Chapter 5
She opened her eyes a second later.
She could feel gravel digging into her thighs through her yoga pants.
“Motherfuck,” she half muttered, half moaned.
“Oh, thank God you’re alive. I thought someone might have dumped a body.”
She gave a start and turned her head. A pair of denim-clad knees filled her field of vision.
The voice was male, lusciously deep, husked at the edges, familiar in a strange way. Maybe it was the voice of God.
If it was, for just a millisecond there, she hadn’t minded being dead.
“Does that happen a lot around here?” she said to the knees. A little woozily.
“Not as often as you’d think, given the remote location.”
She hoped he was kidding.
She hoped he wasn’t a vagrant or the type that liked to hide from the law in the thick woods here.
She touched her hand to her forehead to check for blood or dents.
She held it in front of her eyes. It came away clean. It sure was stinging, however.
“I saw that gate heading at you and I ran like hell but I couldn’t get here in time to stop it.”
“There was a cat...” she began woozily. “I got distracted by a cat...”
“Yeah, that’s The Cat.”
That really didn’t clear things up at all.
“So how are you feeling? How many fingers am I holding up?”
She turned her head to look up.
Just as the owner of the voice bent over her.
Her heart jolted as if battery cables had been applied to it.
Surely only one person in the world had eyes like those: like looking into the shallows of the Hellcat River, through to the fool’s gold and river rocks.
She was certain she’d stopped breathing.
“Wait... am I... am I dead?”
She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. In a whisper, no less.
Two straight dark eyebrows made a V when he frowned.
“I have a hunch you got clobbered harder than we thought. Maybe I ought to call an ambu...”
A series of subtle emotions whipped across his face like scenery outside a train window.
He stood up abruptly.