While the girls all look at each other, my phone buzzes in my shorts pocket.Lauren grabs my shorts off the floor and extracts my phone from the front ...ocket. "It's Kelly," she says, holding the phone up so I can see."Let it go to voicemail," I answer, raising a smile from my little s!ster. Shit. What am I doing here with these high school girls? Eighteen or not, they're all too young for me. Before we can get back to what we were doing, the phone buzzes again."It's a text," Lauren says, reading. What did you two do?” he asked, looking directly at Helen.“You weren’t wrong. We are running, but not because we did anything wrong. I maintain that you need to know as little as possible, but,” she trailed off, eyes fixated on the main screen.The massive circle was gathering energy at each of its corners. Energy arched from one pylon to another. In the middle of the circle, a beam of light grew wider, slowly expanding towards the pylons pointed at it. Blue beams of light jumped from the pylons. She always was. I waited for about twenty minutes until she finally stepped into the kitchen doorway. Amber was wearing a long dark, bright orange beach dress that came down to her ankles. The dress had printed various sizes of butterflies on it that were a multitude of color shades from purple to pink. The dress was cinched at the waist by a wide, tan leather belt that had ropes with fancy fringes on the ends and tied into a perfect looping bow. The dress formed to her body, and being. She smiled when she saw me, but I sensed that it was a smile meant to elicit discomfort rather than reassurance. “We’re going to have fun playing with you tonight.” Conrad moved back, and invited me to walk inside. Reluctantly I looked behind me as the cool October air swirled around me and rustled leaves along the grass. I don’t know what I was looking for, in retrospect. Maybe I was hoping for a sign, or maybe I was just stalling for time. Yet the limo had already pulled away and there was no.