I've (probably unwisely) decided to start yet another OC fanfiction (and yes, I am planning on finishing all of my other stories as well as this one!)

So, I know that the Will/Tessa/Jem dynamic is very beautiful and something you don't see often in books, if at all. I absolutely adored it...which is why I'm throwing an OC into the mix. ;) I've had her floating around in my head for a while, and I wanted to write a Jem/OC fic even before I read Clockwork Princess.

The classic girl-from-the-future-gets-sent-back-in-time is a very overused premise, I know (since I've written more than one of them) but as with all of my stories, I want to make this one different, and I hope that others will enjoy it.

It begins a couple of weeks before the events of Clockwork Angel, and will follow through Clockwork Prince and part of Clockwork Princess—but turns AU in some parts. Since I'm going to be telling it from my OC's perspective, it won't be a complete retelling of canon, and although some conversations and events will stay the same, others will be different. If you're interested in that, please give it a chance!

Now, I apologize for the length of this chapter and the lack of Jem or Will, but I want to flesh out my OC as much as possible before the "real" story begins. Let me know what you think!

DISCLAIMER: Abby and her mother are the only characters I own.

"Time is too slow for those who wait,

Too swift for those who fear,

Too long for those who grieve,

Too short for those who rejoice,

But for those who love, Time is eternity."

-Henry Van Dyke

Somewhere in California, May 1978

Rain splattered heavily onto the roof of the seedy motel we were staying at, seeping through the cracks in the plaster roof and dripping into the buckets I'd strategically placed under the gaps in the ceiling. The steady drip-drip-drip had been an annoyance at first, but during the night I'd gradually grown accustomed to the sound until I barely registered it anymore.

Above the sound of the rain, I heard the low whoosh of a strong gust of wind, and the building creaked loudly. I pulled the musty blanket up tighter around myself, shutting my eyes while envisioning beaches and palm trees. I wished I knew where my mother had gone.

As soon as I'd gotten home from school the previous day, she had run into my room, wild-eyed, and demanded that I pack my things. We were driving to Los Angeles straight away, she informed me, and there was no guarantee that we'd ever get back home.

"Mom," I'd exclaimed, exasperated, "I know you have a tendency to overreact, but we can't just pack our bags and leave—"

"Abby," she'd said firmly, a determined spark in her blue eyes, "We need to get to an Institute now, and the one in Los Angeles is the closest."

No matter how much I'd insisted to know what was going on, she wouldn't elaborate any further, and I'd been forced to fill my suitcase with clothes and keepsakes, knowing that we'd probably be back within the week. My mother often got strange ideas in her head—from time to time she would swear that someone was following us, and I was used to staying at hotels and motels in different cities around the state until she announced that the danger had passed—so I hadn't taken her seriously at first.

We'd only driven for around three hours when she'd pulled over at a dingy motel in the middle of the desert and announced we were staying the night. I'd certainly stayed in worse places, but this wasn't the best by a long shot. My bed was far too narrow, pushed against the window so that no matter how I drew the curtains, I could still see a glimpse of the parking lot, and the tiny television refused to work. The lamp on the bedside table wouldn't turn on and the water that spewed out of the sink and shower was tinged a revolting brown color. Worse still, I could see a large black spider on the wall above the second bed, but I was too scared to throw a shoe at it in case it fell down, hence the reason I had chosen the bed nearest the window.

My mother had hurried out of the room the second we'd arrived, muttering about how she had to do something important. This I found slightly odd, since she usually locked us in the room and nearly went hysterical if I even tried to open the window, so her prolonged absence was even more unusual. When that was combined with the storm currently raging outside and my exhaustion, I was, to say the least, worried.

A flash suddenly lit up the room and I jerked upright in bed, my heart pounding. But after a moment I realized it had just been lightning, confirmed by the booming crash of thunder that reverberated around the room and nearly deafened me.

After casting a wary glance across the room to make sure the spider was still in the same place, I turned my attention to the dull red numbers of the alarm clock next to the broken lamp: 1:58 AM. My mother had been gone for nearly three hours, and aside from my worry about her and my unease from the storm, I was absolutely starving, since I'd had nothing aside from a few French fries at dinner. To top that all off, my mind was churning over the questions that had been bothering me for hours and that I was still no closer to finding the answer: Why?

I was used to running around and hiding by now, trying to flee an unknown threat, but something about this time felt different. Every time I saw that panicked spark in my mother's eyes, every time she snapped at me to pack my things, I felt my heart slowly sink deeper into my stomach, but this time had been the worst of all. I'd long ago stopped questioning my mother about why she went into her strange hysterics, and although I'd loved the adventure and excitement when I was younger, now I just wanted stability. I had just turned sixteen and dreamt of going to New York City for college in just over two years, where I would hopefully study music at Juilliard. I'd played the piano since I was four years old and had performed in numerous recitals all over San Francisco. Although my hopes of getting into Juilliard would probably never come to fruition, there were nevertheless many other music schools in New York where I could study.

Jerking myself out of my sudden daydream of flawlessly performing a piece of classical music, Beethoven or Mozart perhaps, at a recital in front of hundreds of people, I forced myself to think about less pleasant things, like why my mother had insisted that we go to the Los Angeles Institute. That had been the last place I'd believed she would take us. No, this trip was definitely not like the others. Perhaps whatever she'd been fearing for the past sixteen years had finally arrived. The thought made my stomach clench uncomfortably.

My father, Jonathan Cartwright, was a Shadowhunter who had once lived in the LA Institute with his family. He had met my mother, Grace, a mundane, when he was sixteen—the same age I was now—and they had instantly fallen in love, secretly dating for two years where he'd taught her all about the Nephilim and the Shadow World. My mother had learned how to fight and could recite passages from the Codex just as flawlessly as any Shadowhunter. When they were eighteen, they'd gotten engaged and my mother had requested permission to Ascend, as a Shadowhunter and a mundane could not marry. After three months of deliberation, the Clave had refused his offer and my father had in turn ceased being a Shadowhunter, removing his Marks and choosing instead to live a mundane life with my mother in San Francisco. She became pregnant shortly after their wedding, but their happy life was to be cut short two weeks after I was born. Dad received word that there had been a Greater Demon attack on the LA Institute, his old home, and that his family was losing—badly. Despite the fact that his Marks were gone and he had lost most of his strength and powers, he rushed right to the Institute to help, despite my mother's warnings to be careful. Of course, he couldn't last long against a Greater Demon, and even with a seraph blade he was killed minutes after he arrived.

Since he was no longer a Shadowhunter, he wasn't given a "proper" burial, and so the task was left upon my mother to arrange his funeral and he was buried in a nondescript cemetery several blocks from our house; in fact, I often took a shortcut through the graveyard on the way to school and laid flowers on his grave. When I was younger, I used to talk to him and tell him about the problems I'd had that day and how Mom was doing—at least until I was in eighth grade and a group of boys from school had followed me all the way to the cemetery and laughed at me pretending to talk to my father. Shamefaced, I'd run home in tears and never spoken out loud to my father again—but I did still sometimes speak to him in my mind.

Understandably, my grieving mother blamed the Clave and the Shadow World for Dad's death, and so vowed to remove all traces of it from her memory, discarding any of my father's old possessions that carried some connection to his old life with it.

Of course, she couldn't rid herself of the heritage completely: Nephilim blood was dominant, and so I, her daughter, was technically a Shadowhunter. She did allow the standard newborn protection ceremony to be placed on me so that I would be free of demonic influences, but aside from that she had raised me pretending that I was just a normal child. I would occasionally see past glamours when I was younger, and I would be able to see things that other children couldn't and instinctively know if someone had connections with the Shadow World, but my mother had just shrugged it off and made me believe I was seeing things.

Although I hadn't known it at the time, when I was six years old a member of the Clave had shown up at our house and requested to see me—every six years, Nephilim children who were born of a mundane were offered the chance to become Shadowhunters. Of course, I had heard my mother shouting and I'd hid in my room until the visitor had left. Mom had hugged me and brought me a cookie, saying that it had just been a salesman trying to make her buy something she didn't want.

I'd been satisfied with that explanation, at least until I was twelve. This time I'd opened the door for a tall, broad-shouldered man who introduced himself as Andrew Lightwood. He'd immediately asked me how much my mother had told me about the Shadow World, and my baffled stare must have been answer enough, since he immediately began explaining about my heritage and who my father had been. I'd always believed he'd been killed in a car crash, so the knowledge that he had actually been killed fighting demons was a bit of a shock, to say the least. Normally, I would have dismissed Andrew Lightwood as insane and shut the door, but he seemed to know everything about my parents, and even understood the fact that I sometimes saw strange things. Mom had come inside then, and must have immediately concluded that there was no point in making up excuses anymore, so she allowed him to tell me everything.

Of course, I'd been bewildered at first, and fired off a round of questions—why did my father have to leave the Clave? Did I have to become a Shadowhunter? Why had my mother never told me about what I really was before?—and after Andrew Lightwood had answered them to the best of his abilities, he told me he would give me a week to let the information sink in before I made my decision whether I wanted to become a Shadowhunter or not.

As soon as he'd left, Mom had apologized to me, saying she just wanted to keep me safe and that she didn't want me to be killed in battle as Dad had. She told me that I could choose to become a Shadowhunter if I so wished, however, but that I would be required by law never to see her again.

It didn't take me long to make my decision—I'd never been one to recklessly throw myself into new situations and jump headfirst into a world I knew next to nothing about, so after the week had passed I had kindly but firmly told Andrew Lightwood that I had no interest in becoming a Shadowhunter, that I felt that staying with my mother was more important. He had coolly nodded and informed me that he would return when I was eighteen one last time; after that, the path of Shadowhunting would disappear to me forever. My mother, I could tell, was relieved beyond belief that I had refused to join the Clave, and had done her best to scare me away by telling me horrific stories that had happened to Shadowhunters and how terrible and pure evil demons were. Now that I was older, I knew that most of it had been greatly exaggerated and that she'd just been painting the undesirable side of the life to me, but at the time I'd shied away from anything that reminded me of it. When I'd seen things out of the corner of my eyes or I would be able to sense something that no one else could, I'd become terrified and had blocked it out of my mind, a tactic I still employed even today. During my early teens, I had attempted as best as I could to delude myself that demons and Downworlders didn't really exist, that my eyes just liked to play tricks on me and that I had won the genetic lottery when it came to physical abilities (I'd always been faster and stronger than the other children my age, although I'd never been interested in sports despite the teachers' numerous attempts to convince me to play on their teams). I'd told myself that when my mother dragged me along on these strange trips, she was simply running from the Clave trying to recruit me. When I watched a movie with my friends and a passing mention was made of demons and angels or even vampires and werewolves, my heart always began to pound a little faster and I couldn't look anybody in the eye in case one of them noticed I was acting strange. But I managed to push those thoughts out of my mind and laugh along with the others—most of the time.

Perhaps some part of me had always known that I wouldn't be able to escape the Shadow World forever, that it took hold of a person and irrevocably changed their lives whether they wanted it to or not, if that was truly their destiny, but I had repressed all the signs that pointed to my life eventually becoming intertwined with the angel blood that ran in my veins out of plain fear and desire to have a simple life.

That time, it seemed, was fast running out.

While the storm raged on, I pulled the pillow over my head, burying my face in the scratchy sheets and trying to relax myself enough so that I could fall asleep. But my body refused to give in and begrudge me the rest I so desperately needed. No matter how hard I tried to focus on deep breathing and counting sheep, my brain would jump to yet another question within seconds: Where was my mother? Why had she been gone so long? Was she in danger? Was I in danger? If we did manage to get to the Los Angeles Institute, would my grandmother, who still lived there, take us in? The family of Shadowhunters who left the Clave were strictly forbidden to see them once they became mundanes, under no circumstances. I'd never met my paternal grandmother, although I was named after her. Would she like me, or would she try to force me to become a Shadowhunter and abandon my mother?

My stomach clenched painfully, followed by a rumble that was nearly as loud as the thunder outside. I groaned and wrapped my hands around my midsection, trying to ignore the hunger that was clawing at my insides. That combined with the anxiety and certainty only helped to fuel my dizziness and make me wish that I'd just stayed at home and flat-out refused to follow my mother on one of her irrational, crazy trips.

She'd told me before she had left not to leave the room at all, and like an obedient daughter, I'd listened to her. It was the kind of situation where, in books, the heroine would defy orders and go looking for her mother regardless of whatever danger was lurking outside—but then again, a heroine would also choose to become a Shadowhunter instead of pretending to live as a mundane, and I certainly wasn't a heroine—I wasn't even close. I was just Abby, a painfully shy, gawky girl who had been bullied for talking to her father's grave and who apparently had the blood of an angel running in her veins. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was certain that Andrew Lightwood had made a mistake and had been confusing me with some other girl.

I rolled over for the countless time so that I was facing outward into the dark room. I could just see the outline of the spider on the wall, and prayed that Mom would be back soon, if, for no other reason, that she would be able to kill it. I had always hated spiders and any type of bug—if it crawled, I was afraid of it. This was generally a nonissue in San Francisco, but out here in the desert was probably the worst place for an insectophobe like me to be. Unfortunately, it hadn't been my choice.

Maybe, I thought with a sudden rush of hope, she was out finding food for us, and she'd had to drive a long distance before she came to a corner store. A three-hour drive? my cynical mind reminded me, and I quickly shushed it, instead imagining what types of food she would bring back. Pizza would be ideal, with some cans of soda thrown in…hell, I would even be happy with a chocolate bar or fruit. I wasn't picky at this point.

The thought of food gave me the worst pang of hunger yet, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to lie here starving for the rest of the night. Something told me Mom wasn't going to come back anytime soon, and I was liable to faint or need insulin by morning. I didn't even have water to quench my parched throat.

There was a good chance there would be a vending machine in the motel lobby—if I hurried straight there and back, I would probably be safe. I didn't think there would be very many people walking around in the middle of a thunderstorm, either.

Throwing the covers away from me, I stood up and began to feel my way through the dark room, keeping a wide berth from the spider. I imagined it clicking its pincers evilly as my hand closed around the doorknob to the bathroom and I gratefully ducked inside, flicking on the light and blinking several times in quick succession, trying to wake myself up. When I felt as if my retinas had been permanently burned, I turned on the tap and tried not to think about the brown water as I splashed some up onto my face, staring gloomily at my reflection.

Mom had always told me that I was the absolute spitting image of my father, and judging by the only picture I had of him, I was inclined to agree with her. While Mom was slender and tiny, with bright blue eyes and short brown hair cut into a bob, Dad had been tall and muscular, with a handsome ruggedness to his face. I'd inherited his large, almost permanently surprised-looking brown eyes and long blonde hair that I usually kept tied up into a ponytail. I had always had a layer of muscle on me, no matter how much I sat on the couch watching TV, and my high cheekbones and general facial structure were the same as his had been. Unfortunately, the one thing I hadn't inherited from him was his height—at five feet four, I was stubbornly stuck at average. I was certain that my mother's small stature had balanced that out—perhaps it was the only thing I'd inherited from her.

When I was satisfied that I no longer resembled a zombie, I left the bathroom and slipped over to the main door, hoping that the storm would clear up soon. The lightning appeared to be taking a temporary break, and the only sound now was the rain lashing against the roof. Damn it, I realized, I didn't even have an umbrella.

Well, it looked like I would have to run. Grabbing my purse from where it hung on the rack next to the door, I slung it over my shoulder and yanked open the door, stepping outside into the torrential downpour.

Despite the rain, it was still humid and muggy, and my lungs felt like they were filling up with water as I jogged down the pathway to where a dim light from the main lobby was visible through the sheets of rain. I held my purse up over my head as I dashed past several parked cars toward the light, wondering if this was what sailors felt like when their ships were stuck in hurricanes and they caught sight of a lighthouse in the distance.

To my dismay, our car was still in the same place Mom had parked it. Unless she'd left and then come back without going to our room, she hadn't gone to get food as I'd hoped. Now I was really starting to become scared. She had never left for this long before—should I speak to the clerk at the front desk and ask them to search for her?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark shape moving on the opposite side of the car. My thoughts scattered, I stopped in my tracks, hoping that it had just been a racoon or crow. "Is anyone there?" I asked loudly, but the only sound that answered me was the rain.

Don't panic, Abby, I told myself as I walked around the side of the car. You see things like this all the time. It's just worse now because it's dark and you're alone.

When I peered around the edge of the car, I half-expected something to jump out at me, but to my surprise and relief there was nothing there. Maybe I'd just been imagining things and it was my overtired brain tricking me.

At any rate, it probably wasn't the wisest idea to stay outside any longer, since I was already soaking wet, and I turned my back on the car to hurry through the parking lot to the lobby.

I'd never been so grateful to see the garish, brightly colored interior of a motel lobby in my life. Once I was safely inside, I leaned against the door breathing hard, as if I'd just run a marathon instead of a hundred feet. When my heart had slowed down to its normal pace, I opened my eyes and surveyed the empty room, noting with disappointment that the desk was empty. Had even the desk clerk decided to go home instead of braving out the storm?

"Hello?" I called, taking a cautious step further into the lobby, but there was no answer. I could hear the low hum of the air conditioner in the corner of the room, and my skin erupted in goosebumps at the cold air. First it had been too warm outside, and now I was freezing. Was it not possible to have a happy medium?

My stomach growled, reminding me of my purpose for leaving the relative comfort of my room in the first place. Luckily, I spotted a vending machine across the far wall and immediately started towards it, reaching in my purse for a wallet.

Mom had given me the purse for my thirteenth birthday, and I'd never gone anywhere without it since then. It was small, just enough to fit a few essential items, but so far I'd always managed to fit everything I needed in it. I usually wore it slung across my chest—making it more difficult for potential thieves to get at, as I'd learned in Girl Scouts—and it was dark blue, tonight blending perfectly with my T-shirt and jeans. I rubbed my bare arms with my hands to get rid of the goosebumps, wishing I'd brought a sweater.

I only carried four items in my purse: my wallet, the house key, a picture of my parents and I, and my father's journal. The last two were precious to me; the picture being that it was the only physical reminder I had of my father and the only picture of us together. It was taken the day I was born by one of the nurses at the hospital: my father, beaming, with his arm around my exhausted but triumphant-looking mother, who was holding a swath of blankets in my arms. You could just see my pink, wrinkled face, looking like something that was barely human, but I treasured it anyway. On the back was a description in my mother's handwriting: Jonathan, Grace and Abigail Cartwright, March 7, 1962.

Dad's journal was old, the pages yellowed and creased, but I vowed to keep it forever. Only ten of the pages were written in—he'd started it when my mother went into labour, chronicling my birth and the first fourteen days of my life—and I had memorized every sentence written in his strong, sure hand, running over the letters with my fingers and imagining some bit of his spirit still existed in the pages. The last entry had been written the morning of his death, twelve hours before he died, and my heart contracted every time I read it, wishing I could somehow travel back in time and beg him not to go fight the demon, to stay with Mom and I instead…

The vending machine groaned loudly as it spat out my bag of chips and Coke. I immediately snatched them up and tore open the bag of chips, stuffing three of them into my mouth at once. I was too hungry to wait until I'd gotten back to my room, and besides, there was nobody around to see me eat, anyway.

As soon as the food hit my stomach, I began to regain strength, feeling more optimistic about my current situation. Mom would come back—she always did. Maybe she was staying with another one of the guests who was afraid of storms (she often had our neighbor's young son over when he was home alone and there was a thunderstorm), or she'd borrowed someone's car so that it would make her more difficult to track. It was exactly something that her paranoid mind would think up.

Although the junk food hadn't completely filled me, I wasn't feeling as faint as I had been before, and I was just beginning to realize how tired I really was. If I managed to forget about the spider on the wall, I could probably manage to get to sleep. And if Mom still hadn't returned when I woke up, I would get the car and go looking for her myself—I'd just got my learner's permit, and even if I wasn't legally allowed to drive without a licensed adult in the car, I did, at least, have a rudimentary knowledge of how it worked.

Cheered by these thoughts, I headed out of the lobby and back into the muggy night. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle, and although I could hear the low growl of thunder in the distance, it sounded much farther away and I could even see a break in the clouds, above which a sprinkling of stars shone brightly.

That sight gave me hope, and I was almost smiling as I hurried back through the line of cars to our room, suddenly glad that I hadn't locked the door. Mom had taken the only key with her—a precaution in case I would 'get ideas' about leaving the room, but then again, she could hardly blame me for getting food hours after she'd left.

My eyes scanned over the parking lot briefly as I crossed it—and that was when I saw the dark shape again. This time it was farther away from me, but that didn't make me feel any less panicked. The hope I'd been feeling seconds before immediately vanished as I stared over at the hunched form. It definitely wasn't human, that much I could tell, and it appeared to be standing still rather than moving. I had the unnerving sense it was looking right at me.

I froze in my spot, my heart leaping into my throat, just as a bright flash of lightning lit up the lot, and I found myself staring at nothing. The dark shape had disappeared as soon as the lightning had hit, and someone could be forgiven for thinking they were just seeing things. But I knew better.

Forcing my trembling legs to move again, I ran past the row of doors, slowing only when I heard the tinny sound of a laugh track floating out from one of the rooms. I paused in front of it, suddenly comforted. The knowledge that I wasn't the only soul for miles came as a great relief to me, and I almost knocked on the door and asked whoever was occupying the room if I could stay with them for a while. But I knew that a teenage girl asking a stranger for help in the middle of a deserted stretch of road at night wasn't the safest thing to do, and I liked to imagine that I was braver than that—so, with the knowledge that there was at least one other person I could turn to if I was truly in danger, I continued on, idly lamenting over the fact that their TV worked and ours didn't.

Without looking back across the lot to see if the dark shape was still lurking about somewhere, I pushed open the door to our room and double-bolted the lock, hoping that it was strong enough to hold if someone did try to break in. Noting with another sense of relief that the spider still hadn't moved, I scurried across the room to my bed without reaching for my suitcase to change into a pair of dry clothes and climbed under the covers, shutting my eyes tightly and forcing myself not to think about the fact that my mother was still gone, and if the dark shape I'd seen was somehow connected with her disappearance…

It was still dark outside when I woke up, my cheek scratching against the cheap material of the pillow. My mind was muddled, my thoughts disoriented, and it was with disappointment that the alarm clock stated it was just past four o'clock in the morning: I'd only had an hour and a half of sleep.

At least the storm stopped, I thought grudgingly to myself as my eyes automatically sought out the wall for the spider, before realizing with a start that it was no longer there. My gaze raked across the ceiling and then the floor, unfortunately finding nothing. Well, I supposed that it couldn't stay there forever, but still, I would have liked to know where it had gone.

I turned over in bed so that I wouldn't be tempted to continue looking for it, and just before I was about to close my eyes again I looked up at the small gap between the curtain and the window, wanting to see if I could catch a glimpse of the stars before I went back to sleep.

There was something there, all right, but it definitely wasn't the stars.

One large, slit-pupiled eye was staring through the window at me, its irises unblinking and red.

A scream tore through my throat before I fully realized what was happening: my instincts worked before my mind did, propelling me out of the bed. I was on my feet before my brain caught up with me, grabbing my purse from where it rested on the pillow. I half-expected the window to smash as whatever that…creature…was tried to get to me, but there was no movement at all.

Nevertheless, I continued to back up across the room, running over my options in my head. I couldn't leave the room since that thing was outside, so that meant the bathroom was the only place to hide. But what if it tried to get in and cornered me? I could always grab the shower rod and use that as a weapon.

When I reached the bathroom, I jumped inside and closed the door behind me before turning on the light. Not content just to stand there, I climbed into the bathtub and yanked the shower curtain closed, only to see the spider clinging on to the curtain inches from my hand.

I screamed again and nearly tripped over the edge in my rush to get away from it, but my hand moved too abruptly and the spider fell down onto the tiled floor. I leapt away from it and grabbed the doorknob, watching in horror as it began to scuttle across the floor toward me. It was nearly the size of the palm of my hand and I was close enough to see the individual hairs on its body as it came ever closer.

That was it: I wrenched open the bathroom door and stepped out into the main room, pulling it shut just before the spider could reach me. The crack under the door was too small for it to fit through, and it closed right on one of its legs, the end piece slicing cleanly off and falling onto my shoe.

Sick with terror, I shook it off and backed up onto the wall. I couldn't help but feel a shred of pity of the spider despite my overwhelming fear of them—I'd just hacked one of its legs off and its body had probably smashed against the door. But while it was probably bleeding to death right now, I was being chased by a strange dark shape and had just come face-to-face with a reptilian eye. I would almost rather have been in the spider's position.

No sooner had I thought this than I saw the dark shape for the third time—but this time I sensed rather than saw something moving under my bed. Before my incredulous eyes, a long, scaly leg unfurled itself and stretched out toward me, its claws digging into the carpet.

This time, I didn't scream. I simply whirled around and pulled the door open, not even bothering to slam it behind me as I sprinted outside, tearing across the parking lot and running faster than I ever had before in my life.

In hindsight, it was probably a stupid idea: but the thought of going to ask any of the other guests if I could hide in their rooms or dashing back into my room to find the car key were even worse ideas, so I settled for blindly running away from the creature, despite the fact that it was most likely much faster than me and I was trapped in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but empty road for miles and miles.

My purse thumped against my chest as I skidded onto the road, still running as fast as I could. I had no idea which way led to Los Angeles and which way to San Francisco, but if I managed to reach either of those cities I wasn't going to be picky. If I made it to LA, I would go straight to the Institute and beg my grandmother to let me in, and if I made it back home to San Francisco I would call the police and hide at the house.

But I hadn't made it more than fifty feet before there was an enormous crash behind me and the earth began to shake under my feet, mounds of dirt erupting from the ground and spewing out in front of me. This only prompted me to push myself harder, leaping over cracks in the road and kicking my way through the dirt.

Something slammed into the road directly in front of me and I didn't have enough time to stop—I tumbled down and landed hard on the pavement, my eyes streaming in pain from my skin's sudden contact with the gravel. I rolled over onto my back, searching for whatever had made the explosion—and cried out for the third time in five minutes as I saw clearly what had been chasing me.

The creature was huge and scaly, covered in what looked like black spikes that were oozing some sort of green pus. It had at least five legs, each with a claw that had to be at least ten inches long boring into the ground. Atop its main body were four scarlet eyes—the slit-pupiled eyes I had seen staring down at me from the window. All four of those eyes were turned on me now, and even as I screamed, a shrieking sound assaulted my ears, drowning out my cry and sending waves of pain shooting through my ear canal.

It raised one long leg and started to bring it down, ready to spear me on the spot, but with a rapidity I didn't even know I possessed I rolled sideways, falling into the ditch next to the road just as its claw smashed into the gravel where I had been lying, cracking the pavement in two with an ear-splitting crash.

I scrambled to my feet and began to run away again, ignoring the blood trickling down my arms and legs. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I dimly registered that there was no way I could outrun that thing, but my human survival instinct—fight or flight—had kicked in, and I knew I couldn't just stand in one spot and give up. I had to do something.

The creature's agonizing cry sounded again, and through the wind rushing in my ears I could hear it thumping along after me, each blow of its legs sending a tremor through the earth. It was gaining on me with every step it took, and I had the horrible feeling that it was purposely not moving as fast as it could.

I changed direction abruptly, swerving to the right when I spotted an outcropping of rocks in the distance. If all else failed, I could hide behind one and see if I could use any of the smaller stones as weapons. Maybe if I hit the creature in all four of its eyes, it would become confused and I could manage to run…

A bright blue light burst out in front of me, and I skid to a stop, narrowly missing the sudden shimmering rectangle that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. It looked around six feet tall, and if I hadn't known better I would have guessed it was a doorway. Ethereal blue light glowed and danced inside, and I felt myself drawn to it, as if I was meant to go through.

The horrible screeching of the creature behind me had stopped, and I twisted around to see that it appeared to have become preoccupied with something else, its legs waving and twisting as it lunged at some unknown object. For a moment, I hesitated—was it after someone else?

But my head snapped around as I had a dim voice shriek out from somewhere in the distance: "Run! Abby, run!" It sounded familiar—so familiar, as if I had heard it a thousand times before, but it definitely wasn't my mother's voice, and it couldn't be any of my friends—

But the creature appeared to have heard it too, and it stopped attacking whatever hapless prey it had stumbled upon, and turned back around to face me. This time it didn't bother with running—it whirred into motion, streaking across the desert with a speed that could easily keep up with a sports car.

There was no way I would be able to reach the rocks, much less outrun it, and I would surely be killed if I stayed in the same spot for another second. I only had one chance, and it was completely against anything I would normally have done: as if someone else was inhabiting my mind, as if I didn't have control over my own body, I leapt forward and dove into the flickering blue doorway, feeling my body being sucked and twisted into an enormous, swirling vortex as the world fell away from around me.