HUNTER ROSE out of a dark fog to realize his face hurt. Specifically his cheek. Something hard and sharp bit into the skin. He pried his eyes open and peeled himself up.
Harsh sunlight stabbed through the slits, forcing his lids closed again.
Daylight? Some part of his muddled brain was troubled by that. It should be dark, but he wasn’t certain why.
His first thought was he was at a match, that he’d had the wind knocked out of him after a hard tackle. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d had his noggin rattled. But no, he didn’t hear any of the sounds he expected—the referee’s whistle, shouts from the crowd. He only heard the wind and the squawk of a strange bird some distance away.
He lifted his torso off the stony surface underneath him. Tiny rocks jabbed into the meat of his palm. He forced open his eyes again, squinting. Beneath him were old flagstone tiles, weathered and cracked. Sprigs of stringy grass sprouted from the seams between them. Overhead, a dome of unblemished azure.
The side of his face stung. He gingerly touched around his eye. It was puffy. Tender. And his eye wouldn’t open fully. The black eye.
Fragments of his memory started to reassemble, like he was taping a ripped photo back together. The match was over. He was drinking at the bar after. He’d then left the bar with… with….
Fuck, what was his name? They’d cabbed back to his apartment. And….
The break-in. The guy hiding in his closet. The chase down the alley. It was all piecing back together.
That had been nighttime. Ten o’clock at least. Now he could feel the sun warming his face above him, which put it at around noonish. How did he end up here, some twelve, fourteen hours later?
His head throbbed behind his eyes. He’d had a bit to drink, certainly, but not enough to experience a blackout. Had someone tampered with his drink? He felt rough all over—sore and stiff, like he’d been tackled hard by a cement truck, and felt oddly disconnected somehow. But not hungover.
As he pushed himself up and eased onto his knees, he dried his eyes with his T-shirt sleeve. His forearm brushed against his cheek and dislodged a tiny stone embedded there.
He was in the remains of an old stone building. Very old.
All that stood was a portion of a wall and the crook of one of its four corners. The rest had been reduced to a rocky foundation no higher than the grass around it. Whatever this place had once been, it had been abandoned for centuries.
The ancient building lay in the middle of a wide field that seemed to stretch for eternity in all directions. An ocean of yellow grasses surrounded him. The tasseled tops flowed as if an invisible giant raked his fingers across the top. With the sun overhead, figuring out one compass direction from another was futile. The land rose up into rolling yellow-green hills one direction. A heavy band of brown streaked across the horizon in another. A forest?
He knew of no place like this around Chicago. Ireland, maybe. But not the Midwest.
What the hell was happening?
More memories percolated out of the fog in his head. The hole in the wall that the thief had jumped through. How he’d followed immediately behind him.
A sickly tightness bloomed in the pit of his gut, a wave of unease that threatened to inflate and consume him. This was all very wrong.
He clenched his fists and shoved the impulse to panic back down. No, he told himself. Something would explain all this. It had to.
He needed information. With a groan, he rose up. Every muscle complained and resisted him. He brushed off the dirt and pebbles from his jeans and T-shirt and shook more loose from his dark hair. His legs were wobbly, and it took a moment to trust he was stable enough before he swept the inner boundary of the ancient building. Tucked in the lee of the standing corner, he found the remains of small campfire. He lowered next to it, elbows on his thighs. Someone had spread out the coals. Hunter floated his hand over the small mound of charcoal chunks and gray ash. Cold.
His thief?
That didn’t make any sense. He was less than a minute behind him.
He grunted and shook his head. Ridiculous. That bizarre hole in the wall hadn’t brought him here—the idea of that was idiotic. Something else had. It didn’t matter that the last thing he remembered was jumping through it. Somehow, the thief must have knocked him out, brought him to this place, and then abandoned him….
The sour ball of anxiety swelled more. That didn’t add up either. And he knew it.
He needed answers. And he wasn’t going to get them here.
With a hand cupped over his brow, he circled about and scanned the entire horizon. He couldn’t just wander aimlessly across an unfamiliar countryside. He needed a direction. Some sign or indication that civilization was out there.
He spotted a thin tendril of gray in the distance, nearly indiscernible against the unspoiled azure of the afternoon sky. Smoke. He’d almost missed it. It originated somewhere beyond the next hill—how far, he couldn’t tell. But that didn’t matter. Smoke like that wasn’t natural. It meant people. And if he could see it, that meant he was within walking distance.
So he started walking.
THE ROLLING countryside had an eerie, postapocalyptic isolation about it, as if no one else existed. He encountered no roads, no other buildings. Not a single jet stream cut across the sky. That in and of itself was disconcerting.
Again, he tamped down the compulsion to panic that, if left unchecked, he knew would overpower him. First, figure out what was going on, he told himself. Then decide if it was worth panicking over.
The afternoon slogged on as he marched in the direction of the twisting gray thread, which turned out to be farther than he originally estimated. Each time he crested a rise in the terrain, he expected to see the source, but it was always beyond the next one, and then the next. An unobstructed sun pressed down on him. Sweat cascaded down the center of his back, soaking through the fabric of his T-shirt, and his crotch and thighs were starting to chafe under his jeans. His mouth felt like he’d rinsed it out with sand.
It was the wrong temperature for a day in March, but he pushed that unsettling detail from his mind too. He pulled the T-shirt off over his head, wiped his brow with it, balled up in his hand, and then tugged it through a belt loop. At least he could work on getting his summer color back.
Around midafternoon, from the top of a high hill, he saw something different along the horizon. A tree line. The smoke rose from the canopy.
He was closer.
He quickened his pace, ignoring the raw chafing of his thighs. Yellow grasses gave way to red rock and bracken. Thorny branches scratched and poked at his skin as he negotiated his way through. The thicket transformed into a forest of twisting and misshapen trees.
He slowed, despite his burning need for answers. The terrain seemed in pain. Tortured. Each tree trunk reached out of the stony ground in a distorted mockery of what a tree should look like. Limbs writhed in frozen agony, the leaves more brown than green. He felt unwelcome here. Like an intruder. He was tempted to turn around and head back to the open fields. At least there it was warm and beautiful.
But something rose above the moan of the wind. Voices.
Some instinct told him to crouch low and hold very still with his breath locked in his lungs. The sound came from up ahead. Very close.