Free Forsaken by Sophia Sharp

picked out a round stone, got up, and skipped it across the lake.
    “Can you skip rocks, Nora?” he asked.
    “Uh…no, not really,” she admitted.
    “Come on over, then. I’ll teach you.” He smiled at her. “It’s easy.”
    Nora walked to him, but as she got closer, that feeling of being watched returned. She glanced back, but seeing nothing, continued on. Hunter tossed her a stone, and she stumbled catching it.
    “Come on, that’s the easy part,” he teased. Nora grinned at him devilishly, and chucked the rock as hard as she could into the lake.
    It fell lifelessly into the water without a single skip.
    “Well, you sure have the strength for it.” Hunter laughed and threw another rock himself. His skipped five times before sinking. Then he went over to help Nora.
    For the next twenty minutes, Hunter tried teaching Nora how to duplicate his feat – without much success. Still, they had fun, laughing at her attempts while playfully poking fun at one another. By the end of it, Nora’s arm was absolutely exhausted, and her shoulder burned. She collapsed, defeated but laughing, onto the ground.
    As she fell, that feeling of unseen eyes returned. It was stronger than before.
    Nora was certain somebody else was here. Just as Hunter threw one last stone across the water, she snapped her head back quickly – and froze when she saw a man, dressed in all black, peek out from a faraway tree. Their eyes met for a flicker before the man disappeared.
    Hunter touched her arm, and she jumped, startled. She hadn’t even heard him approach. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
    “I just saw somebody.”
    Hunter squatted down beside her, suddenly serious. “What do you mean?”
    “At that tree, over there.” She pointed. “He disappeared right when I saw him.”
    Hunter relaxed. “Sometimes people drift here, I told you that,” he explained. “They only stay a moment and then return to their regular dreams.”
    “This man was looking at me, though. I felt his gaze.”
    “What?” Hunter’s eyes became laser sharp, and he focused on her. “Are you sure?”
    “Yes. I felt it once or twice before. I thought I was imagining things.”
    “This man…” Hunter scanned the landscape surrounding them, his eyes darting restlessly from place to place. “What did he look like?”
    “I didn’t get a very good look at him,” Nora admitted. “And he was far away. But he had a black coat on, and a black hat. Everything about him was black. Except his skin, it was pale white, much like…yours.” Nora gulped the words.
    “What?” Hunter demanded. “Are you sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “Shit.” Hunter shoved a hand back through his hair. “Shit! Shit, take my hand,” he told her urgently.
    “Why?”
    “We need to leave. Now!”
    Nora reached up to grasp his hand. On contact, a blast of cold jolted through her bones, and everything around her turned dark. She felt herself fading. She felt her body begin to disintegrate as the world around her started to crumble.
    The only thing she was sure of was Hunter’s hand, gripping her own tightly. Then she felt heat, the flare of molten-hot rock churning down a river of lava, and she started to fall. Direction became meaningless, and she fell for infinity, for eons, in no direction and in them all, with no sense of time or space to guide her. She fell through layers of heat and layers of cold, and the frost from all the world’s glaciers froze her body as the heat of a thousand suns pulsed in her veins.
    She fell…and was ripped back into her body on top of Hunter’s gray Camaro in front of the lake.
    Nora’s eyes popped open. A light rain had started to trickle down while they were asleep. Her clothes were already damp. She felt Hunter’s hard body at her side and looked up. He blinked, and came to as she had. He looked at her. Then he pushed her aside and leapt off the car. He started to pace back and forth in front of her, obviously troubled.
    “Hunter, what’s wrong?”