No matter from where the truculent creature had come, it clearly believed itself the rightful master of this otherwise unremarkable village common. The beast stood stiff-legged and twitchy, aggressively challenging Lysander and his borrowed mount, Icarus. The maddened gaze heated. The hell-spawn ram scraped a cloven hoof on the scattered straw in warning. Apparently the fluffy fiend took offense to Icarus's elegant long-legged form, which surely looked quite strange to its tiny mind after a lifetime of thick, stolid draft horses and plow ponies.

Aristocratic Icarus, on the other hand, visibly trembled in terror before the snorting demonic creature bountifully festooned in multicolored festival day ribbons, which twisted and flapped in the afternoon breeze in ludicrous counterpoint to the lethal twisting horns.

Lysander had a single instant to wonder if Icarus, London creature that he was, had ever actually seen a sheep.

The previously amiable horse let out a shrill neigh of panic and performed a gyrating, rearing hop that not only faced the gelding away from the rage-maddened ram, but also aided in putting a nearly instant quarter mile between himself and the nightmarish creature.

Unfortunately, Lysander was not invited on this retreat. The world flipped on its axis and he found himself facedown in the mud with the wind knocked clean from his lungs. Shaken by the fall and his sudden change in stature, he madly scraped the mud from his face and eyes and drew his breath in with a strangled gasp.

Mud. Mud and blood and pain. Thunder.

In time, he would look back to comprehend that the pounding that shook the earth was merely the retreating hoof beats of the fleeing Icarus. Unhappily, in that moment Lysander instead heard the thunder of cannon and storm.

And any moment icy rain would pour from the war-blackened sky and the earth would run with blood.

His heartbeat sped until he could hear nothing but the hammer of his own pulse and the hoarse gasps of his own breath scraping its way out of his throat. There was no village festival, no shattered prize sheep's pen, no gaping crowd of astonished Swaledale farmers around him. There was only the rocky fist of memory, knocking him heedlessly backward in time, flinging him down on a mud-and-blood spattered field of war in Spain.

Thunder. Cannon. Enemy. Battle.

The ram lowered its head and gave a threatening snort, taking up the challenge with vicious glee. Battle indeed, it seemed to say.

To the death, if necessary.

CHAPTER 2

Chapter 2

TWO DAYS EARLIER….

IN A ONCE ELEGANT but now rather dilapidated neighborhood in London there stood a large rambling house composed of soot gray stone and ivy vines. The structure had passed "tattered gentility" several decades back and was well on its way to "ramshackle ruin." Yet like a grubby, much-loved toy, the crumbling structure had a heart and soul that made it almost a member of the family who lived within.