Abandon - Meg Cabot [15]
A male voice shouted something. When I looked up from where I’d crouched in an effort not to be killed, I realized the shout had come from the rider. He’d cried out the horse’s name — Alastor, as near as I could tell — and was kicking his boots from the stirrups as the horse scrambled back to its feet.
It was only then that I realized — with a physical shock that jolted me nearly as much as the horse’s violent reaction had — that this was no nightmare. If it had been, I’d have woken by now. I wouldn’t be tasting sand in my mouth.
And the man I’d met the day of my grandfather’s funeral wouldn’t have suddenly been standing over me, staring down at me with silver eyes that held not the slightest hint of recognition…or humanity.
It was then that I noticed there was something — other than that awful voice — different about him. No, it wasn’t that he was different.…
I was.
I wasn’t seven anymore.
But he was exactly the same as he’d been that day in the cemetery. The dark hair. The flashing eyes. The towering height — only he didn’t seem quite as much of a giant as he had then.
How was any of it even possible, when so many years had gone by since the last time I’d seen him?
“Are you all right?” he demanded in a voice that was somehow worse — louder and more authoritative — than the thunder that had torn through the cavern seconds earlier.
“I — I guess,” I said, resisting the urge to jump up and run. My heart in my throat, I reached up to take his hand, allowing him to pull me to my feet. His skin felt tantalizingly warm and dry, considering my own was the exact opposite. “Are you all right?”
He threw me an incredulous look, the glowing-eyed gaze seeming to rake me.
“Am I all right?” he asked. “You could have been trampled. And you’re asking if I’m all right?”
“Did he roll onto you?” I asked, nervously eyeing his horse, pawing the ground a few yards away, his bridle being held — barely — by one of the guards. The horse had to be at least part Clydesdale. And the rest devil.
His owner did not appear to be the least bit interested in discussing any injuries he might have sustained during the accident I’d caused.
“I’m fine,” he snapped. “But you need to learn to follow instructions. Do the words ‘stay in your own line’ mean nothing to you?” He released my hand to wrap his own around my upper arm instead.
And the next thing I knew, he was dragging me back towards the line. Not the one I’d come from.
The other one.
I tried to say something. I did. But I think the shock of it all was finally beginning to take its toll. All I could do was stare. His eyes were the exact same color as the throwing stars a military client from Japan had given my father. When Dad first opened the box in front of me, the color of the blades had stirred a faint memory.
It wasn’t until now I realized what that memory was.
Him.
“Don’t ever touch these,” Dad had warned. Like I’d even wanted to…until he said that.
Then I’d had the strangest compulsion to pull one out from the special drawer in which Dad kept them, and throw it at the trunk of an old tree in our backyard. Dad had to use a pair of pliers to get it out, it was embedded so deeply. After that, he kept the blades locked in his office safe — except when he took them out to try throwing them at the tree himself, to see if he could make them stick the way I had. Which, to his consternation, he could not.
Now, for the first time, I felt as if I knew where that compulsion to touch Dad’s throwing stars, despite his warning me not to, had come from.
“Don’t bother looking up at me like that,” my captor warned me. “It won’t work. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I know all the tricks. And batting those big brown eyes at me won’t do a thing, I guarantee.”
I blinked. Was he speaking to me? Obviously. I was the only person he was dragging around.
Tricks? What was he talking about?
I’m still not sure how I managed to formulate words, let alone a complete sentence, under that menacing gaze.
But I suppose when you’re completely soaked, desperate,