Anarchy (The Stone Legacy Series Book 4) by Theresa Dalayne Page A

the wave receded and settled into a puddle beneath him. He coughed and sputtered liquid from his lungs.
    Bright light assaulted his eyes. He squinted into the distance—nothing but desert and abandoned Mayan temples in every direction.
    Contessa’s silky voice carried over the barren land. Jayden jumped to his feet and peered to the far temple where she stood, book propped in her hands, her eyes inked into black wells of onyx.
    She whispered in a foreign language. Her words were harsh and grew in intensity between each breath. His stomach cramped. The air seemed to thicken. Contessa’s red waves of hair floated off her shoulders, splaying around her as if gravity did not exist.
    Bits of soil fell over his shoulders. He raised his face to the sky, where roots from an enormous tree writhed and whipped wildly above him. He’d seen the tree before, but this time it seemed…angry. The sight nearly knocked him on his ass. He stumbled back and dragged his steps over the dry ground, stirring clouds of dust.
    A soft laugh tinkled through the air.
    Jayden froze, unable to shake the prickling sensation crawling over his skin.
    That Modem kid was right. This couldn’t be a dream. No dream was this realistic.
    A hand grabbed his foot, and Jayden leaped back.
    Hands. Thousands of hands with broken fingernails and bloody knuckles reached from beneath the earth and clawed to the surface. Raw skin peeled away, exposing tendon and bone. Jayden leaped onto the bottom step of a nearby temple and watched as the ground of this godforsaken land writhed with reaching hands, like maggots in a bloated corpse.
     
    Jayden’s eyes shot open and he sat up in bed. Hawa blinked, her bare shoulders exposed from under the blanket covering them both. “You okay?” Her voice was sleep-laden and soft.
    “Um…” He was back in the hotel room with Hawa. Back under the covers, lying beside her where he had drifted off to sleep in the middle of the day, just a few hours ago. “I think so. I had a really weird dream.” He ran his fingers through his hair, leaving wild strands to hang down around his face.
    Hawa rolled over and tucked the blankets under her arms, covering her chest. “Contessa?”
    He stared down at her. “How did you know?”
    “An obvious guess.” Her black hair feathered over the pillow. A strip of bright sunlight pushing through the curtains streaked over her face. She smiled.
    Damn. She really was beautiful when she smiled.
    “She was doing something with the book.”
    Hawa pushed up onto her elbow. “What?”
    Jayden examined her for a moment. Her skin carried a soft glow, and the dark circles under her eyes were nearly gone. The rest had been good for her, and weighing her mind down with worries about Contessa would only lay on another layer of stress. “You know what, I’ll tell you about it later.” He pulled Hawa closer to him and groaned. “Can we just sleep for the rest of the day?” Her cheek nestled in the curve of his shoulder. It was a welcomed change to have someone lying beside him. She shivered, and Jay frowned. “I’m sorry.” He tucked the blanket around her so she wasn’t touching his bare chest. “I don’t mean to make you cold. Can’t really help it.”
    She curled into a ball. “That’s okay. I’m used to being cold. Spent enough time here cold at night.”
    “I thought you had electricity.”
    She curled into a tighter ball. “Heat runs off of gas, and that’s not so easy to borrow.”
    “Steal, you mean.”
    She shrugged with a soft smile.
    He chuckled and threw the covers off him, careful not to tear them off her too. “I’m going to—” Telling her his vision now included Modem would probably just freak her out. “I’ll be back.”
    She sat up, clutching the blanket to her body. “You going to try to take off again?”
    He shook his head. “I’ll stick around.” He stood and slipped on his pants. “For a while at least.”
    She snorted and threw his shirt at him. “Like