Torin yelled, “Daena hurt her!”
The sounds of struggling, then the group of men moved closer to the horses and the horse I was draped across was set into a walk.
The leather saddle hurt my stomach, my ribs, and my hip bones — this giant horse’s movements were excruciating because I couldn’t adjust or move in anyway — the pain was overwhelming and relentless. My face was pressed against the side of a sweating filthy horse, all the blood rushing to my head.
My head was jostled, I raised it enough to see Torin shuffling along beside me as he was pushed from behind by our captors. He whispered, “Daena tell them who ye are.”
I moaned.
He whispered, “Mistress… daena die, please.”
I mumbled. “I won’t.”
“Daena worry, I will get ye free. I promise, I will get ye home, I promise I will keep ye safe…” I lost consciousness again.
36
JEN
2004 - THE LAWN AT LEXI’S LAUREL RIDGE HOUSE
My eyes swept the scene — the wind had lessened, the last of the rain was dripping off leaves, the lawn was trashed, mud puddles formed in the deep grooves created by the battle we had just witnessed. The storm had been so sudden and intense that I had had to duck and cover, and now that it calmed enough to stand up and look around, everyone and everything was gone, all the men and horses had vanished into the storm.
Even the men who had been on the ground.
I was on the bottom porch step, my mouth wide open in shock. I slowly turned to see Cooper, his tall and lanky self, with his hands in his hair, looking out at the scene.
Cooper said, “What the hell was that, I just… where did she go?”
I shook my head and mumbled, “I don’t know.”
“You saw that, right? It was right there, Lexi was there, Torin… where are they?”
I said, “I saw it. Did you see the medieval men on horses?”
“Yeah, I saw a man dying on the ground, right there, dressed like he was at a Ren Faire, covered in blood. Now he’s gone.”With his hands still on his head he turned and said, “What the hell did we eat? Did someone spike our pancakes?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t feel like a hallucination. That felt weirdly realistic, yet insane.”
He looked right and left. “Did he kidnap her?”
“They’re both gone, they were both kidnapped, somehow.”
He dropped his hands. “Did you happen to get a description of the guys, anything useful? I didn’t, that was too crazy, I couldn’t think.”
“For the police? No. I mean, the horses were brown. The men were wearing old-school costumes.”
Coop said, “Dammit, I never got my gun either. I didn’t get a good description, what the hell was I doing?”
“Well, none of that was normal. We should call the cops, right?”
He said, “Yeah, yeah, for sure, call the cops, we gotta. Do we need to get our story straight?”
“Why, we didn’t do anything!”
“But it just sounds so absurd. There were horses, like eight men?—”
“Two groups, were they all together?”
