So here she was in the dead of night, walking the bastard in the park where she was probably going to get frigging mugged when she should be at home resting in her bed—the bed she was going to have to clean when she got back.
Well, the entire apartment wreaked.
The first thing she would have to do was to clean up all the poop.
She thought she might just save that for Peggy and give it to her when she finally got around to returning for her damn dog.
Then she would have to collect the garbage and get it back into the trash bags.
Then laundry.
She was just going to have to flip her mattress any way she looked at it. Duke had left a pile that looked like she’d had a visit from a damned elephant.
She stopped when she realized they’d made their way all the way through the park and come out on the other side behind a popular night spot.
It was rocking.
Even outside she could hear loud music and louder talking.
It must be deafening inside!
Unfortunately, Duke didn’t stop when she did and he was nearly as tall as on all fours as she was on two.
He lunged forward and nearly jerked her off her feet and her arm out of the socket.
She was tempted to wrap the leash around his neck and ….
She was even more tempted when she realized what Duke was so excited about—cars. He nearly dragged her off her feet as he rushed to the first and hiked his back leg and pissed on the tires.
She dug her heels in and tried to pull him away, but he lunged again. This time he literally jerked her off her feet and then dragged her down the parking lot pissing on the tires of each car he came to. Every time he paused, she tried to get up, but he was off again before she could get to her feet.
She finally managed to untangle her hand and wrist and let go of the leash.
Duke uttered a loud bark and took off, leaving her sprawled in the parking lot.
Her knees and palms were on fire from being dragged across the pavement. She grunted, managed to heave herself up to her hands and knees.
And then, abruptly, she was bathed in light.
Car, her mind said, and she leapt to her feet.
It was the last thing she remembered with any clarity at all.
When she came to, she thought she must have been hit by the car that had blinded her with its light.
The strange thing was, she couldn’t recall getting hit.
Shouldn’t she feel pain? A lot of pain?
She could certainly feel her knees and palms burning. Her wrist felt as if that dog had sprained it at the very least. Her shoulder hurt and her hip, but these were fairly minor pains. Nothing seemed to be broken.
The scary thing was, once she’d done her internal investigation and turned to external, she discovered she was blind.
She had reached a state bordering hysteria, having felt everything around her and been completely unable to identify her surroundings, when something grabbed her, touching off a frantic bout of completely uncoordinated, hysterical screaming, crying, and gyrations that failed to free her.
It did result in another, deeper, bout of unconsciousness. Something stung her neck and it was lights out.
She surfaced briefly—just long enough to discover she’d been deposited in something capsule like that was filling with fluids and then she was out again.
She dreamed.
Horrible nightmares filled the darkness of her world, the unrelenting darkness that wrapped her in a chilly, frightening blanket.
Her next awareness was pierced by a blinding shaft of light that seemed to bore a hole in her skull. She squeezed her eyelids tightly against it, but the moment she tried to suck in a breath of air and discovered her lungs seemed to be paralyzed, blind panic hit her. She began bucking against the walls that closed in around her and then hammering on the window above her.
Abruptly, the light was blocked as something moved between it and the casket that had entombed her.
She opened her eyes wide then, hammering on the window, begging soundlessly to be released.
Without words because her voice box seemed as frozen as her lungs.
Whatever it was outside began to hammer on the glass from the other side, but Cara was too frantic to feel any fear until the window was abruptly pried open. Great hands reached inside and tore the restraints from her and the tubes that had been sustaining her life. Grasping one arm, they lifted her until she was sitting upright.
The moment she sat up her body began to expel the fluids in her lungs. It gushed out through her nose and mouth, strangling her, making her choke and cough. She was still being wrenched by the spasms when she was hauled out and released to sprawl on the ground in a boneless puddle like a jellyfish.
She was shaking all over from trying to hold herself up at all by the time the spasms finally ceased and she could draw in a breath of air.
She started coughing again immediately.
She didn’t know if it was residue of whatever had filled them that was still in her lungs or the fact that the air felt … thick.
She was shivering.
Possibly from being naked and wet, possibly from shock. She had no idea except that she was so cold it was nearly unbearable.
She could hear sounds around her, thought there were voices, but it sounded as if she was hearing from underwater and she thought the fluids still filled her ear canals.
Almost on the thought, the bubbles of fluid popped and the liquid began to ooze from her ears.
She struggled to see, but everything was blurry and it was so bright the light seemed to stab through her skull and into her brain.
Someone grasped her arm again and hauled her upright.
She struggled to get her feet under her, but her body felt as if the bones had melted and she’d gained a hundred pounds—maybe two. Her heart and lungs were struggling to function. She couldn’t support her weight, couldn’t lock her knees to take steps.
Whoever had tried to stand her upright dragged her for a little ways while she pedaled feet and legs that didn’t seem to belong to her and then she was hauled up and slung over a hard shoulder.
She promptly vomited down the man’s backside, but there was little more than bile and water in her belly.
She was carried a short distance and then dropped none too gently on the ground.
Thankfully, it was loosely packed sand and cushioned her fall … but not a hell of a lot. She thought it would have felt worse to have been dropped in the area she was taken from, though, because she recalled the distinct impression of lying on sticks and other hard or pointed objects.
She pretty much lay where she landed. She struggled, briefly, to find a more comfortable position, but she just couldn’t summon enough energy to do much.
She was lying weakly, panting for breath, when someone landed almost on top of her—well, the woman did land on her.
They fought each other for several minutes until they managed to disentangle—which was only a few moments before someone else landed half-on half off of the two of them.
Cara pulled herself into as tight a fetal position as she could manage and covered her head with an arm to protect herself from falling bodies, too deeply in shock, still, to even try to figure out what was going on.
She couldn’t find it within herself to care about anything in those moments except her complete misery and the struggle to alleviate some of it.
That was actually accomplished, in time, by the bodies of the women piled on top of and around her. Eventually, the shivering stopped and warmth seeped into her bones.
She faded in and out of consciousness but, in time, the consciousness began to dominate.
Someone dragged her upright, cupped her hand around an object that felt like a drinking glass, and spoke.
The word was unfamiliar and the accent gave rise, at last, to curiosity.
Cara opened her eyes and stared at the creature in front of her, feeling her eyes widen wi
th horror as she struggled to take in what she was looking at, to make sense of it.
Somewhere in the visual search for answers, she discovered a very large foot and a large calf that did not seem to belong to the creature sitting in front of her and she followed that foot and calf to a very large knee and thigh.
The skin was more yellow than it should have been, almost hairless, and there were strange things attached at the ankles and knees that looked like … well, fins. They were closed, but that was what it looked like.
The creature that was squatted in front of her cupped a hand around hers and lifted her arm, guiding the thing she held toward her lips. As it came closer, she realized it was filled with liquid of some sort—not water—and it seemed to be hot.
She wasn’t certain about the aroma wafting from it.
But her stomach was.
It growled.
She decided not to fight the creature, to accept.
Partly, this was because it was abundantly clear that the creature meant for her to drink it and even though it seemed to be a very old—female—creature, it was far stronger than she was and she learned that resistance wasn’t working.
Partly, this was because her stomach demanded that she put something in it.
But mostly it was because she finally lifted her gaze far enough to see what was attached to the tree trunk legs and such a jolt of shock went through her that she was next to catatonic.
He looked like he might easily have been seven feet tall. His distinctly yellowish skin was covered in tribal/primitive tattoos—in the bulging chest and muscular arm area. His black hair had been formed into a Mohawk.
His facial features were nothing short of stunning—as in beautifully sculpted—but he was the most terrifying man she’d ever set eyes on.
The Nine Realms of the Uti I: Warrior Prince Page 17