I was five feet, eleven inches tall. I rarely looked up to a man. Most often, I was eye-level or looked down at them.
But I was eye level with their chests.
Were they truly close to seven feet tall, or did I have too much scotch?
“Calm, female,” the man said in an accent I couldn’t place, but in a soothing voice that made me want to relax.
Did he deadass refer to me asfemale?I narrowed my eyes at them, flicking my gaze over to study the second man.He had blond shoulder-length hair and a very light eye color.
And pointy ears.
They both did.
What the fu?—
“You have three seconds to get off my property,” I told them in a stern tone. Adrenaline surged through my body, and the sound of sand rushing in my ears made me realize how much danger I was in.
I was completely alone.
At the docks.
“You need to come with us,” the blond man said in a bored tone. He looked me up and down with a look of dismissiveness. As if he were inconvenienced by being on my boat, he demanded that I go with them.
I snorted at them, “Absolutely not.”
Then I noted their pointy ears again. Their clothing. It was dark, so I couldn’t catch all the details, but they wore leather chest pieces and thigh coverings. Their long-sleeved shirts and pants looked…odd.
A European style, maybe?
Perhaps that’s why they had accents, but I couldn’t placewherein Europe they were from. I was determined to figure it out. If anything went down, I would need to remember as many details as I could about them when I filed a police report.
With their fake-pointy ears, I wondered if they were actors of some kind? There was a Renaissance fair thing forty minutes north up in Buena Park. Perhaps they came from there? But I couldn’t recall for sure, because I wasn’t tapped into Live-Action-Role-Play culture.
They had black, thin scarves around their neck. It almost looked like a headpiece I’d seen snowboarders wear under their masks, which didn’t bode well for me. If they had those facial coverings, but were showing me their faces now, it probably meant that they didn’t plan on me being around to identify them after this.
Shit.
“Please,” the brunet said, lifting his hands up higher to prove a point. “We don’t want trouble, just come with us.”
I frowned, glancing at my bag a foot away.
“Why?” I asked, stalling.
The blond man rolled his eyes. “Because we have orders.”
The brunet threw the blond an annoyed look, before focusing back on me. “I’m afraid we have to bring you with us—but please trust that we don’t want to hurt you.” Was I more valuable to them without bruises or cuts, or scrapes? My stomach twisted at the thought.
“You expect me to just go with you?”
“You are coming with us whether you want to or not, human,” the blond responded with a downturn of his lips. With his words, ice-cold, paralyzing fear started to drip down my spine, coating my bones, stiffening my muscles.
Terror consumed me. My heart was beating too fast; it couldn’t have been healthy.
Usually, I was excellent at regulating my emotions. But I couldn’t grab hold of this sudden panic. The adrenaline from the surge of my anxiety was paralyzing. It gripped me like a vise, making me feel like a ghost watching my own body react.
I’d never experienced dread like this, and I had no idea why this was my body’s reaction to these men. To the blond’s voice.
It made it difficult for me to keep a level head, but something in my chest wanted to just get this over with and go with them. The fear of the unknown was scrambling my nervous system, making it almost impossible to properly formulate a plan to get myself out of this.
