This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Epigraph
Until the lions have their own historians,
tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
--African Proverb
Chapter 1 – Night Vision
Cassie felt herself sinking. She tried to jolt her sleeping body into action. “Wake up! It’s just a dream. This can’t be real, so move already!”
She was standing in the shadows against the wall in her sister’s antique shop. The room was dimly lit by a green banker’s lamp near the cash register. Sybil was frozen in position in front of the glass showcase—a phone suspended midway to her ear. Her eyes were fastened on a man who had just entered the store. He was wearing a Stetson hat, and he was pointing a gun at her.
“Where’s the key, sugar?” He spoke with a Southern drawl—his tone lazy, almost casual.
“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sybil stammered. She put the phone down and began inching her way along the showcase toward the rear storeroom.
The man shrugged. “Don’t make no difference to me, but you don’t want me tearin’ up your neat little shop just to find it, now do you?”
“I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Sybil’s denial sounded unconvincingly shrill.
Cassie wanted to rush forward to pull her sister out of danger. She tried to scream a warning, but all she felt was a rasp in her throat where the words should have been.
The man advanced down the center aisle. He was over six feet tall, in his late twenties or early thirties. Cassie knew this had to be a dream because of his strange outfit. Aside from the cowboy hat, he wore a short denim jacket, a string tie around his neck, jeans, and snakeskin cowboy boots.
The gun flicked slightly in his hand. “I tell you what. The service in this establishment ain’t very friendly.”
He flipped his hat aside, and it landed on an oak sideboard. His dark brown hair was combed back in a high wave.
“I guess if you don’t want to help me, I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and help myself.” He moved toward the glass case.
Sybil darted past him and ran for the front door, but he was faster. He grabbed her by the arm.
“Now, that’s no way to treat your customers, honey. Tryin’ to run off and shirk your responsibilities like that.” He twisted her arm behind her back.
Cassie could see Sybil wince with pain. Her sister looked around wildly for some other way out. The man tightened his grip with one hand and drove the gun against her temple with the other. Sybil struggled, but he only wrenched her arm harder behind her back until she stopped struggling.
“It seems to me like you can’t hear what I’m sayin’.” The man cocked his head slightly, considering the matter. “Maybe we should go someplace private where I can get through to you better.”
As he shoved her toward the front exit, she twisted out of his grip and reversed direction. He lunged after her, tackling her. She fell head first against the showcase, sending shards of glass cascading across the room.
Cassie could feel a cry of despair welling up in her throat, but no sound emerged. She willed her feet to move. They twitched slightly but nothing more.
The man raised himself to a crouching position. A look of annoyance flitted across his face. He reached forward to check Sybil’s pulse, and the look of annoyance deepened to a frown.
He let out a martyred sigh as he stood up, shaking bits of broken glass from his jacket. “Well, that ain’t no help at all.”
In a flash, the scene changed, and Cassie was back in her dorm room. She could feel the mattress beneath her. “Wake up, dammit!” she commanded herself. This time, as she clawed her way up to consciousness, her mind obeyed her. She sat up shakily, her skin clammy with cold sweat. Tossing off the covers, she sat forward.
On impulse, she grabbed her phone and started to call her sister. “It was just a nightmare, you idiot! What are you going to do? Wake her up in the middle of the night to tell her you had a bad dream?” She tossed the phone on the nightstand, disgusted by her own timidity.
Gradually her breathing slowed, and she lay back down. Curling herself into a fetal position, she drew the covers up to her chin. “It wasn’t real. It was just a bad dream… Just a bad dream... Just a bad dream...” She chanted the words like a mantra for several minutes until she started to dose off.
Then the phone rang.
Chapter 2 – A Wake
At about three o’clock in the morning, far outside the city, four people were staring bleakly at one other across a kitchen table. It was an old-style oak table in an old-style country kitchen. The kind with tin ceiling tiles and tall glass cupboards above the sink. A single yellow nightlight glowed from the wall.
At one end of the table sat an elderly woman in a terrycloth robe and slippers. Despite the late hour, she had managed to roll her white hair into a neat little bun at the nape of her neck. She shook her head sadly. “This can’t be true.”
“It’s true. Sybil’s dead.” The abrupt comment came from a blond man in his mid-twenties at the opposite end of the table. He slouched despondently in his chair, arms crossed. “When she called me around midnight, she sounded scared. She thought somebody was trying to break into the shop. Then the line went dead. I got there as fast as I
