Hunted [Wild Hunt Series: 1]

6: Cairo

Clouds closed over the tiny light leading Lucas to my corpse. I felt painless, unhurt, barely awake, my hair streaming behind me in congealed knots. The rest of me was strapped to a tremendous dark stallion as he stampeded through the night air. The animal's muscles churned through jolting turbulence. Were these corrupt valkyries, a band of wretched soul thieves? I wondered as our wingless mounts climbed higher and higher, beyond the clouds, out into the open sky. 

Was I alive, dead, teetering on the cusp of some great unknown, fluttering like a leaf caught on the edge of a drain? The back of a fat man, the one wearing the walrus skull, blocked my view of the moon, which seemed to grow bigger and brighter every second. Beside us raced other horses and their riders, leaving tiny trails of embers with every strike of their hooves. 

Another strong bounce from the horse and I felt myself slide toward the glow of what looked to be Anchorage. I squeezed my eyes shut as the walrus rider tugged me into a more balanced position. It was easier to shut my eyes and pray death would take me. Whatever the hell I was-hell being a genuine possibility at this very moment in time- I still wasn't keen on heights. 

I also couldn't keep my eyes shut. I had to be deep in the throes of death to be seeing a car wreck this bad, so naturally, against all instinct and common sense, I couldn't stop staring.

The walrus rider turned his head, starlight eyes unreadable. "Worry not, girl. Gravity's only unfriendly to the living."  His voice boomed from everywhere and no where inside my skull, thick with the bristle of Nordic explorers.

"Am I dead?"

"That body is." 

"Oh," I said in a calm hollow tone as if he'd just informed me birds could fly.  Hearing that didn't bother me, not the way I thought it would've. I mean, not that I was expecting to be around to feel bothered by my demise. Just. . . It all made perfect sense in some frustratingly inexplicable way. I didn't even feel sad about the horror Lucas would lead Mom and Ajax come morning. I just felt neutral about my death, neutral and numb, disturbingly numb.

"Am I going to hell?" I asked.

"I would say so," he rumbled.

"But why aren't we going down? Heaven's up. Hell's—"

"Shut your eyes."

 "Why?" 

The moon flared, flashed like wildfire in blinding burst of energy. The night burned away from rider and steed alike. Their helms dissolved, their armor vanished, my bindings disintegrated. The horses lost their ghastly sheen, taking on the patterns of natural horses—roans and bays and chestnuts and more—but the riders....

They became human.  Except for the walrus man, the midnight cavalry were themselves tall and muscular, as to be expected from a horde of warriors, but they were no where near the armored giants they'd been. 

Worse still, they were naked. Each bore a single tattoo on their right shoulders: a black inked skull of the animal whose helm they wore. 

The horses' hooves smashed onto sunburned plains. The shifted momentum from sky to land-based running  sent me, a doe unchained, flying. 

I sat up naked in the brittle grass, warmed by green sun. Not sliced or bruised or even scarred—well, my hands were scraped now and my ass hurt, but other than that my body I was a genuine medical miracle. 

The riders had stopped and dismounted. A good number of them laughed at me.

I wished they were all still creepy skeleton lords. It's one thing to have soulless flaming pits for eyes focused on your breasts; it somehow feels a lot more judgmental with thirty odd pairs of human ones involved. My hair a sorry curtain to hide behind, I hugged my front against the big buckskin I'd been previously tied to. The horse, for his part, kept reasonably still for having a nervous woman clinging to him.