"How did I get all the way out here?" Emily Hart said foisting her coat closed. Nigel warned her about traveling too far down the unbeaten path. Too far from the gauzy street lamps and rain drenched cobbled streets. The misty air flecked against her cheeks in the night long after dusk. Mucking about in the largest city in the world, 1820s London, in the dead of night, didn't exactly exude the pedigree of someone who'd spent months trying to get into New London University's elite and prestigious School of Liberal Arts. Still, Emily, a nick name for Amelia, traipsed wantonly, hoping to find her way back the Havisham Hall.
She coasted more to the leaf strewn borders before she'd realized nothing looked at all right. This particular evening, she was to meet with Dr. Cagney, her Modern Ethics professor. There was something romantic about a dueling of minds over the most intense questions of humanity's primal natures. Still, none of those romantic thoughts would keep her warm from the forest chill, nor guide her through the bleak and lightless hollows between the sycamores.
Emily adjusted her glasses atop the narrowest center of her nose.
A noise rustled somewhere in the near stillness.
"Anyone there," she called out, clutching her wool herringbone coat so tightly her fingernails drilled into her palms.
Nothing.
She tilted—an exaggerated act of valor—ever so slightly forward. Emily hugged the two huge tomes of Epicurus and Thomas Aquinas just at her small breast.
Again, she heard something curling through the grassy detritus.
Fwump.
The very small Emily fumbled hard when a strange force jabbed her in the back. No amount of wobbling seemed to keep her balanced, before she rocked forward and fell onto the ground. After a long while, she wrestled over with wet flakes of crumbled leaves stuck to her face, but that wasn't what frightened her. A pair of yellow eyes, the shade of a summer moon, furrowed at her and snarling fangs reflected the dim light of the sky.
