Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

come from her mouth. She hurt all over, but the worst pain was centered in her right knee. It felt as if the bone had been replaced with molten fire, the sensation so intense, so far beyond any type of pain she’d ever experienced, that she wasn’t sure there was a word for it.

Her eyes were squeezed shut and tears streamed down her face to wet the grass on either side of her head. She didn’t see Coach Anderson, but she heard the woman blow her whistle – a signal for the other girls to take a knee – and then she heard pounding footfalls as the coach ran toward her.

“Lori! Are you okay? How badly are you hurt?”

She opened her eyes and tried to focus on Coach Anderson’s face, but her eyes were filled with tears, and she could only see a watery, distorted image of the woman. The light hurt her eyes, caused her head to start throbbing and the ringing in her ears to intensify, so she quickly closed them again.

“Check on Aashrita,” she said, hissing the words through her pain.

She feared her idiotic desire to be the baddest badass soccer player on the team had resulted in her friend being hurt, maybe seriously so. And if that was the case, she didn’t think she’d be able to live with the guilt.

To hell with soccer, she thought. Playing in college wasn’t worth it, not if it meant having to hurt anyone who stood in her way.

“A noble sentiment.”

Startled by the voice – a male’s, one she didn’t recognize – she opened her eyes.

The pain was gone. Her head no longer pounded, the ringing in her ears had ceased, and the fire in her knee had been extinguished. The relief was so great that it was almost as overwhelming as the agony it replaced, and she drew in a gasping breath. Her vision was clear once more, and she saw she sat alone in the back seat of a car – a big one, a Cadillac or limousine – and she was her current self again, thirty-four, and wore a long-sleeved robe made of sheer white fabric. She was naked underneath, and her breasts and nipples were quite visible. Suddenly uncomfortable, she crossed her arms over her chest. The seats were upholstered in fine black leather, luxuriously soft, but cold, and her gossamer-thin robe did little to insulate her body from it. The vehicle’s only other occupant was the driver. He – Lori assumed the driver was male based on the voice she’d heard – wore a hooded red robe. She couldn’t see the back of his head, but she could see his hands gripping the steering wheel. They were broad and thick fingered, the backs covered with hair so thick it almost looked like fur. The nail of the pinky finger on his left hand was painted red, the same shade as his robe.

Like the goat-eyed woman in FoodSaver, she thought.

The radio was on, but all that came out of it was static, the volume turned low so it was almost inaudible. There was a rhythm and cadence to the sound, almost as if it were words spoken in some alien language that she could barely perceive, let alone understand. She turned to look out the right passenger window and saw nothing but blackness. She might’ve thought the window had been painted over, but she had the impression there was depth to the darkness, that it stretched outward for miles, all the way to some unseen horizon. She leaned closer to the window and looked upward. There were no stars in the empty black sky, and it seemed the darkness continued on to infinity. It made her feel very small, and she tightened her arms around herself as she shivered.

She looked forward, and through the vehicle’s windshield, she saw headlight beams illuminating a glossy obsidian surface. We’re on a road, she thought, one without any identifying features. No billboards, no dividing line painted down the middle. Nothing.

“Where am I?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

The driver answered without turning to look at her.

“Where you are is the Nightway. What’s going on is that I’m taking you to the Vermilion Tower. My associates and I want to have a little chat with you.”

The man’s voice was devoid of emotion, almost robotic. She leaned forward to look at the rearview mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of his features in its reflection. She expected him to have goat eyes, like FoodSaver woman. He had no eyes, though, only patches of smooth skin where eyes should be. As she watched, the patches pulsed, as if in time with his breathing. He smiled then, his teeth a gleaming unnatural white.

“I suggest you relax and enjoy the ride.”

The no-eyed man turned his attention back to the obsidian road that stretched out before them.

Lori’s detached calm was beginning to give way to nervousness. All of this – her nakedness, the road, the car, the driver – had seemed like a dream, or perhaps a hallucination brought on by some powerful drug. But her mind was starting to clear now, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this was real. She tried to remember how she’d gotten here, but nothing came to her. She remembered being on the soccer field, running toward the goal that Aashrita protected, remembered how they’d crashed into each other…. She frowned. That had happened in high school, seventeen years ago. How…. She realized then that she had been dreaming. That day on the practice field had changed her entire life. She’d torn her anterior cruciate ligament – her ACL – the tissue that connected the thighbone to the shinbone. She’d needed surgery, followed by months of physical therapy. It was nine months before she was able to return to full physical activity. By then she was in her senior year, and although the doctor had given her the green light to return to playing soccer, she was