Eternal Rider - Larissa Ione [35]
“Stand down, brother!” Ares’s voice was a guttural roar. He swiveled his head to Sestiel. “Go. Now!”
The two stallions clashed, and Ares swung his great blade, but Sestiel didn’t wait around to see what happened.
Summoning his last gasp of energy, he flashed away, offering up a silent prayer for the poor soul who was about to receive his gift.
Seven
So this was York.
Cara had always wanted to see England, but not like this.
To finance the trip, she’d talked Dr. Happs into buying all of her veterinary equipment. Then she’d left Jeff a message that she might be on a wild goose chase, but that she was heading to England to find the source of their dreams.
Now she was wandering the walled city, having just finished dinner. It was too late to start the search for the house on Newland Park, but she wasn’t ready to head back to the B&B. Instead, she decided on a little sightseeing. Which was why, when she first saw the bloody man with the arrow impaled in his chest, she snapped a picture. But as the handsome blond actor stumbled down the middle of York’s famous Micklegate Street, something struck her as odd.
He looked very similar to the man she’d seen in her dream, the one who had tried to grab her when she was in the basement with Hal. Even odder, no one around her seemed to notice him. Soupy fog choked the streetlights and darkness had fallen, but it wasn’t that dark.
Gripping her cell phone tighter, she took a step back, alarm growing as the man came closer. In an awkward but lightning-quick move, he surged forward and grasped her shirt. Fear closed in on her, suffocating and ice cold as he slapped his palm against her chest. A burning sensation nearly ripped her apart, but she couldn’t scream through the pain.
Somehow, she wrenched herself away and slammed her fist into his face. As if he weighed no more than her own hundred and thirty pounds, he flew backward several yards, hit the pavement, and skidded into a light pole. She didn’t ponder how easy it had been to toss him like that, nor did she wait for him to get up. Spinning around, she scrambled toward the nearest pedestrian, but… something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
The pedestrian wasn’t moving. No one was moving. Every vehicle, every person had frozen.
In midstride.
A blinding light flashed… a camera? Had she wandered onto the set of a movie? Or some kind of reality TV prank? Her mind flipped through several scenarios, none of which really made sense, and then her mind went utterly blank when a massive white horse appeared from out of nowhere, its eyes blazing a reddish-orange fire. On its back was a knight, his armor streaked with black, the joints oozing blood.
For a crazy moment, Cara was glad to see him—a knight. It meant this really was some sort of production… right?
Sure, the special effects were abnormally great. The blood looked real. The pain on the arrow-guy’s face was spot on. The evil and cruelty in the knight’s ice-blue eyes couldn’t be more genuine.
And when the knight put a second arrow into the man who had grabbed her, the thud, the spray of blood… all so incredibly real.
“Will you die already?” The knight almost sounded bored as he nocked another arrow. His long platinum hair fell forward to conceal his expression, but dark amusement rolled off him in an oily wave Cara felt on her skin.
Please let this be a movie set. Or a dream.
The pincushioned man stumbled onto the sidewalk, bumping into the motionless people and scattering them like bowling pins. They fell hard, their bodies so stiff they might as well have been mannequins.
The knight released the arrow, nailing the guy in the back. Grunting, the unarmed man went down to his hands and knees, but kept crawling, leaving a trail of blood. Cara barely restrained a cry of horror.
Another horse and rider appeared from out of a giant oval of light in the center of the road. And