Page 266 of Hunters and Prey

Traveler

IOPENED MY EYES.

Staring up, I felt my heart hammering in my chest.

It was dark but not. It felt like night, but I couldn’t see a sky.

I heard people… what sounded like foot traffic.

Reaching out my aleimi, I scanned with my psychic sight. I felt them.

There were a lot of them.

Definitely a city, or some area with a large population. It felt strange though, not like the Earth I knew. There was a strangeness to their light, to the light of the Barrier space around me. It felt different somehow, heavier, more crowded but that wasn’t all of it.

Sitting up slowly, I fought to focus my eyes, fighting panic as I looked up and down the narrow lane where I found myself.

It took what felt like an endless stretch of time for my mind, my memories to click back into place. I’d jumped. I was on a different world.

It seemed to take forever, but now that I remembered what had happened––and where I was, if only in a general sense––I realized I’d snapped back relatively fast, probably within only a few minutes.

Minutes was definitely better than hours. Minutes was a lot better than days. In the beginning, it took me days to remember. Then it took hours to remember. Even just in the last jump, the one to Revik and Allie’s world, it took hours before I felt remotely like myself again.

My mind slowly cleared.

I was in an alley, but not in any city I knew.

No one had bothered me yet.

I hadn’t been arrested, bitten, dragged, or attacked.

All pluses in my book.

I looked up. The buildings were so high, they seemed to meet at the middle. I saw the reflection of neon-type signs. I saw other reflections too, what looked like flying machines, somewhere up high. They might have been planes, but some of them moved too slowly for that. They were something else.

I climbed carefully to my feet.

The ground was strangely clean. It looked like it had been power-washed.

I looked down the length of the alley, and saw it stretched far––at least a hundred yards out to the road, maybe farther. In the distance I saw more moving things. Lights. The shapes of people. It was definitely a city of some kind.

I looked around and saw pipes running alongside the opposite building, and more pipes going into the ground, almost like I was in some kind of water or electric station.

I started thinking this was less an alley and more some kind of utility lane.

Was this the place I got arrested the last time?

If so, I’d definitely landed better. The first time I came here, I’d opened my eyes in a park, and people had been yelling at me. I’d tried to fight my way free, and that’s when the cops showed up. Some of those cops had been vampires.

Some of them showed their teeth at me, threatening to bite me if I didn’t calm down.

I gripped the cement wall, looking up and down the alley a second time. I wondered where I might find clothes. I didn’t want to end up in jail again.

I remembered then.

I wasn’t here to run and hide until I could fall unconscious again… not this time.

I remembered clear irises in the dark, a sideways smile.

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