Bring Him Back

Prologue

Deep in the snowy pine forest, a young girl was running barefoot for her life.

She was almost fifteen. Her name was Kristina Braun, but for the last several months, she’d barely been aware of her own identity.

They had taken it from her.

They would strip your soul away, if you let them. They would steal your mind.

They. She had no idea who it was who’d been holding her captive for so long and doing all these horrible things to her. She only knew that she must get away — and now, suddenly, after all these months of pretending to go along with them while secretly planning her escape, her one chance had finally come.

Except that they had no intention of letting her get away so easily. As she stumbled wildly through the snow, tree branches whipping her face and her bare arms torn by brambles and thorns, she could hear the voices of her pursuers close behind.

‘I see her!’ yelled one of them. An instant later, there was a muffled crack and something thwacked into a pine trunk just a few inches from her. Not a bullet, but some kind of dart. All she could do was keep on running. The trees seemed to thin out ahead. Could there be a road? Could there be a village?

Then, suddenly, there was nowhere to run. She skidded to a halt, teetered on the edge and almost fell, sending a shower of powdery snow down the sheer face of the ravine to the wooded valley far below. There was no road. No village. Just the stark, wintry emptiness of the mountains and forests all around her.

Shuddering with cold and fear, Kristina glanced desperately around her for another escape route. It was too late. The voices of her pursuers seemed to come from all sides. They’d cut her off.

She turned back to face the edge of the ravine. The freezing mountain wind whistled about her.

She knew what these people would do to her if they caught her, if she let them take her back to that awful place. The same thing they’d done to Angie. Perhaps something even worse.

No. She wasn’t going to let that happen.

Kristina closed her eyes. Visualised the faces of her parents. These last months she’d often thought about how frantic and desperate they must be, wondering where she was, sometimes hoping she’d come back, perhaps sometimes thinking they’d never see her again.

And now she knew for sure they never would.

Kristina said goodbye and stepped out into the void.