Where Nightmares Ride
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part II
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Immortal
Appropriate for Teens, Intriguing to Adults
Immortal Works LLC
1505 Glenrose Drive
Salt Lake City, Utah 84104
Tel: (385) 202-0116
© 2019 R.A. Baxter
https://rabaxterauthor.wordpress.com/
Cover Art by Warren Design
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information email contact@immortal-works.com or visit http://www.immortal-works.com/contact/
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-7339085-7-3 (Paperback)
ASIN B07YBNZN1Q (Kindle Edition)
For James Wymore, for inspiring a concept
so rich in potential.
R.A.B.
Dark forms materialized, silhouetted against a backdrop of billowing yellow-gray smoke.
“Not again!” Jack Park spun around and searched for his tormentors. He found the shadowy figures, swathed in bright colored silk robes, standing in a wide ring around him. His instincts warning him to run, he charged their linked arms, but all the force he could muster couldn’t break through their combined strength. They caught him and flung him like a ragdoll back into the center of the circle.
Jack landed, sprawled at the feet of a squinty-eyed hag. She wore a brilliant magenta dress and carried only a mulberry hand fan adorned with the image of a bird among white flowers. Yet her presence radiated an inexplicable power that compelled him to cower before her. He held back tears. What would she subject him to this time? A pack of wolves? An ogre? A gang of street thugs? He pulled himself up on his feet and glared at her, sweat dripping from his blond-tipped, spiky black hair.
The old woman smiled.
How dare she smile! “What’s it going to take?” Jack tightened his fists. “You know this is pointless! I can’t do what you want! You’re wasting your time.” He laughed in despair. This woman had no concept of reason.
“Pak Jaegi ya!” she said in a high-pitched voice. “Bring peace to an old woman’s mind. Tell me you have obeyed. Tell me you’ve been honing your skills in your waking hours.”
Jack clenched his teeth and fought the urge to clock the old crone. “How many times do I have to tell you? I’ll never fight anything for you, especially not some imaginary ‘Dark Mind’ you keep rambling about.”
“What I want is irrelevant, young one. The Dark Mind is coming. Your destiny will find you whether you prepare for it or not.”
Jack had heard all this before. “The only future I want is one far away from you.”
The woman frowned. “Your defiance is regrettable. You’ve learned nothing of honor or duty.”
Tears filled Jack’s eyes. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? You don’t know anything about me.”
“You have forgotten who you are. You must defeat your fear. Were your fate unknown to me, I’d gladly leave you to waste your life—but I know your destiny. I tried to defeat the Dark Mind myself and failed. Zaqar spoke not of me. He spoke of you. It’s you who will defeat the Dark Mind.”
“I won’t do anything for you!”
“Enough!” The woman stepped aside, revealing the towering form of an immense winged lion, a manticore. The huge yellow eyes of its human-like head glared into Jack’s trembling face. Its snake-like tail writhed in the air and the animal roared, revealing three rows of shark-like teeth.
It rose into the air and soared in a ring around the boy, its hungry gaze fixed on Jack.
“You people are crazy!” Jack took a defensive Taekwondo stance, fully aware of his limited skills. He feigned an attack, then turned and made another dash toward the human fence, attempting to hurtle over their arms. They merely backed up and caught him, then swung him back into the fight. He saw no hope of escaping, and even less of defeating this monster. His only task was to determine the least painful way to die. He closed his eyes and stretched out his arms, thinking it best to end this charade quickly. He awaited his demise.
His captors, however, wouldn’t even tolerate self-sacrifice as a means of escape. The screaming of a woman compelled him to open his eyes. A half dozen robed men dragged a brown-haired girl into the circle and forced her back against a massive stone slab. The girl, clothed in a light blue dress, squirmed and kicked at the men but couldn’t stop them from clamping shackles to her arms and legs and chaining her to the rock.
The manticore descended and hovered before the offering, its heavy wings raising clouds of dust. Its face stretched into a savage, toothy grin. The girl screamed and yanked at her restraints. She turned toward Jack, her teary brown eyes pleading for help.
Fury carved the lines of Jack’s face. The devils were using this innocent girl again to force him to stay and fight. Either he battled the manticore, or this innocent young woman would die. Jack glared at the old lady. “Leave her alone!”
“Katie’s fate is in your hands now.” She handed Jack a long, curved scimitar. “Defeat your fear and save her!”
Jack wanted to strike the woman down, but her inexplicable power stayed his hand. Terrified, he couldn’t move, let alone attack the monster. Then the girl’s gaze met Jack’s eyes and fortified his resolve. He turned and faced the beast, aiming his sword between its eyes.
The old hag nodded to the creature, and it turned toward Jack and roared, its glare burning with hatred and rage.
Jack dropped his sword and it clanked against the rocky soil, then he stumbled backward into a multitude of hands. He
scrambled to retrieve his scimitar, but now it magically transformed in his hand into a flaming firebrand.
“What’s going on?”
The manticore landed in front of him and raised its furry head. Jack swung his firebrand back and forth at the snarling beast and it stepped back, then solidified into stone, its joints crunching and scraping. It lumbered toward him, shaking the earth with each step.
“Fight it!” The old woman’s eyes went wild with anticipation. “Defeat it!”
“I can’t kill a block of stone!” He charged the creature, seeing no other options, and ducked below each strike of its claws, his firebrand falling meaninglessly across its stone chest. The body of the stone beast transformed again, stubby horns and bat-like ears emerging from its skull. Its grin stretched wide and it glared at Jack with the deep-set eyes of a grotesque gargoyle.
Jack couldn’t explain the intense terror that now overcame him. He recognized this beast. The thought had hardly entered his mind before the gargoyle pounced and Jack screamed, raising his hands to protect his face. His world exploded in a flash of bright red-orange flame.
Katie’s wrists throbbed, raw and aching from pulling against the thick black chains binding her to the cold granite slab. She’d avoided death by the manticore before it transformed into stone and shrunk into the form of a flaming gargoyle. She turned away and shut her eyes, unable to bear the terror in the Asian boy’s face.
Even closed eyelids couldn’t dim the light from the flames or block the sudden blast of hot air. The warmth decreased fast, and she peeked through squinting eyes to find both the boy and the monster had vanished, along with many of the people who’d been tormenting him. The old lady shook her head. Her remaining followers gathered around her.
Katie didn’t waste a second. “Let me go! You got what you wanted! Unchain me!”
The old woman stared at her, then approached her at a slow pace, her cohorts assembling behind her. “You’ve nothing more to fear from us, Miss Frost. It’s regrettable that we had to treat you so cruelly, but it couldn’t be avoided. We thank you for your sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice? You kidnapped me! You killed that boy! You’re monsters!”
“I don’t expect you to understand, young one. Trust me, there was no other way.”
Katie’s face contorted with rage and she yanked at her shackles. “Let me go!”
The woman nodded to a green-robed man next to her and he slid a key out of his robe, then proceeded to free Katie’s ankles.
“We sought no pleasure in your suffering,” the old woman said. “Find contentment that your fear brought about much good.”
“Contentment?” Katie yanked her left hand away from the green-robed man the second he unlocked the shackle.
“Before we remove the last restraint, I wish for you to understand something. You’re here because you’re a woman of special abilities. Your presence lent great power to Pak Jaegi. We, however, aren’t the only ones benefitting from your ignorance regarding your power. For your own safety, I beg you to speak to your father and ask him to enlighten you.”
“So, you care about my safety now? Keeping a lion-faced monster away from me didn’t cross your mind?”
“You were in no danger, young one. The boy simply needed to believe you were.”
“You talk about him as if we didn’t just watch him die!”
The old woman smiled. “Remember what I said, speak to your father.” She nodded to the green-robed man and he unshackled Katie’s other arm.
Katie rolled off the stone and stood up. She stared fire at the old woman.
A brown-robed man standing nearby unsheathed a gleaming scimitar and handed it to the old woman, who then bowed to Katie before twisting sideways and raising the blade high above her right shoulder. Katie stepped back, her eyes wide, but could do nothing to block the blade swinging toward her neck.
Katie pried her eyes open and found herself lying beside her four-poster bed, her cheek pressed against a cold hardwood floor. She gained consciousness and discovered her nightgown wadded up and twisted around her chest, mingling with a chaotic mass of linens and pillows.
“It happened again.” She wondered why she never remembered previous nightmares during the current ones.
Sunlight glowed through her window blinds, making her squint. She tilted her head to shield her eyes and spied a pair of glossy black Mary Janes, white knee-highs, and white lace bordering a pastel green dress. Looking up, she met the smiling round face of a complete stranger. The girl’s shoulder-length, blonde pigtails bobbed when she giggled. She looked like a child, although clearly a teenager.
“Why are you in my room?” Katie wrestled with her bedclothes and stood up with no small difficulty. “Who on earth are you?”
Jack Park yelled and writhed to the left and right, blinded by the light of an expanding ball of fire. He tried to free himself from an unseen force preventing him from backing away from the inferno, but the anticipated bath of searing pain never came. He peered through raised fingers and watched the flames soften to the marbled gray glow of an overcast sky, viewed through the water-spotted windshield of a silver Ford Fiesta.
Cold moisture flowed down his left leg, melted ice cubes freeing themselves from a toppled paper cup trapped below his left arm. Jack turned to the tall, lanky young man driving the car and awaited the inevitable sarcasm. His friend, however, merely gave him a concerned stare, shifting his attention between Jack and the road.
“Sorry I dozed off, Taylor. Want me to take another turn at the wheel?” Jack shoved the ice aside, then dabbed his leg with a paper napkin he found on the console.
“No, we can switch after lunch. You alright, dude? You had that nightmare again, didn’t you? Let me guess: A beautiful girl was going to die if you didn’t obey an old hag and fight off some horrible monster?”
Jack nodded and turned to stare out the window. Red, flat-topped mesas formed the backdrop of a wide field of pink soil, sprinkled with pale green sagebrush and scattered bursts of scrub oak. “How long was I asleep?”
“About an hour. I can’t believe we left Los Angeles six hours ago and it’s not even noon yet.”
“Where are we?”
“Utah. You just missed Saint George.”
Jack nodded. He spotted a glossy red brochure on the center console and grabbed it and shook off a few stray ice chunks. The cover page displayed an image of young campers smiling over roasted marshmallows next to a large green banner that read, Camp Farley.
Jack thumbed through the brochure, looking at the words rather than reading them, then felt the press of Taylor’s hand against his shoulder.
“Snap out of it, bro. Now’s not the time to give up. We’re heading to the one place that can fix your nightmare problem. Unless that brochure is bogus, they’ve got the world’s top experts on dream tech. You may have just dreamt your last chance to kiss that brunette girl.”
Jack forced a smile. He usually appreciated Taylor’s attempts to lighten the mood, but these repetitive nightmares had taken their toll. “She’s the only thing I’d miss if these nightmares went away. I’m sure everyone at school thinks I’ve cracked. Maybe I have.” He pressed his hands over his face.
“No one thinks that, bro. Okay, there was that time you woke up screaming in the middle of chemistry class, but no one cares. Everyone sleeps in that class.”
Jack pulled a lighter out of his denim pocket and flicked the flint, then stared at the flame. He wasn’t a smoker. He wasn’t even a pyro, although Taylor often accused him of being one. He really had no reason for carrying around a lighter. Truth is, he couldn’t explain his infatuation with fire. He just loved staring at flames. It brought peace to his mind and calmed his nerves.
“I’m sorry,” Taylor said. “I know I’m not much help. Honestly, I never knew anyone could have nightmare problems like yours.”
Jack let the flame flicker out, then shoved the lighter back into his pocket. “Dude, you help me more than you’ll ever
know. No one else would put up with me ranting about my mental problems every day. You totally surprised me this morning when you said you were coming with me. It almost didn’t work, though. When you asked me to stop by at four in the morning just to tell you goodbye, I almost didn’t do it. I was sure you couldn’t wake up that early.”
“I don’t blame you. Until this morning, I thought sunrises were a myth. I’m glad you came by.”
“So am I. Actually, I’m shocked they even let you register at the last minute.”
“Someone must have cancelled, and I didn’t do it just for you. I’m looking forward to this. According to their website, half of the cabins are for girls. I know the food will be good. They’ve got canoes and an archery range. This’ll be fun.”
“I just hope their dream tech works.”
“It’ll work,” Taylor said. “Just getting away for a few days will help. Think about it, a whole week in the woods without your parents stressing you out. That’s probably all you need.”