It was unlike anything he could’ve imagined. The blood-red waters. The distant mountains shimmering with an odd yellow haze. Two moons hung in the sky. Close to the water there was a forest, the foliage so dark it was black. Behind Lou, a wide, open plain traced a cliff. The vertical ridge of the cliffs seemed to shoot straight into the sky. He could not see the top of it, lost in low silvery cloud cover.
On her left the water continued until connecting with the ridge. The only way to go was right, away from the lake.
Unless someone wanted to swim across the water to the opposite shore and the mountains there.
But the pod of dorsal fins made Konstantine think that would be a short trip, and the explorer would never see that shore.
“What do you think?” Lou asked, twisting the water out of her hair. She was checking her gun, wiping it down with a dry handkerchief produced from a sealed pocket.
“It’s a nightmare,” he said.
“Wait until—”
A screech tore through Konstantine’s body. The sound raised every hair on his arms and made his insides quake.
“—you meet her.”
Konstantine expected Lou to pull the gun, put it up and ready. But she put it away.
“Lou,” he began nervously. Something was crashing through the forest, knocking down the limbs as it passed. The enormous shifts of thrashing branches told him the creature must be massive.
“Stay behind me,” she said.
“I—” His words were obliterated by the creature emerging from the forest.
It was bigger than Konstantine had imagined. Its long black body, scaled like a snake’s, was one massive muscle, contracting.
Its six limbs carved away parts of the earth as it launched itself toward Konstantine.
He knew then that he was going to die.
“No,” Lou said, and stepped in front of the creature, her hand out as if that would stop it.
She looked so small compared to the beast. One swipe and it could knock her away.
Yet it hesitated, but only for a moment. It tried to dart around Lou, its jaws snapping in Konstantine’s direction. The muscles in his lower guts loosened. His knees weakened.
He saw that the inside of the creature’s mouth was white, and puffy. He imagined how suffocating it would be to go down such a throat.
It screeched again, obviously irritated by this game.
“Konstantine, come here,” Lou said, reaching for him. But her eyes remained locked with the creature’s.
“No,” Konstantine said, finding he couldn’t move from the spot. He held one of his bags against the front of his body like a shield.
“I’ll remind you that this was your idea,” she said calmly. “Come here.”
He inched forward until he was just behind her shoulder.
“Give me your hand.”
Konstantine wanted to do anything else, but he shifted the bag to his left arm and extended his right hand. Lou took it, moving it toward the beast’s face.
“Do you have to—”
His palm touched cool muscle. Large eyes widened, surveying him. Its pupils dilated.
It’s very intelligent, Konstantine realized with horror. He could practically see the thinking behind those eyes.
The beast pressed its nose into Lou’s abdomen, audibly sniffing her, her neck and chin. Then it sniffed Konstantine’s hand again.
“Mine,” Lou said, and put her arm around Konstantine. “Mine.”
The beast regarded them. The sound it emitted now was more like a cooing.
Lou moved.
Konstantine mirrored her, unwilling to be exposed. “What are you—”
“Let her smell you.”
The beast was on him in an instant, easily knocking his bag away.
It bent its head and Konstantine braced himself for the attack, for the searing pain of having his entrails ripped from his body.
But the beast only smelled him. It shoved its snout against his chest and sniffed, then his abdomen, his groin.
“Hey, hey,” Konstantine said, covering himself with his hands.
Then she was sniffing his neck and ear, his hair.
“I think she can smell you on me. And me on you.”
She. Konstantine wasn’t sure he could think of this animal as a she.
“You’ve brought other men. Wouldn’t their scent be on you?” he asked.
“I don’t think it would’ve been as strong with such short contact. And it’s possible I smelled like you then too.”
He thought of the nearly two years since the first time he’d touched her. How many kills had Lou brought and dumped in this world in that time? Countless. Had the beast noticed the shift? Was there, in the creature’s mind, a before and an after of Lou’s time with him? Had her scent changed for the animal enough that it now recognized the source of that smell?
Lou was placing a hand on the creature’s snout. “I didn’t bring anything to eat.”
It rubbed against her like a cat.
“It—she missed you.” He found his hands were shaking.
Lou smiled. “Yeah, I think she did.”
* * *
Lou wondered if her relief showed on her face. She hadn’t expected this to go so well. She knew that Jabbers was very intelligent. She had pushed Lou into the water once, when she was bleeding to death, somehow comprehending that the help she had needed was on the other side.
And now, it seemed she understood Konstantine—despite bearing every resemblance to the men she often brought here to La Loon—was not on the menu.
It was more than that. Jabbers seemed interested in him. Curious. She sniffed him and his bags. She dragged her tongue up the back of his neck.
She watched him carefully. Lou couldn’t recall Jabbers ever showing as much interest in her.
Despite how it looked, Lou kept a close eye, ready for the situation to sour at a moment’s notice. Hadn’t she seen YouTube clips where a tiger befriended a goat, only to eat it later?
As Konstantine collected samples of the shore’s soil, the lake’s water, and plucked one of the black heart-shaped leaves from the forest, she kept her eye on Jabbers.
She noted that he didn’t entirely look away from her either. Good. It was smart to stay aware.
There were other reasons to be alert.
She’d never been away from the water’s edge before. In all the years her power had delivered her to this strange place, she’d only ever stepped onto the shore, and briefly at that.
It had never occurred to her to move further inland and actually canvass the land.
What if there were more creatures like Jabbers, who did not have their shared history. Would they simply tear her apart—or die trying? And even if Jabbers was one of a kind, that didn’t mean there weren’t other dangers.
Konstantine must’ve seen her sizing up the cliffs. “I didn’t bring climbing equipment, but we can follow the lake and see if there is a gap at the end, where it seems to connect with the lake.”
They walked the plain that stretched between the cliffs and the lake. The grass—if that was what it was—caressed Lou’s knees. It was black with a strange metallic sheen to it. When Lou touched it, turning it in the light, it shined like the back of a beetle, iridescent.
Jabbers trailed on her left, seemingly content to follow her guests. Once in a while, she would press her side to Lou’s and Lou would pat her hard body reassuringly. To Konstantine, she would sniff his hair, the back of his neck.
It amused Lou. Mostly because Konstantine’s terror was thinly veiled.
He bent and opened his case. He snipped some grass and fed the thin strands into a vial. He filled another clear vial with the soil beneath it.
Jabbers stiffened.
Lou pulled her gun.
“What?” Konstantine whispered, staying low in the grass.
“I don’t know,” Lou said, watching the beast slink forward, toward the lake, her body low. “It looks like she’s…”
With lightning speed, Jabbers leapt from the shore into the water. Her considerable length disappeared beneath the surface, leaving large rings in her wake.
A moment later she broke the surface with something thrashing in her mouth.
To Lou, it looked like a turtle without a shell for its top half, while the bottom half looked like a dolphin’s tail.
Jabbers tore it apart while it screamed.
Konstantine’s face blanched.
It occurred to Lou that Konstantine might put two and two together and realize that his brothers died like this, torn apart on the shore by this very animal as Lou fed them to her, one by one.
The look in his eyes said as much.
“She must eat from the lake,” Lou said. “When I don’t come.”
Konstantine put his samples in their carry case and removed a small device. “I wondered. I haven’t seen any birds, or small animals. And she’s so big. I can only imagine how much she has to eat to survive.”
“What is that?” Lou asked, gesturing at the device in his hand.
He followed her gaze. “It’s a SUMMA canister. To collect an air sample.”
“Is there anything you don’t plan to take a sample of?” Lou asked, smiling. So far she’d seen him collect dirt, water, and any plants they’d passed.
“I’d like a sample of her blood,” he said with a laugh, nodding toward Jabbers. The turtle-dolphin creature had stopped screaming. Now there were only wet tearing sounds. “And I don’t think that will happen.”
“No, but you can get some of whatever she is eating before she cleans it all off her face.”
Lou smiled, watching Konstantine consider this option as the beast lay on the shore, cleaning turtle-dolphin guts out of the webbing between her paws.
To Lou’s surprise, he approached the animal with a cotton pad in his hand.
“If she eats you,” Lou began, “it’s your own fault.”
Konstantine cooed to her softly in Italian and the beast mimicked the sound. Lou snorted.
Show off.
Then, to her surprise, she let him wipe her paw with the cotton pad.
When he returned to his kit, he looked like a kid who just walked out of the candy store with a fistful of free candy. There was a pronounced bounce in his step.
“And there’s little bits of flesh in it,” he said, stuffing the cotton pad into a jar.
Twenty feet lay between the edge of the cliff and the lake. Beyond was an endless plain. Lou began walking in that direction, interested in seeing the lake from the other side.
“There’s a gap. We can pass through here.”
Jabbers bounded into her path.
Lou stopped. She tried going around, but again Jabbers sat up on her hind legs.
“She doesn’t want us to go this way,” Lou said, turning to find Konstantine frowning behind her.
Lou gazed around the animal at the endless stretch of field. More long, metallic grass swung in a low breeze. But the sky was light and unmarred.
What’s out there?
“She must think it’s too dangerous,” Konstantine said.
“For us or for her?” Lou wondered.
“Maybe both.”
Lou looked up at the cliffs. “Then let’s call it a night.”
She craned her neck up to regard the cliff face. It cut from the left into their path. From here, it looked as if the dark mouth of a cave awaited them.
If there was such a cave, she’d much rather sleep off the ground and away from anything that may roam the grasses at night looking for a meal.
It was Jabbers who bounded up the side of the rocks first. Her serpentine body seemed to slide and fold over every obstacle with ease.
Lou relied mostly on her right arm to pull herself up. The incline was very gradual, and a worn path allowed her to ascend without much effort.
Jabbers stopped on a landing a hundred feet off the ground. Lou had been right. It was the mouth of a cave.
“You got a flashlight in there?” Lou asked, staring into the pitch black.
After a short rustle in his bags, Konstantine put a metal flashlight into her hand.
She clicked it on.
The cave wasn’t huge, perhaps 220 square feet from its mouth to its curved back wall. Against that wall was a pile of…
She moved closer for inspection, her beam sweeping over the rubble.
“Bones,” she said. “There’s a pile of bones.”
“She piled them so nicely,” Konstantine said, his voice still strained from the climb.
Lou snorted.
Jabbers squeezed past Lou to the pile and flopped down onto it. Then she began to roll around like a dog in the grass.
“That’s one way to scratch a back,” Lou mused.
“Can we eat now?” Konstantine asked, and Lou heard the irritation.
“You’re like Piper,” she said, tossing her small leather bag against the far wall. “You get cranky when you haven’t eaten.”
Konstantine was tearing open a food packet with his teeth, rolling his gaze up to hers defensively.
After reconstituting the food with a bit of water and heating it over the small fire he built, they ate their chili mac with beef. Once Konstantine had two packets down, the lines in his face evened out. He was even able to offer her half of his brownie.
Lou took off her boots and shrugged out of her leather jacket. The fire made it too warm to wear it, and she wanted to dry her damp clothes near the flames.
Free of the leather, she stretched her shoulders.
“If this is her cave,” Lou wondered aloud, “where are the others? She can’t be one of a kind.”
The fire threw shadows against the wall, which Jabbers watched curiously until she settled at the mouth of the cave, stretching long and feline against the backdrop of the eternal twilight and placid lake.
“Maybe they are solitary creatures,” Konstantine said. “Like jaguars, they spread out and have territories hundreds of miles wide. They only come together to mate.”
Lou arched a brow at the word mate.
With her eyes on the distant two moons, Lou thought, There have to be others. Jabbers couldn’t have come from nothing.
“Does it always look like this?” Konstantine gestured at the night. “Are there seasons?”
“I haven’t seen anything but this. It’s always the same.”
“No seasons and the same amount of light? No visible sun in the sky. Well, the tilt of the axis could play a part. And some of the outer planets have incredibly long seasons. Forty years, I believe. But this place has oxygen and life. And it isn’t freezing. It can’t possibly be too far from a star, can it?”
Lou held her hands toward the fire as he stoked it.
“I honestly don’t know enough about planetary systems to guess the conditions where such a place is possible,” he continued. “But obviously, this is another world.”
Lou had thought of the alien planet idea, though she could not, in her mind, fathom that her ability would take her not only through water but across space.
“I guess I thought it was Earth,” she said. “In a really distant future or past.”
“Where did the other moon come from?”
She shrugged. “Just the right asteroid came along at the right speed or whatever.”
“If this is the very distant future, it’s possible. But that begs the question, where are the humans? Are there any? Or did they go extinct?”
Konstantine eyed the creature lying at the mouth of the cave. “Did they get eaten?”
The fire was cozy and there was something about Jabbers asleep at the mouth of the cave that made Lou feel both safe and uneasy. The creature was guarding them. But from what?
“When we first crossed over, there was a car,” Konstantine said. “I stepped on it.”
“That came with Angelo,” she said, watching his face for any reaction to his brother’s name.
“Really?”
She waited, seeing where this might go.
“I didn’t realize you could bring an entire car with you,” he said.
“I made his chauffeur drive us into the bay. I’d only wanted Angelo, but it brought all three of us and the car across.”
She wished she understood the expression he was giving her.
“Has that happened before? Where you’ve brought entire vehicles or fleets with you?”
“No. I can’t do it in the dark.”
After a long pause, he flicked his green eyes up to meet hers. “And when he got here?”
Lou said nothing.
Konstantine laughed. “How do you know she is a she?”
“I guess I don’t. It’s just a feeling.”
If Konstantine was horrified by the news that his brother—and most of the family—had been eaten alive by this creature, he didn’t show it. But they’d made that bed the night they came to her childhood home and shot her parents.
She relived it distantly, the white snap of the gun going off in the bedroom upstairs and the sound of glass breaking. The gate to their backyard flying open and Lou’s father lifting her and throwing her into the pool, knowing it would save her life.
It had taken her years to hunt them all down. Years to discern how all the pieces of that one night had played out, and who had been responsible for what.
All of it had delivered her to Konstantine’s door.
His mind ran with questions too. That much was clear. But he said nothing, only looking into the flames.
“That scar on your shoulder,” he said eventually, pointing across the fire to her.
“She bit me,” she said.
He didn’t reply, obviously waiting for the story.
“I was taking a bath and I slipped through,” she said plainly, conveying none of the terror of what it was like for her then, trapped in a body with a will of its own. This was long before Aunt Lucy showed her what she could do.
It was Lucy who had given her back her life. Aunt Lucy who’d not only taken her in after her parents had died, but who’d taught her that Lou controlled her power. It didn’t control her.
“When I crawled out of the lake, she attacked me. I fought back. I don’t know if I poked her in the eye or hit her nose, but she let me go and I fell back into the water. I reemerged in a swimming pool in a man’s backyard. He was cutting his grass when I just walked out of the pool. Bad day for him.”
Devil’s Luck Page 9
