came to mind as I wandered around the woods.

In Scotland.

Because I was a complete idiot.

“Kiera, you’re lucky I love you,” I whispered, turning around in a full circle to get a look at what was around me. Not like it mattered, since everything looked like everything else. It wasn’t like there were any trees that looked different than the other trees.

And there weren’t any signs pointing to the mountain peak I was looking for.

What was the deal with this place? I pulled out the printed Google Earth image which I had shoved into my backpack before leaving the hotel after breakfast and looked at it again. For the millionth time.

“It should be there,” I whispered, looking up over the treetops, where I could see nothing but blue sky. “It’s got to be there.”

It wasn’t. On the print-out, which I had assumed would be right because the picture was taking from a freaking satellite, there was a definite mountain peak, followed by several smaller peaks which trailed behind it.

“This has to be true.” If I said it enough, I would be right. Because it had to be true. I was holding the proof in my hands.

Did I do something wrong when I tracked the location the email to Keira came from? No. Impossible. I was too good at my work to make stupid mistakes. And the last time I checked, entire mountain formations did not disappear overnight.

Oh, God. What if Keira got as lost as I was? What if I led her to the wrong place and something terrible happened? I looked around again in a panic, half-expecting to find her rotting corpse somewhere nearby.

It would be all my fault. And here I was, so full of myself. Thinking I was the world’s best hacker or something when I screwed up royally and got my best friend killed.

No. She told me everything was all right—so good that she wanted to stay. But that was the last time I heard anything before she dropped off the face of the earth. Two months later and nothing. Zip. Which was why I bought a plane ticket.

So she had found something. But what? Tamhas? Or something dangerous? Something she couldn’t tell me about, maybe.

I could feel the panic starting to spread through me—my breath went short, my heart started racing a mile a minute. Sweat beaded on my forehead and trickled down the back of my neck. I wiped it away with a shaking hand.

Was this how she felt when she searched the woods? Because she might have had a better sense of direction than I did and she might have had those sharp instincts or whatever, but even she couldn’t find her way to something that didn’t exist.

If she had turned around and gone back to her hotel, why did she tell me everything was okay, and she was going to stay? Why? What didn’t she share with me?

My imagination was running out of control, and I knew it. I had to rein it in before I went into a full-blown panic attack. I hadn’t had one of those since I was a teenager in the worst foster home of all of the millions I had been in and out of. This wasn’t the time or place to start that shit again.

I sat down on the nearest fallen log and did all the old tricks. I deliberately tuned in to all of my senses, one at a time. The feeling of the breeze on my face. The solidity of the log underneath me. The sun warming my skin. The fluttering leaves, the singing birds, the sound of my breath as I slowly and purposefully inhaled and exhaled. The smell of damp earth, rotting leaves, fresh air.

A few minutes later, I was in control of myself again. I could reason through the mess I was in.

First, I needed to know the time. I had no idea how long it had been since I started wandering around and was starting to feel disoriented. My phone was in one of the pockets in my backpack—I wouldn’t have a signal in the middle of nowhere, but I’d be able to use it as a clock, and the compass app I had installed would come in handy.

At least I had the foresight to do that much.

“Wait a minute.” I squinted at the screen, then stood up and held the phone away from me like people always did when they were searching for a signal.

Only I wasn’t searching for one. I was checking to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, that there wasn’t some sort of glitch in the software. Because I did have a full signal—and, according to the display, a Wi-Fi connection.

“What is happening here?” I tested a couple of websites and was able to access them. I shouldn’t have been able to do that, out in the middle of the woods. The phone’s clock told me I’d been hiking for three hours, so I had to be pretty far from the road and civilization in general.

The only reason I could see for being able to connect was the presence of a Wi-Fi network somewhere close by. And a cell tower.

The strangeness of this alone was enough to keep me moving. I continued north, as the compass told me to do, holding the phone out in front of me and checking from time to time if the signal weakened. Meanwhile, all sorts of questions fought for attention in my head.

Where was I, really?

I never got the time to figure that out.

Nobody could ever accuse me of being the outdoorsy type. I had to buy a decent set of hiking boots just for the sake of searching for Keira. My skin was so pale, I could pass for a ghost. The most light I ever got was the light from my computer screen.

But even I knew what it meant when a twig snapped in an otherwise quiet place.

My head snapped around in the direction the sound came from. Total reflex, done without thinking first. If I had thought first, I might have run. Not that it would have made much difference.

Four women entered the little clearing I had just walked into. The leader was tall, beautiful, with caramel skin and black hair. Her light green eyes competed for attention with her hair and nobody needed to be that gorgeous.

She carried herself with grace—they all did, like trained dancers. Only they looked like no dancers I had ever seen. There was anger all about them. Anger and strength. Fierceness.

They reminded me of Kiera, in a way.

All four wore black dresses, full-length, simple, tight at the top and a little more flowy in the skirt. No jewelry, no makeup, but covering their bare shoulders and chests were intricate tattoos I couldn’t make sense of from a distance.

The leader’s full lips parted to show white teeth bared in a snarl. “Who are you?”

I gulped as the four of them slowly surrounded me, all of the women sort of floating through the leaves covering the ground. But no, that was impossible. I had to be imagining things.

What I didn’t imagine was the tension in the air. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my purple hair stood on end. Just the way they looked at me, like I was trespassing on their land. It couldn’t be theirs, could it? How could it belong to anybody?

“I—I’m just a hiker,” I whispered, wishing I could back away and keep backing away until I reached the road again. But they wouldn’t let me do it—they were closing in on me all the time.

“Just a hiker? Hikers do not simply appear here, child.”

Child? The girl looked like she was my age. Where did she get off?

Another, this one with almost white-blonde curls and skin as pale as mine, held up a hand. “We have seen them before, remember. People have taken up this hiking business as a sport, it seems.”

“Oh, yes.” The leader nodded. “I tend to lose track of what falls in and out of popularity.”

Where the hell were these women living? Under a rock? They sounded like they lived outside the world.

“This does not explain what she is doing here,” said the redhead whose vine tattoos covered her throat. For somebody so beautiful, she looked pretty ugly when she glared at me. “I do not believe she is only hiking.”

“I agree,” spoke the fourth, a freckled little thing with big, luminous eyes I had a hard time looking away from.

“Why not?” I asked, prying my attention from those eyes and looking around. “What’s wrong with being here? What did I do wrong?”

“It is a bit too much of a coincidence.” The leader nodded, and just like that the other three lunged for me.

They didn’t know how fast I was. One of the skills I had picked up over the years, spending so much time in foster and group homes with bullies twice my size. I had learned to be quick, or else be somebody’s punching bag.

“There is no point in running!” one of them called out. Right. Like I was going to listen to her. Like she would tell me if there was a point in running away from them.

I made it to a spot where one tree had started to fall but was caught by a second tree. They formed a triangle with the ground. I was just about to run under and past it when, just like that, out of nowhere, the blonde appeared in front of me.

One second there was nothing but trees and more trees. The next, a solid-bodied human being who stood there with her hands on her hips.

I stopped short to keep from slamming into her—so short, I scrambled backward and landed on my butt. I didn’t feel the pain from hitting the ground since a person had literally appeared in front of my eyes when she hadn’t been there not a second before that.

“Must we waste time this way?” she sighed as she advanced on me.

I scurried backward, still sitting, hands and feet moving as fast as I could get them to move. This couldn’t be happening.

“It is rather tiresome,” a voice behind me agreed. “Simply check the back of her neck, and we can be finished with this.”

“Wait, wait!” I threw a jab with my elbow, with my knee, anything to keep them from touching me. But it did nothing. I might as well have been fighting a brick wall. The redhead hauled me to my knees while the blonde pushed down on the back of my head until my neck was exposed.

“Damn it.” I lifted my head in time to see the blonde shaking hers.

“She’s not the one, after all,” the redhead lamented.

“What do we do now?” one of them asked.

The leader stood in front of me, glowering. “And we were so certain. This will anger Selene.”

The redhead still held onto my shoulders, keeping me on my knees. I was too terrified to fight—and it would’ve been pointless. Her hands were like steel bands. “What should be done with her, then? We cannot let her go.”

That shook me out of my silence. “Wait. What the hell are you people talking about? I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you. What do you mean, you can’t let me go? What are you going to do to me?”

They would kill me. I was never so sure of anything in my life as I was sure right then that they would kill me. I would die there in the middle of the woods, and no one would ever know.

Kiera was the only one who would’ve cared, and I doubted by then that she was even alive.

“Take care of her,” the leader muttered, turning her back.

A strange sense of peace came over me then. Not panic, not anger over missing out on the rest of my life. Just peace.

And then I realized it was because one of them had done something to me without touching me. I couldn’t move.

I was breathing. I could see. But I couldn’t move an inch. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream.

“Come. Selene will wish to know what came of our search.” The leader’s icy green eyes met mine. “Why did you have to be here?”

Funny. I was just asking myself the same question.