Prologue

I had always been the quiet kid; I hardly spoke. I kept my head down and my opinions to myself, letting my own thoughts fester and irritate my brain in silence. Ironically, I declared a communications major for myself, but only because Dad thought it would be good for me. I graduated high school two years early with no friends, no job, no extracurriculars, and no picture of myself in the yearbook. I went from a nobody in high school to a nobody in online courses. My professors ignored my questions, my emails, and even my assignments sometimes. Dad was always distracted. Mom was gone. It was as if I was a ghost among the living.

I didn’t know it yet, but I wasn’t just a loner; I was a target. I had no one. No one waiting for me. No one looking for me. No one wondering where I was, what had happened, or when I’d be back. I left home in the dead of night, when Dad was fast asleep and the roads were empty. With a single backpack’s worth of clothes and all the savings from my college fund, I slipped into the night in hopes of creating myself anew. A brand new, shiny me. But I wasn’t the only one who wanted to enact my metamorphosis.

One moment, I was barreling down a dusty, abandoned highway walled in by sand and cacti as far as the eye could see, and the next, I was plunging off the road with four flat tires, a spike strip in my rearview mirror, and a white van waiting just over the hill. I didn’t crash, thankfully; I only spun out. No injuries, just disorientation. And that was all they needed. Those monsters were at my car doors before I could get my eyes to steady themselves, punching in the glass and pulling me out like a NASCAR driver trying to bail. My wrists and ankles were bound in leather, my mouth was gagged with my own shirt, and a heavy black hood was thrown over my head. I hit the floor of the van with a hard thump before a sharp pinching pain erupted from my neck, and everything turned black.