Her footsteps sounded off the walls of the alley. The sound of the sharp clacks of her heels against the pavement echoed through the alleyway and somehow it conveyed a hurried sort of nervousness and a rush of adrenaline through her veins. And she didn't know why she was so anxious. She was used to walking alone at this time of night. But something had happened that night; the star-strewn indigo sky was suddenly pitch black and lightless, the stars, the full moon, the misty streetlamps at either end of the alley had vanished. The distant rumble of cars and the whisper of the trees had gone. The balmy evening was suddenly piercingly, bitingly cold. She was surrounded by total, impenetrable, silent darkness.
As that thought occurred she wheeled around and stared back down the distance she had just walked, but it appeared to be completely deserted.
She walked on, hardly aware of the route she was taking back home, but she had pounded these streets so often that her feet carried her home automatically. Every few steps she walked, she glanced back over her shoulders.
Eighteen years old Jade walked nervously, she wasn't as fearless, but the area was deserted; there was no reason for her to worry so much. Still, something tonight was making her skin tingle and the hairs at the back of her neck stand up. She shuddered against the cold and picked up the pace, grateful that the local bar is only a few blocks down from where she was walking.
The mouth of the alley opened up just a few more steps away, and she hurried her pace to a jog, feeling just a little foolish for being so scared of nothing. She wasn't in one of the busiest towns in California, and they had the greatest sheriff; she had no reason to be so paranoid, it's where she had been living for the past few years. But why did she feel like she was being followed? Silly, stupid girl. Nothing happened to anyone in this boring abandoned old smelly place filled with nothing but stray cats and drunks.
She turned right down the narrow alley; it was empty and much darker than the streets it linked because there were hardly any streetlamps or open windows. She continued to walk down the alley; her footsteps were muffled between garage walls on one side and a high fence on the other. There was a cold plunging sensation in her stomach.
A loud shrieking voice made its way from the far beginning of the alley that made her heart drop and her stomach turn over, she gave an odd, shuddering gasp as though she had been doused in icy water, and she jumped and almost fell over. She backed into the wall of the alley to prevent whoever or whatever's out there from seeing her, at the same time pulling from the waist band of her faded acid-washed ripped jeans a small pocket knife as if she was unsheathing a sword. She stood stock-still as she was pointing her pocket knife towards the empty darkness to where the sound came from. And as soon as her pale bluish gray eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that she was pointing her wand at a cat that had just jumped onto a trashcan making several cans and glass bottles crash against the concrete pavement.
She let out her breathe and sighed heavily, she kept her knife as she continued to walk to her destination, she rushed her pace into a run until she reached the end of the alley, she stopped put her pocket knife back in her waistband, looking around and breathing a sigh of relief. That was her mistake. It was the last breath she ever took before something large and heavy made contact with the side of her head, lifting her off of her feet and slamming her fragile boney body against the greasy wall of the alley.
"Its a symbol, it means they're coming."
"Who?"
"An Alpha pack. And they're not coming, they're already here."