“Dreams, hellnightmares is more like it,” was how Ryan defined them, both at that time for Doc and even now, at the present, when he was caught up in such a jump state.
Nightmares.
RYAN LOOKED DOWN at his hands. His scarred fists were stubs of raw, red meat from where he’d continued the pounding on the thick armored glass of the room’s lone doorway. His bones ached, and his back was one long knot of pain. The shoulder he’d injured and Mildred had reset was a glistening mass of aches. His mouth was desert dry, and his breath was a long rasp as the oxygen-rich air went in and came out through lips that were cracked and bleeding.
He needed a drink. He needed a long cool drink of water, or even better, a bottle of vintage predark Scotch whiskey, a large heaping tankard filled with nothing but the finest whiskey and pure spring water and cracked ice.
Hell, at that very moment in life, Ryan felt as if he could drink a five-gallon bucket of the liquor, especially if it was the good stuff. Scotch like he was dreaming of could only be found in the secured wine cellars of the most powerful land baronsfat, swaggering, evil men who reeked of corruption and decay. Most barons were a silly, idiotic lot, content to feast on the downtrodden and keep all in their so-called kingdoms for their own private use and gainbut they always had the best booze.
A lot of baronies were nothing but cesspools of slave labor and sexual cruelty, sadism for sadism’s sake a child pulling the wings from a fly, or the torturing of an injured animal caught in a bear trap; the crushing of a man’s self-respect and honor; the joy of watching the light of life slowly die in the eyes of anyone who dared get in their way. That’s all many barons stood forand Ryan had no use for them. However, barons could also be dangerous when provoked, and the one-eyed man and his ragtag band of friends seemed to have a knack for pissing off all the right people at all the wrong times.
Ryan wasn’t the most patient of men, nor was he the most compassionate. He worked hard at holding back the red curtain of anger that would start to descend at the slightest provocation, knowing that to give in would leave him vulnerable, at risk.
But at that very moment, Ryan was prepared to endure the most debilitating bout of red-eyed rage if he could gain a bottle of Scotch whiskey in the bargain. Even the kiss of a baron was preferable to sitting in the near darkness, alone and in pain, for Ryan knew there would be no drink coming, neither of Scotch nor of water.
Not here. In this room there was nothing but madness and the dead.
Ryan studied the walls of the chamber, which seemed to flicker with hidden fires. The air was filled with shadows, physical and mental, but all were black.
The shadows were his protection against seeing his oldest friend with his arms wrapped in a death’s grip around the body of the black woman in his embrace. Ryan felt his eye involuntarily tear up as he tried not to see the lifeless, pale, scarred man-child or the lean, weathered face of the elderly dead man tangled together on the floor. He tried not to notice how the flames flickered and created after-patterns in his retina when his gaze passed over the long, flowing, sunburst flame of hair of the woman he loved.
The woman he had loved. Ryan’s tenses kept scrambling uppast, present and future. He made a valiant attempt to cut his lone eye away from the broken sight of his only son, the heir to the Cawdor name and bloodline. Madness.
Ryan remembered now the reason why all of the walls in the chamber were spider webbed with cracks. Krysty had called on the terrible power of Gaia, the Earth Mother, closing her emerald eyes to slits as she sat in the lotus position on the floor and began to whisper in a half voice a mantra of assistance, “Help me, Mother, help me and give me the strength.”