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spite, she might have come across the way
she really felt. Rather, her whatever came out like a
yawn.
    Sunday crossed by Stephen’s bed to reach the
one beside it, sticking her tongue out at him as she momentarily
blocked the TV. He snickered. Big bad werewolves weren’t so scary.
Not to her anyway. They were just annoying. These , in
particular, had done little more than get in the way of her bodily
functions, her hunger, and her desire to hunker down under a warm
comforter and snooze.
    As soon as she was within a foot of the empty
bed, Sunday pivoted in a perfect 180-degree turn and flopped
listlessly onto the bed. She grunted as soon as her body hit the
mattress. She proceeded to remove her battered Chucks and pull down
the sandpaper-like comforter until she found the sheets beneath
them.
    Before the other two werewolves made it back
to the room, she turned her back on the Alpha laying on the other
bed and nestled under the covers. Her feet were cold and the air in
the room was dry. It was well-suited to the hot-blooded wolves, but
not to her. As usual, Sunday found herself either too hot or too
cold for comfort. She shuddered inside her cardigan wishing she had
the energy to ask the werewolf to turn on the heater.
    Just as she was falling asleep, the door
slammed, and she startled into awareness. The other two had
returned to the room. With them all finally gathered into the same
room, Sunday rolled over not so much to look at them, but so that
they could hear the little bit that she wanted to say.
    “I’m not afraid of you,” she said in a
half-mumble. She rubbed her eyes as the men watched her—men or
monsters, or both. “I knew you were coming and I know that you’ll
leave me soon.”
    She turned back and snuggled into the pillow.
Within a minute, she was asleep.

CHAPTER
FIVE
    Sunday was
blindfolded and tied up. She was also lying naked, stripped
entirely of her privacy along with her clothes. She was an awkward
fourteen year-old with a long body and long limbs. She was gawky
and nervous even when boys looked at her and she sensed that they
liked what they saw. Sure, Sunday had all sorts of powers and was
all kinds of rebel, but she was also fighting tooth and nail to
stay strong in the face of what was the proverbial ‘big bad witch’
in all the fairy tales, and to keep from bursting into tears of
embarrassment and shame at her own nudity.
    After too many minutes to count, the door
creaked on its hinges and the stagnant humidity in the room was
sucked out like a vacuum. The sudden chill of an AC vent from just
outside the room blew in, and Sunday shivered. Click. Click.
Click. Click . Steps on the bare cement floor made their way
toward her. When the clicks stopped, the door was shut behind
them.
    Even robbed of her vision, Sunday sensed the
strength of the witch’s aura as she entered the room. She knew that
if she wasn’t careful that magic would flood her psyche. There was
no way that she would condescend to this witch’s power. She was too
young, though, and too immature in her gifts. Without Maggie’s
intercession, she’d blacked out more than once when she’d practiced
letting the world seep in. Opening up, even just to get a clearer
picture of her captor, would inevitably lead to her own loss of
control.
    “Have you no fear? Do you not know why it is
that you have been brought to us?”
    The woman’s voice was tight and clipped, but
she wasn’t angry. It was more a lecture of rhetorical questions
than an interrogation. This was the same voice that had greeted her
in Seattle when the werewolves handed her off. This was Bernadette;
and, of Bernadette, Sunday knew nothing.
    Sunday didn’t answer. Maybe it was the rebel
in her that didn’t want to do what she was asking merely because
she asked it. Maybe it was the blind optimist in her that knew she
could get away with not answering. Either way, Sunday didn’t have
anything to say to the woman.
     
    “You did not run from the men who sought