Hide And Seek

Prologue

I was going to die tonight.

Even if a person didn’t kill me in the next few minutes, the woods surrounding Camp Blackpine would. I was sure of it.

Branches clawed at my face, roots snaked up from the dirt like grasping fingers, and jagged rocks littered the ground, waiting for one wrong step.

Still, I didn't stop running, even though my lungs were screaming. Couldn’t stop.

“Alissaaa...”

The deep, melodic voice drifted through the trees, sickeningly playful.

“I'm coming for you, sweetheart. Ready or not…”

The sing-song taunt echoed through the trees, turning the chase into something grotesquely familiar. A fucked-up game of hide and seek where getting found meant getting killed.

A wrenching sob tore out of me before I could swallow it. Shit. I might as well have strapped on a flashing neon sign to announce my exact location to whoever was pursuing me.

I pressed on anyway, crashing through undergrowth that raked at my arms and snagged at my clothes, tearing threads loose like the forest itself was trying to pull me apart. A branch whipped across my cheek, and I tasted copper where I’d bitten the inside of my mouth.

Keep going. Keep—

My foot caught on something, and the ground rushed up to meet me so fast I barely managed to throw my hands out to catch my fall. As my palms landed on dirt and pine needles, my knee hit something sharp. White-hot pain exploded up my leg.

For a few gasping seconds, I lay there, dazed.

Then the voice came again, closer now.

“You're not getting away from me…”

I forced myself up, ignoring the pain in my knee, and lurched forward.

My ponytail had come loose, and sweat-drenched strands of hair were plastered to my face. I could barely breathe. Barely see. But stopping meant dying.

A clearing appeared without warning; moonlight falling across a stretch of open ground. I almost sobbed with relief at the sight of it. Maybe I’d gone farther than I thought, and there’d be a track leading from the other side to someone’s property. Maybe even—

The rope took me before I registered it was there.

A loop snapped tight around my ankle, yanking me upward with brutal force. The world flipped, and pine needles and dirt rained down into my eyes as I swung wildly before coming to a stop, hanging upside down from a tree branch.

I tried to reach up and grab at the rope around my ankle, fingers scrabbling uselessly at the knot, but the angle was wrong and the tension was too great. On top of that, my own weight was working against me.

“No.” I said it out loud, uselessly. Blood was already rushing to my head. “No.”

I twisted and writhed, but nothing I did made the slightest bit of difference.

I was totally fucked.

Tears came then; ones that barely made a sound because I simply didn’t have the breath to sob. They fell upward from my perspective, dropping toward the ground as I dangled there.

The tree line was still. Silent. Then… it wasn't any longer.

A masked man stepped out of the woods, moving with slow, deliberate confidence. His mask was white in the moonlight, eerily featureless, and a huge ax hung loosely from his right hand.

I instantly stopped crying. Not because the terror had passed, but because some primal part of my brain understood that crying wouldn’t do anything to help me now.

The man stopped walking. Just stood there in the clearing, watching me twist in the air like an animal caught in a trap.

He slowly tilted his head, regarding me with something that might’ve been curiosity. Then he reached up and took the mask off.

The face beneath it was one I knew very well. One I'd seen across the dining hall every day. One I’d worked with several times. One I’d wanted and despised at the same time.

Dark hair pushed back from his forehead. Square jaw. Eyes that caught the moonlight the same way the ax blade did; flat and silvery-blue, giving nothing away. He was soaked in blood so dark it almost looked black.

He started walking toward me again. Slow. Steady. Ax swinging loose in his grip.

“I knew it,” I said, voice shaking. “I knew it was you.”

He said nothing.

Then the ax came up, and he swung it right at me.