Gemini

Chapter 11.1

Water dripped somewhere nearby. She opened one eye. When darkness, just the way it would be in Farvin's room, greeted her, she frowned. Out of the six of them, Farvin being light-sensitive always slept in a pitch-dark room. Riga and Sahara's room always had a light on and the room she shared with Anita sometimes had a light on and sometimes had no light.

Then the awful smell of mould and rotten flesh assaulted her. She knew it was rotten flesh for she had once brought a piece of chicken and had forgotten to cook, making the refrigerator stink for a week. But underneath the rotten scent was a sharp hint of fresh blood.

She opened another eye. And no matter how much she tried, she could not see anything before her. After a few minutes, she made a faint outline of a ceiling and metal lines that ran across it.

When she had been kidnapped, she thought it was all a play, a hallucination of hers. Even when she heard their voice, she never gave it another thought. She just thought that she had been dreaming and all would end when she woke up.

She woke up, and the nightmare did not end. If anything, it had become all the more real.

Who in the right mind would kidnap her? She was neither someone important nor someone who was the lover of someone important. She was just someone who had been going back to the same boyfriend even after breaking up thrice with him. Perhaps, she should just find someone important so that her kidnapping might actually have some meaning.

Though she was treated as the princess of her family, she was from a middle-class family and as much as she knew that her parents would raise the ransom, she knew how hard it would be for them to raise it.

She frowned again. If her kidnapping was not a dream, then was-

"You woke," Kriti said in a calm voice. "Finally."

Monisha licked her lips and tried to give her a crooked smile. "You should have kissed me awake if I had been sleeping too long."

She could not find out her friend's features in the dark, but if anything, she knew that Kriti would be rolling her eyes at her. After all, Kriti kissed only one princess and that girl was not here with them.

Monisha cleared her throat. "Okay... since you have been awake for a long time, what did you find? Why have they kidnapped us?"

In the minute of silence, she wondered if Kriti was terrified. But this was Kriti, someone who dared to walk at night in the city alone.

"That," Kriti's voice had a shake. "That we are in a completely different continent and... no gi- females who had ever come here left out alive."

"Or-organ trafficking?" Monisha asked. "And what do you mean by no female left alive? You spoke to someone else? Does that mean we are not the only ones left? Where are-"

"She asks a lot of questions, doesn't she?" a new voice asked.

Monisha pursed her lips and turned her head in the direction from where she heard the new voice speak. "You are?"

"Always with the questions," the owner of the voice said.

"She is Jair," Kriti said. "She is... a half-vampire and a half-werewolf."

She had been the one with the paranormal books and movies in their apartments. She had been the one to convince them the existence of werewolves and vampires. But she still maintained the rationality to know that they did not exist.

It was not physically possible for them to exist.

But now, Kriti was telling her that the one she spoke to was a half-vampire and a half-werewolf? What next would she say witches existed? That zombie invasion was just a year away?