Summary: Three best friends. Never separated. Until now. One of them has been kidnapped by an elf queen, and the other two have until Monday morning to get him back, or lose him forever...

Chapter One

"He's the proper age, your Highness."

"He can't be...this can't be...my son..."

"He is. And the prophecy, majesty..."

"I know. The prophecy. Get him. Take him from there. Bring him to me. Do not let him escape."

***

Have you ever had an exact week to do something? Anything that you felt was much too important to only have a week to do it? Preaching to the choir here. I've always felt that having only one week to do something was a little hard. I mean, I may be a very sloth-like person, but still.

Take a report, for instance. You can't write a report in seven days. Or rescue someone. And, surely, you can't have a quest in seven days. Right? And you cannot, certainly, fall in love in seven days.

Right?

My name is Renee. I'm fifteen years old, and a celebrated procrastinator. I know, I know. I'm in high school now, I can't put everything off anymore. That's what I told myself when I first entered ninth grade. I was going to stop procrastinating but...I still put everything off. Oh, well.

I guess it all started before I was even born. But I can't just start telling everything from the beginning, can I? No story can start, truly, from the beginning. I'll have to start on Monday, when everything started.

I have two best friends. Darnell DeMead and Tad Marriot. Darnell lives next door to me. I've lived next door to Darnell my entire life. Or, at least, it seems that way. I think we met when we were about three.

Darnell and I aren't so different. We're both kind of quiet, and we don't say much to people we don't know very well. The two of us as friends was always a weird combination, because we only talked to each other. I guess we understood one another. But we were always quiet, and that didn't take us far...until we met Tad.

On Monday morning, I walked to Darnell's house. Since he lives next door, it was not a large feat. I knocked on the door and waited. I always go to his house first in the mornings, then to Tad's, then to school.

He came outside with a piece of toast still in his mouth, and he was pulling on his backpack as he shut the door behind him. He glanced at me, grinned around his mouthful of toast, and said, "aya."

"Aya?" I repeated blankly.

"Hiya," he corrected himself, swallowing his toast. "Sorry." He grinned, and I grinned back. Darnell is probably the perfect epitome of a "nice guy." He has light hair and blue eyes, under a pair of thin, wire framed glasses.

I sighed. "Is today the day we're going to ditch Tad for good?" I'd been asking Darnell this since the day Tad joined the two of us.

"I'm game if you are," was his reply.

We walked down the sidewalk, talking about last night's physics homework. It was an autumn day, and the street we were walking down has a lot of trees that are lined up neatly, like soldiers, and shedding leaves of different colors.

"Darrrneeeeeellll!" came a cry from out of nowhere, and from one of the stupid, soldier trees came a small, bounding thing that landed in front of us on two feet and stood up striaghtly.

Small, skinny, nine years old, the terror was named Mina. Mina was a neighbor girl who, ever since she moved in two years ago, has been obsessed with Darnell. She hugged him excitedly around the waist. "Darrneeelll," she said lovingly.

Mina wore overalls, and a striped shirt. Her blonde, shoulder-length hair was pressed against Darnell's stomach, and she had dark brown eyes. Almost black eyes. Kind of like the pits of hell. Kind of like her personality.

Darnell gasped. "Mina, can't breathe."

She let go of him instantly. "Aieee, Darneeeell! Are you okay?" she asked, sympathetically. "I'm really sorry, y'know."

I sighed. "Mina, we have to go to school," I said in a tired tone.

Mina spun around to face me. Like most little kids, Mina can't turn around like a normal person. She puts her arms out, and turns around in a huge circle before coming to a complete stop and glaring. "I just was saying hello!"

Suddenly, out of nowhere, almost as surprising as Mina's appearance, came Tad. "He looks like he always did. Tad has black hair and dark eyes and is usually smiling, but he wasn't at the moment.

"Well, you can say hello another time!" he said dramatically to Mina as he walked in between Darnell and I and threw his arms around our shoulders.

"Back off!"

"You back off!"

"Tad, let's not get into a fight with a nine-year-old, okay?" Darnell said nervously, hurrying him along before he could strangle Mina.

"Did you do the geometry homework last night?" Darnell asked as we walked towards the school.

Tad and I both sighed. Though I was the essential "nice one" of our trio, I was in no way the smart one.

"I don't know when we're ever going to use last night's homework," Tad said tiredly.

I rolled my eyes at this. "Tad, it was a square."

Tad grinned at me. "Well, if you can give me one good advice for when I'm going to need the periwinkle of that thingie, let me know."

"The square's perimeter?" Darnell echoed, sounding plainly horrified.

"That's what I said. The perithingie of the useless thingamabob," Tad said sternly.

"It's a square, Tad," I told him, with a smile.

"Well, it's useless," Tad informed me, when suddenly, the sky seemed to darken. The wind also seemed to begin to whirl, and everything seemed scary. We all looked up at the sky curisouly, and Tad pointed at me. "This is it!" he shrieked. "Now you will get your just rewards for you and your heathen shapes of doom!"

"It's a square, Tad!" Darnell and I both screamed

Suddenly, from behind Darnell, a shape grabbed him and held something to his head.

"Darnell!" I screamed, and Tad stopped his ritual dance to save our souls and turned to look.

"Don't move," the figure whispered, and suddenly, I could see the gun he was holding to Darnell's head. "Don't...move."