Everlong by Hailey Edwards

tapping idly on the ground while piercing through leaves and mulch on the forest floor.
    Fear tied my stomach neatly into knots. Suddenly, letting an enraged and aroused demon find me in a burrow big enough for two didn’t seem like such a great idea. I cursed the damn fox for leading me into what could become my final resting place and me for being fool enough to follow her. What had I been thinking? Oh yeah, that I didn’t want Jacob to find me out in the open, either.
    He turned so his toes pointed directly towards me, almost at the level of my eyes. I waited, expecting his foot to test the opening or him to drop onto his stomach and explore the entrance just large enough for a frightened demoness to slip inside to seek refuge.
    My hands trembled where they rested on my knees. I shoved them between my thighs and clamped my legs together until the nervous twitching stopped.
    Outside, thunder clapped and rain began again.
    “Madelyn,” said Jacob. “I will find you. And laws or no laws, no one will keep me from you.” Then he roared, “You are mine!”
    My ears rang from the ferocity of his cry, the sound so filled with hate and twisted with desire that it sickened me, terrified me to the marrow of my bones because I knew he believed it.
    I saw muscle shift as Jacob’s Achilles tendon flexed and his toes dug into the ground while rolling onto the balls of his feet. I heard the snap of leather pulling taut, a muttered curse, and then he was gone.
    I could no longer feel my fingers so I loosened my thighs and let my hands quiver fitfully on the tops of my legs. My lungs expanded fully for the first time since entering the guard shack and released a foggy breath that was full of gratefulness to be alive. The bone-biting cold went unnoticed by me as I evaluated my position.
    After living a half-life for so long, I had thought myself ambivalent to its continuance, but when faced with death, I had been afraid. I didn’t want to die. I needed to curse flat tires and run through rain, sand old paint and put up wallpaper, bicker with Emma over silly unimportant things, come and go as I pleased, see…
    I wanted to live. It was as simple as that.
    The corner of my lips kicked up in a grin. Too bad it had taken a face-off with a demon, a figment of my own imagination and the promise of hours trapped underground to convince me life really was worth living.

Chapter Eight
    Shivering, I kept track of time by the faint glow of my Timex wristwatch. Sometime between the start of rippling cramps from a missed lunch and the gradual fade to black of my vision, I decided Figment, the name I had given the fox, had stood me up. Night had fallen and I had to move.
    I doubted the cavalry was on its way or it would have been here by now. Figment either didn’t exist—and I had been crazy to believe a wild animal could somehow bring help—or she did exist and I was…well…slightly less crazy but still trapped with no help looming on the horizon. Not that I would see them at this point. Only the sensation of movement told me when I waved my hand in front of my face. Darkness rendered my eyes totally useless in distinguishing my surroundings.
    Gnawing hunger and the pressure of need to use a restroom gave me two options. I could either stay put and hope Figment returned with Clayton—which seemed far-fetched even inside my own mind—or I could crawl out and then make a run for it in the hope I reached town before Jacob could mark me as his. He could be patiently sitting outside waiting to pounce as soon as I left the safety of this burrow. That notion caused the tip of my tongue to flick out and moisten my cracked, dry lips as I swallowed the thought.
    Blood pumped and swelled painfully through my muscles as I inched my way forward to the reality of the world outside. My joints protested the long, enforced stasis as I coaxed my knees to bend under me. Lifting my head slowly above ground level, I watched as pale, shimmering light reflected