As soon as turned over the paper a wave of emotions passed through me. However, the most prominent one was disbelief.

On the glossy white paper, the word ‘missing’ was embossed in bold, block letters. And under that was a picture of a girl smiling broadly with her hands in the air. The girl felt familiar. Well, of course, she did after all...

It was me.

After that, I kind of lost it. I blacked out and when I came to, the bed was placed upside down in a corner, the paintings on the wall were lopsided and I was sitting on the floor which was covered with hundreds of the same posters lying in every direction. 

There was no doubt about it. Even though the girl in the picture couldn’t have been older than four, her green eyes, straight dark brown hair and the mole beneath her right eye, all made her identity obvious. However, if it wasn’t for the ring the little girl was holding, I probably wouldn’t have accepted that it was me in the picture. Instead, I would have made up some silly excuse to deny all of this.

Ultimately… it was proof that the life I had lived until now had been a lie. I lifted my hand to look at the ring that had been with me for as long as I could remember. Who knew that the beautiful black ring that I had always cherished would have secrets of its own? I was surprised at myself as I started chuckling.

As I lay on the cold floor laughing uncontrollably, I wondered out loud, “How does this even happen?” 

Soon the loud laughter turned into quiet tears. 

No, I wasn’t sad or upset. I was pissed. Extremely pissed. Pissed at the world, the demon-slash-parents-slash-kidnappers, the mysterious men, the woman whose voice was in my head and especially me. 

“So I was actually kidnapped huh?” I thought to myself after calming down a bit. "But what about all the memories? We were a family were we not? Me, dad and mo- no, I mean Irine and Dan. They were demons? And whose voice was that? Who were those mysterious men? And was it really magic that I saw today?"

I had a billion questions but zero answers.

“And this.” I turned my head around to look at the shiny green thread that had been attached to me.“What the hell is this?”

I tried touching the mysterious thread and to my surprise I could do so. I am pretty sure that this was what Mom and Dad- no, I mean Irine and Dan were looking at before those mysterious men had arrived. This was what had made them so terrified. 

I tried pulling the thread but that didn’t make any difference. The thread seemed never-ending. No matter how much I pulled, the end of the thread was nowhere in sight.

“Urgh! This is pointless.” I said after giving up on the thread and lying down on the floor again, frustrated and tired. I looked at the thread again.

I wonder… where this thread leads to?

Was this magic too?

I shook my head and slapped myself. “Focus on what you can do, Zella,” I told myself. I picked up one of the many missing posters lying around and started observing the picture to find clues.

My eyes widened as I saw something.

All of this magic stuff had distracted me so much that I hadn’t noticed the shadow in the background of the picture. Why did that shadow look so familiar? As I stared at the figure my head started hurting again.

She was back. 

The woman whose voice I had heard when I saw the blue liquid. My vision started dimming again. It was weird. If I told someone they would probably think that I am crazy. Because, even though hearing that voice made me go through unbearable physical pain I wanted to keep hearing it. The voice made me feel nostalgic for something. I have no idea what.

That voice just… felt like home.

After this, I passed out from the pain or maybe it was the fatigue.

What I didn’t know was that while I was passed out someone arrived at the window.

“Tsk, she made a mess and passed out.” said the intruder.

As he swung his legs and got into the room, he picked up one of the missing posters.

“Well…now this is interesting.”