Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) Read Free Page B

twice, hard. Wake up!
    Four people rushed up the steps, shouting angry-sounding words he couldn’t understand. Blurs of brown coalesced into other colors. Red. Yellow. Spots of blue and green. On long tunics, not the T-shirts and shorts the people should have been wearing.
    He’d been knocked out. Come to for just long enough to crawl back to the pyramid’s summit. Those voices were really Violet, Keith, others in their group. Maybe the paramedics.
    When the men reached him, two grabbed his arms and yanked him off the wall. Their guttural words sounded nothing like the Spanish he’d grown used to hearing the past few days.
    He jerked his arm away. “Hey!” He twisted in their grasp, but their grip tightened, and the other two moved forward. “Let me go!” He tried to fling his body to the wall behind him.
    The men’s harsh shrieks cracked in his ears. One man slapped him. Hard. His face stung.
    “Hey—” Disbelief locked his jaw as the other two men grabbed his wrists and ankles, their sharp fingernails digging into his skin. Tony bucked against them. “Get off me!”
    A man wearing a beaded necklace and a dark, fur cape loomed before him. He growled something threatening, then gripped a wad of Tony’s shirt as if trying to tear Tony’s heart out. Agitated jabbers ensued among the four men. The leader barked something incomprehensible and released Tony’s shirt with a jerk. The hands on Tony’s limbs tightened, and the men lifted him.
    Dreaming , Tony reminded himself. The medics were probably loading him into the ambulance. But did they have to be so rough? And why couldn’t he wake up?
    He must’ve been injured pretty badly. His head no longer hurt, but maybe unconsciousness was his body’s way of protecting itself. Relax. Make the medics’ job easier.
    The men half-dragged, half-led him around the corner of the pyramid to a side of the temple he hadn’t seen. Huge, twin snake statues flanked the triple entryway. Did their menacing, fang-filled jaws hint at his own fate? Before his mind could process an answer, the men jerked him upright.
    He hung in the men’s grasp, too weak to resist further. The man in the animal pelt—probably a priest, the way the others deferred to him—walked around Tony, studied him, pawed at his clothing. He stopped, faced Tony, and drew a stone knife from a sheath at his waist. Murmurings rose from below.
    The man gripped the knife in his fist with the blade pointing down. Fear crawled down Tony’s throat as the man brought the knife closer, until the sharp, stone tip touched the placket of Tony’s shirt. He wet his lips. It’s the paramedics. Doctors.
    The man drew the knife down, slicing Tony’s shirt to the hem. The blade barely touched his skin. What the—? The two men beside him ripped the shirt off his back and tossed it to the floor, then the leader began to saw at the waistband of Tony’s shorts.
    The medics were cutting his clothing off. Looking for—or treating—other injuries. Injuries serious enough his mind had blocked them out in his semi-dream state.
    A cut down each leg brought his shorts down. Next, the men lifted his feet and yanked his shoes off, then his socks, twisting an already-sore ankle. Shouts and catcalls from the ground told Tony a crowd had gathered. No, a two-way radio in the ambulance, the noise of traffic as it hurtled toward the hospital.
    The priest peered at Tony’s briefs with a cocked head and squinting eyes. Despite his rationalizations, Tony’s groin clenched at the unpleasant sensation of reliving the old standing-in-the-school-hallway-in-your-underwear dream. The man with the knife growled something, then drew the blade up one of Tony’s hips, then the other. Tony’s underwear fell away, then the men dragged him to the edge of the platform.
    A breeze caressed his naked body, oddly cold despite the blazing sun. Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. He must be messed up really bad. Tony shut his eyes to stop the queasiness that