Ancient Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

He thought of the girl's face and he grew thick with desire. He shivered, and the sap seeped through his groin and lent its strength to his already painfully hard erection. His hips lifted from the ground, and he tried to call out to the girl, to make her turn and see him, to stop her and draw her back where he could touch her, gaze into her eyes and share the heat and drown himself in her and fill her.   He tried to bring her back to where he could see her eyes.
    All the while, a voice whispered in his ear.   Most of the words were jumbled and lost—or filed away. He heard the girl's name, Elspeth Carlson; it shivered through him and raised him from the ground again, wiping the next sentences from his conscious thought and dropping him back into the stream of sound around some bend. He knew that name, had breathed it into the darkness more than once and dreamed it into his life, despite the unlikelihood of such an event ever transpiring.
    The girl disappeared into the distance; her image dissolved into the trees and the branches. The sunlight was warm, and he felt wind on the damp, chill sweat that coated his face. He could not breathe—felt as if he had not breathed since that horn cup had been held to his lips and tilted. In that instant, he saw the old church; its faded walls gleamed white and its steeple jutted into the sky, a sharp, one-finger salute to Heaven.
    Tommy gasped air through the thick, sticky mess that filled his throat and coughed violently. His hands dropped to the ground at his sides and he dug his fingers into the dirt, dragged his nails deeper and gripped until his knuckles threatened to pop through the skin or explode from the pressure. He coughed again and bile-coated chunks spewed from his mouth in a stream. His head pounded. He tasted sweet air and dragged it into his lungs in great heaving gulps. He lay flat on his back, fighting for the breath he'd been denied before passing out.
    In those moments, he saw how death could come without warning. He would not die this time, but this was a wake-up call.   You could drive down the mountain, park your truck, walk into the woods and die. It was that simple.
    As his breathing steadied, his awareness of his surroundings returned. He felt the press of grass and dried leaves against his back and the knot where he'd cracked his head on the rock. He heard the chirruping cry of crickets in the shadows and the flapping of wings overhead. The sun was not as bright as it should be, and for a moment he thought there would be a storm. Then he lifted his arm and glanced at his watch, and sat upright as though stung by a hornet.
    The quick motion was a mistake, and vertigo struck hard. He leaned forward and placed his head between his knees. His mind whirled. It was after six in the evening. When he and Angel had come down the mountain, it had only been one o'clock.
    Angel.
    He turned, but Angel was not beside him on the ground, or anywhere in sight. Shadows encroached on the path from all sides, and only the slightest hint of sunlight glowed about the trees. Tommy scanned the trail, and the trees beyond it, but there was no sign of Silas Greene, or of antlers. The thick, ropy vines that had erupted from the earth were nowhere in evidence, and the ground where Greene would have stood, if he'd been there at all, was as undisturbed as any other patch of trail in sight.
    He found his hat on the ground at his side, lifted it and brushed the dirt from it carefully before sliding it back onto his head. His throat hurt like hell, and there was an awful, bitter taste in his mouth. He'd tried an acorn when he was much younger, not listening to his father's warning about the taste.   This was like that, only worse, so bitter that even the act of trying to spit it out drew new spasms of disgust. At the same time, he felt the ghost flicker of desire sizzle down the back of his throat. Elspeth Carlson's face flashed through his thoughts, and then was gone.
    He rolled back to