Читать книгу Time Jumper - Connie Hall - Страница 9

Thunderclouds billowed and writhed across the evening sky, obscuring an enormous moon. Frigid wind, thick with impending icy moisture, rocked Hannah Gray’s white Honda Fit as she turned into the Patomani Indian Reservation.

She gazed at the speedometer. Wasn’t working. Figured.

The clock display read: 8:52, 8:51, 8:50. The digital numbers were moving backward? Peachy! She was used to clocks stopping around her. That had been a regular occurrence all her life. But rewinding? Now that was a new twist. Could things get any wackier? Her life had been one episode of X-Files after another, and the series didn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.

She felt her hands trembling. Then she made the mistake of looking at them. They glowed as if she’d been struck by St. Elmo’s fire. In fact, her whole body pulsed neon.

She cringed. She’d never get used to seeing her own skin lighting up like a firefly. She’d been glowing for a week, since that—Oh, God! She didn’t want to think about what had happened to her in the past seven days. It was too creepy and frightening to contemplate or believe. If she hadn’t lived through it, she would have sworn it was a horrific nightmare.

She turned her mind to her driving and controlling her trembling hands. They steadied a little, but her insides still quaked. Were her organs glowing, too? Was her blood still red? Was she turning into some kind of monster? Another tremor shook her. It really didn’t matter, she told herself. The important thing was, she was still alive and lucid and she was about to discover who or what she was.

Memories of the past seven days made her glance over her shoulder, check the back seat.

Empty.

So why did she have this feeling that she wasn’t alone, that a specter watched her, counted her breaths in the silence of the car, waited for the right moment to attack again? Get a grip. It won’t get you. You’re okay. For now, anyway.

She drove along the reservation’s main gravel road. The road snaked between barren farming fields, through dense woods. Most of the homes were as far off the road as possible, covered by woods. All she could see were driveways carved through dense swatches of trees and mailboxes standing guard at the front of them. A lot of the driveways had No Trespassing signs firmly planted at the entrance. From what she’d read on the Internet, the Patomani Indians didn’t welcome outsiders. It seemed the info on the Net was right.

She was so busy looking for mailbox numbers and trying to drive that she didn’t see the two figures dart out in front of her until it was too late.

Hannah gulped and couldn’t believe what she was seeing: a stag’s lower body and a human torso from the waist up. The creature was running upright across the road, its spindly buck legs defying physics.

It paused and gazed directly at her. Glowing red eyes pierced through the gleam of the headlights and drove straight into her face.

The force of those red eyes hit her like an avalanche. Like a high-pitched freight train tearing through her mind, deafening her, ripping at the confines of her skull. The creature’s occult power electrified her whole body, and her back stiffened. Her hands were glued to the wheel and her foot was pressed to the accelerator. If the creature continued to control her mind she knew she would die. She was losing her grip on the wheel, those red eyes steering her toward death. As she veered off the road, she saw the creature’s pursuer plunge a blade into the stag-man’s chest, using her unexpected arrival to his advantage.

Hannah screamed and barreled into a tree. Glass shattered as her seat belt wrenched the breath from her lungs. A massive limb pushed its way through the driver’s-side window, smashing into her head. Pain tore through her cheek and temple. The air bag exploded, but then let out a loud sigh as the tree bough stabbed it to death. She felt it deflating and thought what a fitting end to a horrible week. Then she let the darkness take her away.