The rest of the men came off and one grabbed my arm. “You’ll be staying with me for now.” I looked down at his rough and scarred fingers, digging into the flesh of my upper arm. How was I supposed to run now?
Aaron reached into his bag and sprinkled another handful of chips on the ground near his feet, like he was feeding ducks in a park. The monkeys looked up and scrambled over each other, screeching and clawing to get at the food.
One by one, the men were caught up in the spectacle of animals teetering on the edge of violence. The man with the gun nudged the guy next to him, pointed and laughed. Movement near a cluster of trees caught my attention, more monkeys, attracted by the noise and food, were coming from the woods. Suddenly, I thought I might know what Aaron was up to.
But I didn’t have any idea how he was going to do it.
Keeping his head low, Aaron looked up into my eyes, Get Ready. All at once, everything happened. The monkeys finished the chips on the ground, Aaron acted like he tripped and dumped chip crumbs on himself just as the monkeys from the forest showed up. One monkey, noticing Aaron’s bag, leapt onto his back and began pulling on the bag.
But Aaron had been ready and didn’t let go.
Two more monkeys jumped on him simultaneously clawing the chip crumbs off his shirt and grabbing for the bag at the same time. Instead of trying to fight them off, Aaron fell to his knees—the monkeys swarmed all over him.
One of the men moved to help Aaron, then another. When the monkeys, one by one, began to jump onto their shoulders and paw at their clothes searching for food, more of the men moved in.
The grip on my arm released, and the man holding me in place stepped towards the fray.
The time was now. I took one step backwards. My heart pumped hard and a flood of adrenaline rushed through my veins. Dread dripped through my limbs.
Another step.
The men were swiping and hitting at the monkeys that scratched and clawed at their bags and clothes. In order to feed the frenzy, Aaron continued sprinkling chips from the bag.
Now, at the front of the bus, my hand rested on the large side mirror. To my right was my escape route into the forest—but the few hundred yards of open gravel between me and the protection of the trees looked like a mile. I needed to slip around the front of the bus immediately, get out of their line of sight, and start running.
I watched the chaos of men and monkeys. My legs wouldn’t move.
Move Charlotte. Now!
I inched around the bus, past the large radiator still breathing heat. I expected to hear their voices at any moment, shouting that I had gone, or telling me to stop. When I reached the mirror on the other side, I forced my legs to keep walking, faster, faster. Faster Charlotte!
Running, the enormous and heavy pack on my back bounced painfully against my spine. The added weight slowed me so much, it was like running through water. The trees didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
A man yelled, “Where is she?”
Oh God. I willed my legs to move faster. Any moment they would come around the bus and see me, and I wouldn’t be hard to catch.
My lungs burned.
“Here!” someone yelled. “She’s running!”
I looked over my shoulder, saw the man, he waved at the others and turned to chase after me.
The sound of my shoes, they were like a slow rhythm maraca pushing the gravel beneath my feet. The trees were closer, but the man would easily follow me now.
“Don’t stop!” Aaron yelled.
I looked back. Aaron came around the bus and threw himself on top of the man coming after me. They fell to the ground and started swinging and punching each other. “Don’t stop!” Aaron managed to shout again.
My breath, heart, legs, all pushed me forward. The trees were only steps away. I would find a way to stay hidden. I had to.
A sharp crack broke the air.
My legs stopped.
Paralyzed, I thought of the man with the gun.
When I turned around, I saw all the men running towards me. Except the one still pointing the gun, standing over Aaron’s motionless body lying in the dirt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Buddhist
It was only instinct, instinct and fear, that made me turn and try to keep running. When a second crack broke the silence of the forest around me, my right leg exploded in pain.
After seeing the fabric of my jeans running with blood, my knees hit the ground. Was I shot? My hand moved to the hot, swollen place on my thigh. The forest tipped and blurred before my eyes into a collage of slippery green and brown images that would not focus.
My head fell against the trunk of a tree, the bark scraped my face.
A sharp pain dug into my shoulder. My body was shaking but my eyes seemed glued shut. Two hands grabbed both my shoulders and I felt myself lifted off the floor by this strange force. Like a rag doll, I am whipped forwards and backwards while my head snaps sharply against my chest and back.
“Open your eyes!” A loud smack filled my head, the blunt force of something striking my face. My jaw shifted from the blow and my brain buzzed.
“He won’t be pleased when he sees her.”
“Do you think I care? We need her to wake up to get what we need.”
“We already pulled the key off the old man.”
“We still need the information you ass! He’s not going to give it to anyone but her!”
The hands shook my shoulders again and I sensed that another slap across my face would be happening soon. My eyes wouldn’t cooperate, I opened my mouth and raised my hand, hoping that would be enough to let them know I was trying.
“There she is. Now how about opening those pretty little eyes.”
The strain was unbearable, as if there were no working muscles in my entire face. Finally, the tiniest sliver of light made its way to my right eye.
“Hold her up,” the man who’d been shaking and slapping me barked.
Someone came up behind me and laced their arms under mine, like a wire stand for a limp doll. The angriest of the two released my shoulders and grabbed my face in his hands. Both of his thumbs pressed against my eyes and shoved my lids open.
“Can you see me now?” his voice was like acid.
Everything looked blurred and clouded, but I could make out the shape of his head and black hair. “Yes,” my voice failed and only whispered past my lips.
“Good, that’s just grand,” he stepped back. “See if she can stand on her own,” he instructed the man behind me.
The pressure beneath my arms lessened as the man slowly removed his arms from under mine and allowed my legs to take over the chore of keeping me upright. My right thigh throbbed, like a giant balloon ready to burst. When the man released me completely I shifted most of my weight to the left and reached down with my hand to feel the foreign and bloated injury straining against my jeans. Someone had tied a cloth around my leg but it felt wet and tacky, the thick fluid stuck to my hands. It was my blood. I had been shot.
And so had Aaron.
A thick ball formed in my throat. I remembered Aaron lying in the dirt, the man pointing the gun over him.
My eyes blinked hard, trying to clear away the confusing blur. The man’s features were only slightly more focused when he shoved his face right into mine.
“It lives!” his breath was heavy with cigarettes and garlic. When he grabbed my arm and pulled me, the pain in my thigh burst into a hot flame. I was going to pass out again.
“Hurry up!” he shouted.
My feet dragged and stumbled, but every time I started to lag, the man yanked me forward. My eyesight cleared slowly, but I couldn’t see anything beyond the few feet right in front of me. Wherever we were going it was dark, inside somewhere with no lights. The air around us felt cool and damp and the sound of our feet echoed off the walls. The man dragging me held a portable lantern in his other hand.
The cave. We were inside the cave not far from the Immortal Temple.
/> Farther and farther, we seemed to be walking straight into the Earth. Every step was excruciating but I didn’t dare ask how much longer. The blood from my wound had dripped down my shin and soaked my sock and shoe so that a sickening squish and suck sound accompanied my every step. I worried about how much blood I had lost. How much blood did I have left to lose?
To my right, a form sat low to the ground and slumped against the wall. As we passed, I squinted my eyes and tried to see what, or who, it was.
“Don’t worry about him,” my captor yanked my arm and forced me to hurry up. “Your buddy won’t last the hour.”
“Aaron?” The man wasn’t expecting it, so when I lifted my arm and rolled out of his grasp, I managed to escape him long enough to run and kneel next to Aaron. I placed my hand on his chest, it was covered in blood, his breath came in short and shallow bursts. “Aaron?” I asked. “Can you hear me?” His eyes were closed, and he didn’t respond.
I felt the man’s hand on top of my head as he grabbed a handful of my hair. When he yanked me to my feet I cried out in pain, the sound of my desperation ricocheted off the walls all around us.
Aaron was dying. He would be left here to die.
Aaron would die because of me.
The man’s fingers reclaimed my arm and dug in hard enough for me to feel the flesh bruise beneath his grasp.
“Do that again,” he threatened, “and you can forget about your leg, I’ll shoot you in the back of your goddamn skull. Don’t think for a minute I give a shit who you are.” He yanked my arm so that my face was pressed close to his. “Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“I said,” he barked. “Do you understand!”
“Yes. Yes, I understand.”
When he shoved me I fell back a few steps, only to be yanked forward again as he led us farther into the cave. About fifty feet from where we left Aaron, a form in the middle of the cave began to take shape in my fuzzy vision. It looked like a person sitting in a chair. As we came closer, and the lantern’s light illuminated the space, I could see that I was right. It was a person tied to a chair. He had been beaten and cut and now dripped with blood.
When I recognized the man, I sucked my breath.
At the Golden Summit, this was the man who had knocked me down and given me the note instructing me to meet him here. The man I suspected was the Buddhist key keeper.
By the looks of him now, my suspicions had been correct.
Slumped in the chair and held up only by the zip ties that fastened his wrists to the chair behind him, the man appeared to be sleeping.
My captor shoved me to the ground in front of the key keeper. “He’s been smacked around and won’t wake up for a while. When he does, you’re going to make him tell you the location of the next key.”
“How am I supposed to make him?” I asked.
“He has to tell you, he’s bound by his magic voodoo.”
I didn’t think that was exactly how it worked. “Won’t he know that you plan on just sitting here and taking the information anyway? Why bother?”
The guy had another chair for himself propped up against the cave wall. “They’re his own words, right before he passed out. He couldn’t tell us anything, even if we threatened to kill him, Buddha would prevent him.” The man scoffed at the idiocy of the idea. “Only the Ascendant, he said. And that means you, right? He didn’t say anything about someone else being in the room and listening as well.” He tilted his chair back on two legs until his upper body leaned against the cave wall. “So we’ll all just wait here,” he folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes. “Don’t imagine I’m asleep and you can just slip off,” he lifted his shirt so I could see his gun. “Because I don’t sleep.”
I thought of Aaron bleeding to death behind us, I was anxious to figure out a way to get back to him. “Have you tried to wake him up?”
The guy didn’t even bother to open his eyes, “Oh yes, I’ve been beating the crap out of him for some time now. It didn’t seem to help much…or hadn’t you noticed?”
I turned away from the thug and stared up at the painful vision before me. The poor man’s face was swelling around deep cuts that bled freely into his eyes and ran like a slow moving stream across his cheek bones. We sat waiting, silent, the man barely breathing.
Aaron was dying behind me.
Minutes passed, I held my grotesque thigh between my hands, the pain was excruciating now that I had time to sit and stare and think about the ragged mess of flesh leaking blood from my body. The man on the wall hadn’t budged an inch, but I didn’t dare doubt that he would be up in a flash, making good on his promise to spread my brains all over this cave with his gun.
So much blood. Maybe we would all die before the key keeper ever woke up.
The cold, damp air in the cave wrapped around me like a wet blanket and a violent shiver rattled my core. The pain from the gun shot made me nauseous and light headed. Sitting upright on the hard floor seemed to suddenly require a huge effort from my body, so I let myself recline back until my head rested against the cold dirt ground. My head fell to the side and I let my eyes close—I almost envied the unconscious key keeper, at least his mind had managed to escape from the pain of his physical body—even if it was because the gorilla leaning against the wall had knocked it out of him.
My eyes flew open…or had he?
I didn’t get up, but I did straighten my head so I could see the keeper. Had he been knocked unconscious, or was he in the astral plane? Without moving, my eyes slid over to the gorilla breathing deeply against the wall, something tickled his nose and his hand flew to his face to wipe it away. He was not asleep.
But I didn’t really need him to be.
I let my eyes close and tried to separate myself from my body. Remembering all the steps Mohan had taught me, breathing deeply, rhythmically, quieting my mind, becoming less aware of my physical body. A body that was a screaming siren of pain and sickness was hard to ignore, still, I had to keep trying.
Several minutes went by, I couldn’t completely relax, let go. My physical was refusing to release my mind, or my mind couldn’t forget the fact that I was shot and bleeding to death. I had to stop thinking about it.
Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Visualize myself leaving my body.
I felt a hand grasp mine and pull gently. It felt like being lifted from a pool of pain and sickness. The sensations ran off my body like drops of poisoned water and released me from the rolling waves of anguish. Amazed to be free of it, I opened my eyes and saw the Buddhist key keeper standing before me, smiling gently, still holding my hand.
“You seemed to be having trouble,” he smiled. “So once you were close enough, I gave you a pull.”
“Thank you,” I smiled too. Partly because of the joy I felt being relieved of my torturous body, and partly because this quiet little man practically radiated beams of happiness and light. His eyes were so bright, his whole being so open, I instantly thought of being a child and running hand in hand with a friend towards the ocean.
“We are our true selves here,” he lifted his hands palms up and looked at the astral plane all around us. When his gaze landed on the sight of our bodies left behind, my eyes followed and I gasped. Here in this place, I felt perfect. Whole and healed. The sight of my physical body was a shock. It looked sick, decayed, like a broken mess. My face and body were swollen, bruised and bleeding—but the key keeper looked even worse.
“It will be a relief to leave it,” his voice was quiet, confident.
“What do you mean? You’re not going back?”
His bright and gleaming eyes lifted and met mine. “Just once more,” his voice was soft, resigned. “I will name a place out loud for our friend there, and then my time in that world will be complete. But first, I will give you the correct location here, while we have some privacy,” he smiled.
“You were waiting for me here, so you could tell me the truth in private. How did you know I would think to come?�
�
“I didn’t…but I had faith that inspiration would come to you.”
“It seems like a pretty big chance, what if I hadn’t thought of it?”
He shrugged, “Sometimes faith is the only chance.”
After he told me the country and location of the next key and keeper, I asked, “But what will you say when we go back.”
“Oh, I’ll think of something. Ready?”
“Not really,” the thought of returning to my broken and bleeding body, and all the pain that went with it, did not exactly sound like the option I most wanted to take. But I thought of Aaron, barely hanging on to his life after he had done so much to try and save mine. I hoped that after the goons working for Emerick got what they wanted I would have a chance to try and help Aaron in some way. Convince the men to take him with us, or at the very least, drop him at a hospital.”
“You go first,” the key keeper suggested. “Then you can notice me waking up.”
“Okay,” I said and began moving towards my body. Before I went back, he called to me.
“Ascendant.”
I turned and looked into his smiling eyes.
“Do not feel sorrow for me. Always know that I chose this.”
Confused, I smiled back at him. I didn’t understand why anyone would choose to live always in the astral plane. “Okay,” I said. “And thank you…for everything.”
He shook his head slowly and then bowed very deeply, “No, it is I who must forever give blessing for you Ascendant. You who will sacrifice so much for so many.” He stood back up, “Now go, I will be right behind you.”
I stared at him a moment longer, his words were meant to honor me, but they left me with a cold stone of dread in my stomach. My mother was missing, Caleb and Sophie now hated me, Aaron was dying—what else in my life could I possibly sacrifice when I felt I barely had anything left?
The pain in my body returned by degrees until it again lit up every nerve I had, a beacon of blazing agony. It was worse now, now that I had escaped and been forced to return into it. When I opened my eyes, I saw the key keeper still slumped and unconscious in front of me. Then he swallowed, slowly, as if even that small movement caused him excruciating pain. One of his swollen eyes opened into a thin slit and I could see that he was trying to sit up, but the effort was too much for his beaten body and he quietly slumped forward again.
Midheaven (Ascendant Trilogy Book 2) Page 20
