the bed with a clatter. His heart pounded from being awakened so suddenly, so horrifyingly. And from the fear that this was just the beginning.
Ignoring the fallen cuffs, he straightened and yanked up the shade of the nearest window as the princess rose to stand beside him.
It was like looking at a scene from a disaster movie. Below, streetlights cast their eerie glow on a patchwork of car accidents. Though the sun had yet to rise, the commuters had begun their early morning treks to work. Treks that had ended disastrously. Vehicles were overturned, smoking, piled into one another in every which way. As if no one had tried to stop. As if every one of the drivers had fallen asleep.
Cold chills raced over his skin while his ears buzzed with a harsh white noise. He suspected they had.
A few blocks away, fire glowed orange against the night sky even as another explosion rocked the night in the distance, a fireball erupting in a red glow over D.C. Something had crashed. A helicopter? An airplane?
Good God.
Distant sirens broke through his shock, but close by, nothing stirred. No screams or shouts broke the unnatural quiet. Nothing moved. The only people visible were lying on the street or hanging half out of cars, unconscious. Or dead.
He'd seen this kind of mass enchantment before, six months ago when the Esri, Baleris, found the lost gate into the human world while following the magical scent of the draggon stone. The stone had been doing time as an artifact in the Smithsonian until Baleris stole it.
A sick knot fisted in Harrison's stomach, a headache began to throb between his eyes as the memory of that day at the Kennedy Center blasted its way through his head. Baleris had sung his tuneless song and everyone - everyone - had instantly blacked out, falling unconscious before rising like zombies. Everyone except for his kids and him. And Larsen.
Every instinct he possessed screamed that it had happened again. King Rith or one of his minions had sung a song of enchantment so powerful that drivers had fallen asleep at the wheel and pilots and their craft had fallen out of the sky. Would those who'd survived rise, enchanted? His flesh crawled at the thought of an entire city of controlled humans.
Or would they remain like this...asleep? He didn't know. All he knew was that the stones had been hidden in two different places - the draggon stone and three of the green stones in the water off Ft. McNair. The remaining three green stones in the water off Bolling Air Force Base. The two bases were just across the water from Crystal City. Within two miles of where he was now.
Had King Rith knocked out everyone within a two-mile radius? Heaven help them.
"You idiots." Ilaria's quiet exclamation wrenched his attention away from the window. She hit his arm with a small fist, her face a mask of fury. "You foolish, arrogant humans - so certain your paltry efforts to hide the stones from Rith would be adequate, while you chained me, the rightful queen of Esria, like a beast!"
Teeth clenched tight, she turned back to the window, staring at the destruction. "You will get me to the gate and you'll get me there at once, Harrison, for I've no doubt Rith means to escape back to Esria before anyone can stop him." She whirled back to him. "The moment he reaches the Dark Mountains and the Temple of the Ancients, he'll raise his terrible, unnatural power." Her eyes flashed green fury. "And when those walls come tumbling down, you'll have no one to blame but yourself!"
Harrison didn't interrupt her tirade. He didn't argue at all because, dammit, she was right. He couldn't deny a thing she said.
He turned toward the door. "Come on."
"Where are we going?"
"The gate."
The old feeling of being caught in the middle of a tempest swirled up from deep within the recesses of his bones. The feeling that his world was once more being upended, as it had been when he was thirteen, nearly swamped him - that sense that everything was being ripped out of his control.
It was a feeling he despised.
Crossing the living room, he grabbed his cell phone off the coffee table. As they waited for the elevator, he tried to call Charlie, but the call wouldn't go through. He had a bad feeling the streets were going to be impossible to travel. What they needed was a helicopter.
Then again, if King