Her frightened screams echoed nearby.

  Julian dashed to the sound of Lucy’s voice, ignoring the growing ache in his feet caused by the constant gnawing of the hard leather of his shoes against his skin. He clasped his bow tightly in hand, now anxious for any lingering threat in the forests.

  Comparatively, English forests were always safe, so one never had need of weapons. But if she was screaming, then he only wondered what could be causing it.

  Though, knowing Lucy, she could just as easily be screaming over missing a work meeting as she would being attacked by a bear.

  Following the screaming until it became louder and louder, Julian finally found Lucy stuck up a tree. Below her, a big, angry white cat roared and hissed at her. It looked like some kind of leopard. It kept dashing up the tree, trying to claw at her with its large paws, and she kicked it back each time. Her feet bare, her black high heels abandoned at the base of the tree.

  Julian took aim at the leopard while it was still distracted with its petrified prize. The burning spectral arrow ignited into being before his drawn bowstring. He let it fly, guiding it to the pouncing leopard. The arrow struck it in the side, and the leopard let out a painful whimper before falling to the ground. It stumbled away from the tree a few paces before it fell over and died, its blood staining its immaculate white coat red.

  He ran toward the tree, looking up at her. “Lucy?”

  Her hair was all ruffled and disheveled, littered with forest debris. Her hair band fell out, leaving rogue strands of ginger hair obscuring her face. Her white shirt was torn in areas, as was her skirt and tights. Muck matted her hands. All in all, it was impressive how she managed to get up that tree. Julian might have been done for in the same position.

  Her eyes widened when she saw him. “Julian! Oh my god! Where the hell are we?” Then furrows formed above her brow, and she brushed her hair back over her ears. “Where did you get a bow?”

  “Come on down,” he said, anxiously looking around in case another predator fell upon them. “It’s a long and weird story. But I have no clue where we are.”

  She started climbing down the tree, glaring at the dead leopard just a few yards away. The arrow that struck it had since disappeared. Once close enough to the ground, she jumped down, letting out a soft whimper as her soft bare feet smashed against the leaves. Her steamy breaths shot from her mouth like the smoke of a dragon, and she started shivering.

  “Are you cold?” Julian asked, already taking off his coat to give it to her.

  She frowned as she huddled herself. “I don’t want your coat.”

  “Your jacket is thinner than mine,” he said, dangling it in front of her. “Take it, or you’ll freeze to death.”

  “Never mind freezing to death.” She snatched his vintage coat from his hands and wrapped herself in it. “We have to get back! I have a meeting in three hours for god’s sake!”

  He pursed his lips. “I don’t think we’ll be going back there for a while…” Remembering the words of the Arahka. We’re stuck here, in this strange place… For all he knew, they could be the only people around for miles.

  Lucy shook her head in disbelief, checking her watch. Her chest pulsated; her breathing became quicker. Was she having a panic attack? “No… no. I can’t miss it. They’ll wonder where I’m gone. I’ll get f-fired!”

  “That’s seriously what you’re worried about right now?” Julian released his grip on his bow, and the weapon slowly disintegrated in a ribbon of lilac flame.

  Lucy jumped back, in awe at the display. “How are you doing that? What the hell is that tattoo on your hand? Oh, I must be in a nightmare!”

  “Calm down,” he said, sitting her down by the base of the tree. He explained everything, from the Arahka woman to how they were stuck in this odd new world, and those things called the Vakrul, which Julian still did not fully understand himself. “We have to stick together, work out a plan to survive.”

  “How can I calm down!” she erupted once more, on the verge of tears. “I’ll lose everything. My job, my career, my house! And I’m stuck here with a quitter. How can we make it in the wilderness when you can’t handle sitting at a computer?”

  He scoffed. “That quitter just saved your ass.” He rubbed his hands together, trying to keep warm as he shivered. “Do you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree?”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Oh, are you a fish?” she quipped, with that authoritative tone of a team leader.

  “I may as well have been one in that god forsaken office.”

  Their trivial quarrel was interrupted by the rumbling sound of horse hooves clopping in the muck, louder and louder until it was clear they were coming to the pair.

  Focusing his concentration, Julian mentally summoned his bow once again by clenching his fist, looking around.

  From the rows of the tall, dark trees surrounding them like sentinels, these strange, primitive looking horsemen galloped out from the shadows. Well, this world just got a whole lot weirder. The horses were massive, at their sides carrying fur pelts and dead game.

  The riders themselves were layered up in thick leather fur lined clothes, topped with fur hats that covered their ears. A few of them had their faces covered by a cloth or thick scarf, and others were bare, revealing hard, gruff faces. A few of them held composite bows with curved tips, and another held a lasso.

  Hunters, but whether they were hunting game or people would remain to be seen.

  Lucy glared at them and ran behind him, clutching his arm. “Julian, who are they?”

  “I don’t know.” His fist clenched around his bow.

  The riders rode in circles around them, their horses kicking up clumps of crusty dry leaves and frosty mud. They yelled at one another in a strange language, similar to the harsh, guttural sound in which the Arahka woman spoke.

  Julian frowned, but did not raise his bow. I shouldn’t appear threatening, he thought, but was ready to shoot on a moment's notice.

  One of the riders stopped before him, looking at the bow in his hand. He said something, speaking quickly with a certain lash in his tone that made Julian’s hairs stand. He nudged towards the bow, then said “Tashin daluk!”

  “We can’t understand you,” Lucy exclaimed from behind him. Her breath brushed his ear. He might have taken a moment to enjoy this situation, being her protector, if his heart wasn’t beating like a drum for fear that these hunters might slay them both. “Why do they look like that?”

  “They’re hunters.” Julian looked back up at the rider glaring at him. “We don’t speak your language,” he said calmly, shrugging his shoulders.

  The horsemen mumbled to each other some more. Julian tried not to let one slip out of his gaze long enough, but there were too many of them. They looked like nomads, and from what he knew about nomads, they were about as expert as one could get with a bow. Provoking them would mean death.

  But they took that choice away from him when the rider with the lasso threw his rope around Lucy, yanked her off her feet, and tried to ride off.

  She screamed, her voice piercing the dense frost-bitten tree line. “Julian!” The riders laughed, and the one with the lasso tried to gallop away.

  Julian tried to fire his bow, but the rider before him charged, knocking him over with his horse. He collapsed to the ground, but did not lose sight of the rider trying to carry Lucy off. He took aim from the ground and let his arrow fly, knowing that it would find its target no matter his position, so long as he looked at him.

  The burning purple arrow flew, homing in on the running rider and struck him square in the back. He grunted and fell from his horse, rolling in the mud, leaving a screaming Lucy tied up and alone.

  The riders burst into an uproar, shouting and screaming at each other, or at Julian, he couldn’t quite tell. He tried to fire another arrow before a rider stepped down on his hand so hard that Julian thought he broke it. The bow disappeared as his bones cracked, and Julian screamed in pain.

  The leather-clad horseman looked down from above and unsheathed a scimitar. Half his face covered by a scarf. “Fulun,” the man said. Now Julian saw the most curious thing about these riders. It was not their weapons or strange language, no. It was their eyes. The man standing above him, about to end his life, had eyes like amber gems. A full yellowish colour—no white in the eye—and his pupil was a narrow slit, like that of a cat or a snake.

  Julian frowned, all but accepting the abrupt end of his life, when someone yelled, “Minar!” The horseman paused, looked up, and another feline eyed man, this one with clear ice blue eyes, looked down on him and said something quietly to the rest.

  The rider released his throbbing hand.

  Looking across at the man Julian just killed, he noticed strange, luminescent smoke drifting off the body. A pale blue in colour. Then he felt a strange pull on his wrist—where the tattoo was—and noticed the eye was glowing. On instinct, as if he’d known to do this his whole life, he reached out for the corpse, and the eye on his palm widened. The horsemen seemed to stop their activities, watching the curious display. Then the wispy, ethereal smoke coming from the man’s corpse began flowing into Julian’s palm, as though his hand became a vacuum cleaner. He felt a surge of energy as the last of the wispy smoke flowed into his palm and felt oddly reinvigorated after his tiring struggle.

  The horsemen bickered to each other, likely about what they just witnessed, and wrapped up the man Julian had killed in a thick white blanket, putting him on the back of one of the horses. After that, they fetched Lucy, tied her up, gagged her because she kept screaming, and put her on the back of a horse.

  Julian had the same fate, and he was carried through the icy forest a prisoner. Seeing nothing but a blurry forest floor as the horse galloped through the woods, giving his core a good kicking. If these people were as primitive as they looked, he only imagined what kind of fate was in store for him.

  Boiled alive? Flayed? The best he could hope for was to be made a slave. His stepmother always called him a pessimist, after all…