Free Riverrun by Felicia Andrews

leg might as well have been broken, too, for all the good it seemed to do her. She was cold. She was hungry. There was not even enough strength left for her to lift her head. A few minutes, she told herself finally; just a few minutes more and I’ll get up. But in seconds the world went dark, and even the cold of the river faded into nothing.

Chapter Five
    T here was a bewildering confusion of faces swirling rapidly around her. Sickly pale, deathlike, moldering. Bloodied, bandaged, mauled and mangled. Faces glaring with eyes of fire, faces damning with lips of ice. A woman screaming, a man weeping, a child begging for its cries to be heard. Geoffrey Hawkins appeared, with two shining pennies set over his eyes; Aaron Bowsmith, with a hole in his forehead that let out a wailing. Rafe. Gregory. Ella, cleansed of living.
    Cass groaned and begged, and the swirling slowed, the faces drifted back into the darkness that spawned them, only to be replaced by a gray-looking valley split in two by a still, ebony river. And in the river stood a man, an evil leer twisting his lips to expose yellowed fangs. He was naked, covered with soot from some deep, hellish fire. The water began flowing and he moved through the sluggish current toward her. Suddenly his hands lifted and reached out to touch her, to maul her breasts, gouge her thighs, to tear the hair from her head strand by strand, and through some demonic power, turn each strand into a green-fire torch that seared her flesh to crackling cinders. She backed away, shaking her head, her hands in front of her protectively, her mouth open to scream for help though no sounds escaped her. It was the river instead doing her shouting, the river and the man and the roar of the fire.
    She stumbled backward, grabbing frantically for branches, shrubs, anything at all to sustain her balance. And in falling, she landed hard on her back as the man stepped out of the water and stood grinning between her legs.
    Yankee bitch! his swollen lips mouthed. You ain’t got away from me and Bobbie yet!
    He dropped toward her, and she screamed, and finally sat up.
    The faces were gone. The river was gone. And so was the terrifying image of Josh and his vengeance.
    Perspiration drenched her face, ran freely between her breasts and down the length of her spine. With one trembling hand she grabbed at a piece of cloth and mopped her brow and cheeks… She stopped suddenly and looked down at what she held in her hand.
    It was a corner of a sheet, slightly stained from a great deal of use, yet through its roughness she felt traces of a once-elegant softness…She looked up, and the room she found herself in swooped in and out of focus, so that she sank quietly back to the thick down pillows beneath her head. The mattress upon which she lay was also quite soft, almost too soft, she thought, after her time in the carriage. But she stroked it lovingly, gratefully, for the moment not caring where she was as long as there was comfort for her mind and her wounds.
    And once the nightmare had faded completely, and the reality of her bed became too great to ignore, she slowly took stock of herself, rejoicing that she was still alive. Battered, bruised—she winced at the purple and black and ugly yellow contusions—but not aching as much as she thought she would be. Then she remembered the rock in the river, and she tossed back the light blanket and stared at her left leg. It was wrapped completely from ankle to thigh; so thick was the wrapping material that it could have been a splint. It did not take her long to realize that the bandaging was made of torn strips of green-and-brown drapery, whatever design it might once have had now lost in the twisting. Gingerly she tried to move the leg, to test the extent of the injury to it. Prodding with her fingers produced nothing, but when she attempted to swing it over the side of the bed a gout of fire drove up from her calf and lay her back, gasping. Her eyes widened, her mouth