Carefully guarding her expression so she didn’t compound her friend’s worry, Nikki Harmon knelt on the cool stone floor and touched Haley’s arm. “Is there any change?”
Haley shook her head. Her gray-blue eyes remained fixed on the still figure of her sister. Selina lay sprawled across Haley’s lap, her features lax, face unusually pale. “She hasn’t moved.” Fear and dread trembled through Haley’s voice as she lifted her head and met Nikki’s gaze. “She’s barely breathing. It’s never been this bad before.”
“She’ll come out of it. We always do. She just needs more time.” Nikki did her best to sound encouraging, but Haley was right. It had never taken this long to recover from whatever the aliens did to them.
As near as Nikki could figure, they had been in this dank and dreary cell for about three weeks. The room was constructed entirely of gray stone. It had no windows and only one door. There was a small barred opening in the door, but it only revealed the corridor, which also had no windows. Dim illumination, the source of which Nikki still couldn’t identify, remained constant. They were fed at odd intervals when their captors remembered to feed them at all. Mercifully, there was a tiny bathroom adjoining the cell, but the only showers were at the end of the hallway.
The day they arrived, Nikki regained consciousness first. She rolled to her hands and knees, ready to take on the unseen enemy, but that’s as far as she got. The room spun sickeningly, and she nearly passed out again. For several minutes, she just knelt there and breathed through the nausea. Then she spotted Haley. Haley had been placed on a cot to Nikki’s right. Nikki crawled over to her and shook her shoulder lightly.
“You okay?” Nikki asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. Where the hell were they? Why would anyone kidnap them? Her shop was leased, and art supplies sold there weren’t worth that much. Haley and Selina’s lives were just as ordinary. This had to be some sort of mistake.
Haley groaned but didn’t answer. She was breathing regularly, so Nikki looked around for Selina. Haley’s older sister lay on the other side of the room on a mattress that rested directly on the stone floor. Nikki managed to get her legs beneath her, but before she could take a step, the room tilted. She sank to the edge of the cot and waited for her head to clear. Persistent pounding replaced the vertigo. What in God’s name had she been given to make her feel this miserable? Her mouth tasted like metal, and her head throbbed as if she were in the grip of a migraine.
Before she could muster the strength to regain her feet, the door swung open, and a man strode into the room followed closely by a woman. Nikki’s foggy mind refused to register what she was seeing. It simply made no sense.
The man was huge, not just basketball-player tall but heavily muscled. He was also armed to the teeth with weapons that looked...unreal. In fact, everything about him was odd. In contrast to his beady eyes, the rest of his features were so pronounced that he didn’t seem human. Was he wearing a mask or elaborate prosthetics? This was Sedona, not LA. His skin appeared textured and sallow, again not at all human.
Shaking away the irrational conclusion, Nikki looked at the female. Her shoulder-length hair was coppery, eyes bright orange. One side of her hair was tucked behind a distinctly pointed ear. Was there a cosplay convention nearby? She was as ethereal as the man was brutish. Were they supposed to be the same species? Species? Why had that word popped into her mind? They were misguided humans in elaborate costumes. Nothing more.
“What the hell is going on?” Nikki snapped. Her head immediately protested the exertion, so she pressed her hands to her temples and took several deep breaths. “Whoever put you up to this was way off base. It’s not funny. In fact, it’s criminal.”
“Which one of you is Nichole Harmon?” the female asked in heavily accented English.
An elf and an alien? It sounded like the start of a bad joke. “Who wants to know?”
“Are you Nichole Harmon?” the elf persisted.
Even with elaborate makeup, Nikki could see the elf’s features well enough to know they had never met before. So how had the elf learned her name? Okay, that wasn’t hard. Her name was on the front window of