Night Hunter Read Free

body felt as if it might explode. Mosquitoes which drove him half mad with their insistence. He lay on his side in a bog, his right leg burned from where it had struck the motorcycle’s exhaust pipe, and his mind searching, questioning. The cycle was gone now, maybe a victim of quicksand. Laird Jaeger fought back the icy taste and touch of something he refused to claim, but the effort left him without the strength for anything else. He was alive! Lost. Scared.
    No, damn it, not afraid! He became aware of liquid seeping around him, but whatever he’d landed in, it wasn’t about to suck him down to where he couldn’t breathe or see.
    Knowing he didn’t immediately have to fight the swamp allowed him to gain a small measure of control. Warning himself not to panic, he took in his situation.
    He’d been riding his motorcycle through Alligator Alley. It had been raining, the deluge accompanied by a display of light and sound that had filled him with reckless abandon, an emotion he knew as well as he did the restlessness that was part of his nature. The percussion which accompanied the thunder had actually lifted him off the ground, and he’d been hard pressed to see the divider strip, but then nature had always exerted her control over him. He’d never thought to fight it.
    Drawing in a deep and steadying breath, he identified the smell as swamp gases. Bottom line was that his mode of transportation was gone. He had no idea how far he was from the road or what direction he needed to head in order to find it. At least nothing felt broken. It was still raining, a curtain of water only partially deflected by the trees that draped themselves over and around and beyond him.
    Trees. Dense and lush. Full of life. Nothing to need to escape. Nothing dangerous.
    Encouraged by that bit of logic, he pushed through the fog in his mind. There’d been a woman on the highway with him. She had long hair, straight and dark and soft around her angled features. Big eyes that found and locked with his. He’d read unfulfilled sexual need in those eyes and had taken advantage of it. With nothing more than the energy that had been part of him since becoming a man, he’d spoken to her need. She’d responded. If things hadn’t changed, he would have bedded her. It was as simple as that.
    Where was she?
    Where was he?
    The question brought with it a spasm of emotion. The sounds were of the jungle, without beginning or end, beyond his comprehension and yet—
    “Thunder.”
    Shaken by something that felt as if it existed inside him, he forced himself into a sitting position. A sharp sting along his right palm alerted him to the fact that he’d cut himself. The injury might have happened while he was being catapulted into the swamp, but perhaps the saw grass was responsible, not that it mattered.
    “Thunder.”
    “What?” He forced the word. “Is there someone here?”
    Even as the impenetrable foliage absorbed his question, he regretted speaking. He hadn’t heard anyone call out. The sound was nothing more than system overload. He glared at a ten-foot-high wall of greenery. He’d always felt imprisoned by enclosures, and if he didn’t keep up his guard, that emotion might rule him now. He became aware of just how spongy the ground under him was. Although he was the furthest thing from being squeamish, he didn’t want to go on sitting. His legs felt less dependable than he needed them to be, his head both light and heavy.
    There was no way out.
    Moving deliberately, he looked around slowly. Began wrestling understanding from insanity.
    He had to have made some kind of an impression on the jungle-growth, tire tracks, grasses flattened, something, but he couldn’t determine where he’d come from, or where his motorcycle had gone. His helmet had been torn from him. What drew his hand to his back pocket where he kept his wallet, he couldn’t say. He didn’t encounter the familiar lump.
    No identification. No mode of transportation. Minus