Into The Black

SEVENTEEN

A/N: Sorry for the lack of updates (again), however due to the fact that there are only five more chapters of Into The Black I have started the editing process! So I will be uploading again weekly starting today!

Shellie had fainted. After spending almost her entire life in a small house with her father and little other company, she had never had a very exciting life. Which meant that she was nowhere near prepared to hear that someone had supposedly kidnapped her mother and Buttercup. Clay had managed to explain a brief theory before Shellie fainted, and when she woke her mind whirled with information.

Different police forces across the country had found that a series of disappearances through the last century all tied together in one way or another. Shellie and her father however, had been the first people to know two of the people who had disappeared the same way.

The connections were loose, kidnapped during a thunderstorm while alone, no physical evidence pointing to where they went. Each disappearance happened almost exactly six weeks apart, and they all seemed to simply drop off the face of the earth; no sightings, no bodies, no trail of any kind. Still special forces eventually decided it wasn't enough to make a big case out of and each person was slowly forgotten.

Shellie stumbled down the police station steps and cupped her face in her hands. She sat still breathing deeply until until her father drove up in his dented old car. Slowly she stood and pushed her two braids behind her as she walked out to him. The drive back to their property was filled silence. Shellie was deep in thought trying to calm her mind and racing heart.

As they pulled up to their house and parked Shellie felt her eyes brimming with tears. Her father stepped out of the car and looked in at her, waiting for her to get out.

"Shellie? You're going to get cold out here honey."

"They showed me her file. Mum's too. What if they were kidnapped by the same people?" Tears pooled at the rims of her eyes. Her father pulled up to their house and parked before turning to her. He reached over the console and hugged her.

"Then we know that your mother will protect Buttercup." Shellie sniffled and used the back of her hand to wipe the tear drops off of her cheeks. Slowly she unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. Her father took her arm and they shuffled into the large old house.

Shellie felt slightly angry at herself for crying. She thought she should be put trying to connect more dots to find her mother and Buttercup. At the same she felt filled to the brim with fear and sorrow. One thought nagged in the back of her mind.

Her father had never given up trying to find Shellie's mother but he had never really believed he would. Now the same doubt was trickling into Shellie. That one thought came flooding in with it.

Shellie wasn't sure that she believed in an afterlife of any sorts, but she'd never wanted to more.