Page 57 of The Alien's Vicious Starflash Manor

“Lara Evans.”

“We see you.”

“What are you doing so far from home?”

“Oh, little girl.”

“Come out to see us.”

Kila sat up with a start, then froze as the voices continued their taunting, singsong words, swirling and moving around us.

“What is that?” the raya hissed.

“I have no idea.” I tried to sound tough, unafraid, but my voice quavered and dropped to a whisper. “Nothing good.”

“Well, that much seems obvious.” Despite her sarcastic words and tone, Kila gathered the neckline of my sweater into her hands and pulled it closer around her, holding it up under her chin.

As we continued to avoid answering the creepy voices out in the woods, they began to grow angrier— singing less and snarling more. “You can’t hide from us forever, you know.”

“Keep playing, little girl. It’ll be fun.”

“We always take our prey in the end.”

I shuddered, wondering if these things, whatever they were, could get to us. I never answered them, huddling in the dark and deciding Kila and I were safe as long as we stayed tucked away in this hollow.

We stayed like that for hours, the voices trying various ploys to draw us out.

“We can show you the way home.”

“We can take you to your world.”

When that didn’t work, one of the voices changed, grew higher and lighter. It became Izzy. “Lara? I miss you. Roland hurt me. Won’t you come save me?”

Then a different voice. “Come with us and you’ll be safe.”

I knew it was a lie, and yet part of me yearned toward it. The replica was so perfect, so much Izzy, that it was all I could do to keep from scrambling out from under the fallen log and throwing myself through the dark toward the voices. But then Kila hissed, “No matter who it sounds like, that’s not who it is. Don’t move.”

“It sounds like Izzy,” I said, my shoulders slumping.

“It’s not your sister.”

I knew that, and yet it was comforting to hear it from someone else—someone I trusted.

“Do you think they’ll still be here when the sun rises?”

I gave a tiny shrug, not wanting to dislodge Kila from her perch on my shoulder. “No idea. I hope not. If the sun does drive them away, we’ll need to get as far away from here as possible.”

“What if they follow us?”

“As far as I know, I didn’t come across anything like them when I headed the other direction in these woods. Maybe they have a specific territory…or a range or something?”

“But we don’t know how far we have to go to get out of that range.”

Kila was right. I knew our best chance of survival was to turn around and head back to Frost Manor as soon as possible.

But I wasn’t ready to admit defeat yet.

“They haven’t attacked us,” I pointed out. “Maybe we have to go to them or something, and that’s why they keep trying to get us to come out.”

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