Poacher

Chapter 1: The Hunted

Chapter 1

Hunter or hunted.

That's what it broke down to in his world. My world.

You are either the hunter, or you are the hunted. A fight for survival against two sexes of the same humanoid species. To the untrained eye, I could pass off as a Homo sapien. I look like you. I talk like you. Hell, I might've even bumped into you at the grocery store at one point.

But I am not like you.

I am being hunted.

By the person who claims to love me the most.

My eyes fluttered open almost as soon as I had shut them. I could have sworn I had just climbed into my bed.

I looked around rapidly, and couldn't identify my surroundings. I was sure I had never been in that room before. I had never been any place like that. The room was grand and beautiful. The floors were a patterned marble, and there were elegant tapestries on the walls. The wallpaper was a deep maroon and the only furniture in the open space were the long chaises in the corners and the vases that decorated the window sills.

I felt like I was in a fairy tale.

I felt lighter and smaller.

I felt different.

I noticed a little girl across the room, jumping across the marble flooring. She was giggling loudly in this high pitch laugh that made me warm in my stomach. I was certain I had never met this little girl before, her auburn curls were foreign to me, yet my entire body was telling me that I loved her more than anything else.

It was then I realized that I wasn't in my own body.

"Don't touch the white parts!" The little girl shouted over to me from her side of the room. My body reacted without my brain telling it to. My head nodded quickly and my feet stepped onto one of the black marble tiles. Me and the little girl spent maybe a few minutes laughing and hopping from one tile to the next and encouraging each other. She seemed like she loved me too.

But we had hardly started our game before it was interrupted. We were in the center of the room, hopping to each other, when big wooden doors opened with a slam. Two men dressed in all black came in and stepped aside as another man stepped in.

I had never seen that man either, but the body I was in recognized him instantly. The warmth and joy I had experienced interacting with the little girl was immediately replaced with fear and hatred and an overall cold feeling.

"What are you doing?" The man snarled at me. He was so much taller than me and it wasn't until he got really close to me that I realized the body I was in, the memory I was experiencing, was that of a child. "How many times have I told you not to play with her?" The man glared into my eyes as he jabbed a finger towards the girl who was cowering next to me.

"Do. Not. Fraternize. With. Her." He hissed. The body I was in began to tremble slightly, but gave no response to the tall man in the suit. If he had focused his attention on me any longer, I felt I would've passed out. Luckily, his eyes quickly shifted towards the little girl. My momentary relief immediately turned back into fear.

I still didn't know who the girl was, but I had this incessant need to protect her from the scary man's wrath.

"Get out of my sight, Lucille. Get back to your quarters." He spat at her. The little girl wasted no time in fleeing from the scene. She bolted out of the doors the man had come through and disappeared.

"Don't let me see you two together again. You're too old to be playing these childish games." The man didn't even look at me as he pushed me harshly out of the way so he and the two men in black could leave, too. I wasn't sure if the man used a lot of force to push me or if it was because the child was so small, but it caused me to stumble back and fall right on my ass.