My daughter stabbed me in the neck.
He knew the wound would never fully heal. Fiona was a fellow traveler like himself, and while wounds inflicted by average humans disappeared from his skin’s long-term story, those donated by fellow travelers never healed entirely. He stared at the metal arm attached to his right shoulder.
Case in point.
Ryft had taken his arm.
What did they call that bastard in this time period? Not Ryft...
Sean.
Rune fingered the lumpy scar where Fiona had buried her pen. He suspected she’d nicked his jugular. There was too much blood on his shirt and in the dirt where he’d lain.
Had she tried to kill him on purpose? He’d assumed she’d just been scared and lashed out but...
No. She wouldn’t try to kill him, would she?
Maybe.
Why had she felt so threatened by her own father? She had to know she’d always been his favorite. They’d been so close, once.
Hadn’t they?
Rune shook his head. His memory wasn’t what it used to be. Sometimes he remembered too little. Other times it felt as if he were remembering everything at once. Living everything at once.
He knew he was lucky to still be alive. How had he survived?
A crunchy noise reached his ears, like something sliding across the red gravel around him. Rune turned, careful not to tug the skin near his barely-healed stab wound.
He saw a shoe.
No, two shoes.
Two gray-soled athletic shoes sat propped on the ground behind him, balancing on their toes.
How could that be?
One moved.
Ah.
There were feet in them. Someone lay on their belly, fifteen feet from his position. One shoe slid away from him, pulled by the leg to which it was attached. The knee of that leg dug into the sand, propelling the body forward, the other leg dragging, still straight.
He heard cars nearby.
I’m still in Los Angeles.
He closed his eyes.
I hate this hellhole.
He’d never been a desert person. Why Fiona had chosen this place to wait for him he’d never understand. Perhaps drawn by whatever had drawn Ryft. Maybe drawn by Ryft himself.
His mind began to drift to his goal, his quest, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.
I used to have a purpose, didn’t I?
He shook his head to refocus and winced at the pain in his neck.
Think.
He needed to concentrate on his current situation. Maybe he could start on where he was. Not the year, not the country or the city, but the very plot of blood-soaked sand on which he now sat.
Where am I?
Rune scanned the landscape again, finding only more dirt, scrub brush and discarded trash.
He decided he’d collapsed in an abandoned lot.
Sand scraped behind him.
Right. The guy with the shoes was still trying to crawl away from him. He could hear him breathing. Wheezing, really.
Rune had collapsed, but not before wrestling the owner of those shoes into the lot with him.
He stood and brushed the dust from his pants with his good arm.
The man on the ground looked over his shoulder, his face twisting with panic.
“Get away from me,” the man croaked, clawing at the ground, trying once again to make headway in his quest to leave the lot and Rune far behind.
Rune took a step toward him. Though his dark, thick hair and broad nose implied Hispanic descent, the man’s skin seemed pale, almost gray. His eyes sat dull and sunken in his skull.
“Leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that.” Rune reached down to press his hand against his victim’s flesh. The man had very little life left. It was a miracle he’d regained consciousness, and doubly so he’d been able to drag himself a few feet away. Rune knew the man’s missing vitality was what had healed his own wound. It was the only reason he hadn’t been sent spinning through time and more than likely reborn, his wound too grievous to heal. He would have had to start from scratch.
Rune closed his eyes and siphoned the man’s remaining life force. He felt the heat beneath his palm flooding into his veins. The man made a squeaking noise, one last attempt to protest his fate, before his bodily shell collapsed to ash, mingling with the desert landscape...gray-soled sneakers and all.
A warm eddy of air swirled the man’s ashes and sent them dancing much farther away than he would have ever crawled on his own. Rune laughed at the irony.
He stretched his neck and felt the wound.
Better.
Not fully healed, but better.
Good enough.
Rune straightened and his head swam. He reached out to steady himself but found nothing to grab. Dropping to one knee, he took a moment to collect himself.
Maybe one more…
He pushed himself to his feet once again and moved his lanky frame toward a metal fence. Beyond it was the street. He had a flash of himself stumbling down that street, his hand desperately trying to hold back the blood spilling from his throat. He saw the man. He fell on him. Draining him. Dragging him through the hole in the fence he now used to exit the field.
Wrong place, wrong time for the man, but perfect timing for him.
Rune didn’t know how long he’d been out. It had been early evening, hadn’t it? Now it was morning. Early, but the sun had risen. A teenage girl walked down the street. She looked at him and hurried her step to cross the street away from him, eyes flashing with fear.
Rune looked down at his shirt. It was covered in blood and dirt.
I forgot.
As he stood watching the girl cross the road he felt a presence behind him. His good arm darted out, his fingers curling around a thin wrist like a
