Pastel

Sullivan looked over the crowd, positive his message was finally hitting home. "Though the old, instinctive, and long held tradition of fearing humans may still be present in our minds, I will stand here until I die in saying that this child is in no way a threat to any of us."
"I'm not a child," a voice spoke out from the crowd.
The world froze.
There, sticking her head and hands out of an open manhole, smeared with mud and grease, with a smug expression on her face, was the human girl.

Mary Green has done everything in her power to make it on her own in life. At age fifteen, she's already getting ready go to college with a full ride scholarship in a major that will guarantee her a stable and prosperous life. But when she learns of a new haunting detail surrounding the fire that killed her parents, and discovers for the first time in her life that she was taken in the night as a child, her obsession over the unsolvable mystery consumes her mind and her life, to the point where she becomes willing to do anything, leave behind everything, to solve it, unaware that the answer is just behind her closet door.

Cover art by Chibionpu (Nicole) on DeviantArt.

A little note--
Even though I hired an editor to help me go through and find as absolutely as many mistakes as possible, there are probably a few that got past the both of us, but only tiny grammatical mistakes. I wish I could have 20 different copy editors go through my manuscript (like what published authors have done after a contract is given) and polish my work to absolute perfection. But since not, if you see little tiny mistakes here and there, please ignore them, and I hope they don't take away from the experience of reading :)