A/N: Realizing that I still had just the preview of this one up I'm putting up what I've done so far on the story. It's still on update hiatus...for now but now you can more of the story...sorta like a teaser...is that mean? No need to comment on this one...

Chapter One

Angel woke with a start. Something was wrong, very wrong. It took her a while to recognize what it was that had wakened her up. It was a small sound coming from down stairs. It was a slight rustling sound. Perhaps it’s coming from outside, maybe some forest creatures were messing around in the garbage again. She laid back down and closed her eyes; the sense of wrongness was still there. She sighed a silent groan and climbed out of bed, her bare feet hitting the brand new hardwood floors she, herself, had put in a couple of days ago. As she stood, Angel felt an easy chill go down her back. She looked over at the fireplace in her bedroom and saw that the fire had died out sometime during the night. She was reaching for her robe, when she heard a creak from downstairs. Her breath stilled in her lungs, she dropped her hand back by her side.

Quietly she made her way over to the door of her bedroom. She slowly opened the door so she could peek down the hall. Nothing was there; she stepped out on to the hallway, grateful even more so that she had replaced the old creaking floorboards. She stopped at the top of the stairs when she heard murmuring coming from down below. She leaned farther to see if she could see more. There was a light coming from the direction of her study, she badly wanted to go down the stairs but she had not replaced those floorboards yet. They creaked from the tiniest hint of a touch. She leaned even farther out to hear them better.

“Having any luck?” someone whispered? It sounded like a man to Angel.

“No, you?” another man whispered back.

“No. I told you he wouldn’t be stupid enough to hide it down here. Maybe it’s upstairs.”

“We can’t go up there, she’s still here.”

“So what are you scared of, she just one little girl, I can take care of her while you look for it.”

“You’ve been itching to ‘take care’ of her sense we got assigned this job.”

Angel had heard enough; she didn’t know what they were looking for. She knew however, she didn’t want to wait around and have them ‘take care’ of her. She looked across to her front door. She could make a dash for it but that would mean, going down the creaky stairs, passing the study, getting the door open and getting out before the two men could catch her. She didn’t want to bet her life on whether out not she was fast enough to do all that. She had never been the athletic type. She turned and crept back to her bedroom. Outside her bedroom was a lattice, when she was young she used it to sneak out of the house. She knew she had made the right decision to keep her old childhood bedroom, when she had decided to move back into her grandfather‘s home. She just hoped the lattice was strong enough to hold her. She was bigger then she had been when she had last used it.

She would climb down the window then make a run for the woods. On the other side of them there was a cabin, she had yet to see the owner but the place look well kept. Perhaps there was a phone that she could use to call the police. Se went over to her bedroom window; it opened without much of a noise. It was her who gasped audibly when the cold night air hit her. Her thin nightgown was not much protection against the wind. But she had no time to change; she sat on the windowsill and looked over. It was a two-story drop down to the yard below. Belatedly she remembered she had developed a fear of heights, and was rethinking her plan when she heard a loud creak from the stairs. No time like the present to face fears, right? She swung her legs over the sill and grabbed the lattice, giving it an experimental tug. It held strong, she placed her left foot onto one of the rungs and pushed her whole body out of the window and on to the lattice. After a second of pausing to see if the lattice was going to collapse under her weight she started down.

She was a third of the way down when she heard the shuffling in her bedroom. She looked up towards her bedroom window; perhaps she could still get a look at her intruders. That way she could give a description to the police.

“Where the hell is she?” one of the intruders yelled out. They must have just figured out she was not in her bed.

“Look the window is open. She made a run for it. I told you to be quiet.” A few seconds later, a masked head popped out of Angel’s window. It startled Angel, causing her grip to slip on the lattice. Before she could regain her grip she slipped on one of the rungs and fell the rest of the way to the ground. She landed on the wet grass with a thud. It knocked the air out of Angel’s lungs, stunning her a little. But she quickly recovered her senses and scrambled to her feet. Her right ankle gave a small tinge of protest but she ignored it as she made her way towards the woods.

Angel ran and ran; she ran until she thought she could run no more her lungs were on fire. But she continued to run. She had to make the cover of the woods, then she could find a small hole or ditch that she could hide in.

As soon as she broke through the edge of the woods she swallowed a scream of pain as her bare feet stepped on broken branches; but she continued to run. She did not know how long she had been running when she came across a fallen log that laid across a rather deep ditch. She crouched down and held her breath. She was quite certain that the two men would not have followed her far into the woods. But she was not willing to test that idea. Then she had a twig snap under someone’s shoes, she crouched down farther into the ditch.

“Did you see which way she went?”

“No, but she couldn’t have gone far.”

“Let’s go back to the house. She has to resurface soon. There’s no where to go. There’s not another neighbor for miles. We’ll look for her in the morning. It’s cold out here.”

“Yeah, we’ll look for her in the morning.”

Angel stayed crouched down in the ditch long after she had stop hearing the breaking of the branches. Then she cautiously made her way out of the ditch and continued to run towards the empty cabin. She did not know what she was going to do afterwards but she really did not care, the only thing in her mind was her need to get herself to the cabin.

Again Angel had lost all sense of time, but she breath a sigh of relief when one side of the cabin came into view. She quickly made her way to the front of the cabin then stopped dead in her track. The cabin no longer looked empty.