The fight was brief and intense. Everyone but the boy and I got shot, but the adult travelers didn’t die when they were hit. They fell, they bled, but they seemed more pained and angry than they were mortally wounded. The boy had prudently dropped flat to the pavement, and now he was climbing to his feet, slowly, grinning a little. Of course he was pleased with himself, the little shithead. He had just saved the day by giving his people an extra second to react. The woman was smiling, and she nodded over at the kid. “Good eye, Pim. You just saved all our lives.”
There was no more gunfire, and I knew what that meant for Pat and Boone. But this pack wasn’t done. Oh, I was hurt, I was mad- but I wasn’t a lone-wolf. Oh no. These smug people were tough, and they had stopped the ambush, surviving the bullets that should have put them down because the armor I now saw peeking out from beneath the collars of their shirts. But they had made the same mistake that those raiders had made so long ago, and the same one that every mark before this had made in the last year. They thought I was a little, lost girl. They thought I was just the bait, just some little lost lamb being used by the wolves. They probably thought I was confused. They had taken the bait, even if everything else had gone so horribly wrong. But I wasn’t a lost lamb. Oh no. I was a tigress.
I couldn’t hear a thing. Just ringing. Just that damned dial tone. I drew it out from beneath the car and sighted, just as Boone had shown me. The adults hadn’t been paying attention to me, distracted by checking their wounds. They had only just started to get to their feet. It was in my hands. Comfortable. Familiar. My fellow wolves had always saved the best stuff for me, even this beautiful gauss. Breathe out. Squeeze. Crack. A splash of red. Again. Crack. Again. Crack. And then it was just me, staring across corpses at those wide, pale, terrified eyes.
We just sat there on the road for a while, just staring at each other. I cleared my throat awkwardly in the silence. “Pim, is it?”
The boy’s mouth was hanging open, his eyes just as wide. It didn’t look like he was breathing. “You…” he croaked hoarsely. “You killed them. You killed them!” His voice broke and spiraled up into a brief falsetto; taking the intensity out of the accusation and making me chuckle, despite myself. It wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny. My friends were dead. The marks were dead. It was just me and this kid on a road streaked in blood and smelling of fresh death. The flies had already started to gather.
Pim regained control of his voice. “You’re a fucking monster, ______.” I could not have told you what name he actually said. But I knew that it was my old name. That long-lost name, gone to oblivion, pushed down into the scar tissue of trauma along with that face- the one that had belonged to that wise, leathery-faced old man. But the boy wasn’t done. His eyes shone with a vicious light, a hard, ice-crystal hate freezing over those eyes as he spat the words that he knew would cut me the deepest. “Do you think your daddy is proud of his little fucking monster?”
I reeled back as if he had just punched me in the face. I didn’t know how he had done all of that, how he had known where the cracks in my wall had been, but the strike had been surgical in its precision. I don’t remember raising the gun. I don’t remember pulling the trigger. I dropped the gun and lay down on the bloody concrete, staring up at the shattered sky. “Do you think your daddy is proud of his little fucking monster?” I could no longer see that face in my mind, the leathery-faced, wise, smiling face of a man long gone. He had left me. I disgusted him. I was a monster. I closed my eyes and waited to die. It would happen eventually.
…
They found me near the remains of Los Angeles. The world wasn't dead. There was a president, a warrior with an army of men sweeping across the broken fragments of that grand old U.S. of A., and he was going to put the world back together. He was hope and salvation and life, and everyone loved him. Everyone except me. I didn't feel anything, not at first. They didn't know what had happened to me, they just found me lying nearly starved and heat-stroked in a tangle of bodies and just assumed I was the only survivor of a highway ambush gone wrong. Once again, people thought I was the little lost lamb.
They put me in a sort of orphanage and cleaned me up, and fed and clothed me. They gave me a name, picked "Joanna" out of a hat, and appended "Angeles" to it, for the place they had found me. I was one of many, but the caretakers were dedicated. Counselors spoke to us all, gently, carefully, trying to help all of the kids in their little flock of sheep live with whatever unspeakable traumas lived behind the scar tissue in their brains. All the while, they never suspected I was a tigress, they thought I was another cute, fluffy sheep. They didn't push me, and I didn't tell them anything. Eventually, they left the broken little "sheep" alone and moved on to the next kid.
Eventually, I started to believe the stories that they told me. I was just another victim found half-dead out on the highway, another casualty of the horrible aftermath of the war. We had gotten lucky, they said, lucky that the Savior had turned almost two-thirds of the nukes into useless duds in the air. I didn't know what that meant, but everything else, I ate right up. I became Joanna Angeles: quiet, meek, pretty little Joanna. I studied in school; I ate my vegetables, I smiled when they took my picture. I loved the presidente. I looked up to the soldadesca. And when they asked for volunteers for the Former program, to "secure the future of the human race," I volunteered with a wide, genuine, empty smile.
The whole time, I didn’t think once about Boone, or Pat, or the hundreds of bloody faces that should have been etched into the back of my eyelids when I tried to sleep. Most of the time, I slept just fine. I was just a little lost lamb, found and returned to the fold. But sometimes, every so often, the mask would slip, and I would dream of wide, pale accusing eyes, and hear words that seethed and burned inside me. And I would know that I was a monster.
…
Joanna
I woke up screaming on the ice, panting, breathing hard, pale-blue eyes in memory burning holes in my soul. What little of it remains. This time, the voice from the monolith was my own, speaking in a mocking, almost singsong tone. Sweet little Joanna, poor little Joanna. Why is the universe so cruel to you? Tears streamed down my face and froze halfway down my cheeks, but I didn’t feel them at all. Did you ever wonder why Barbas chose to greet you with that gun? He had to placate the tigress, you poison, you cancer of person. You can hide in your little wool mask, but you can't hide from me.
“Stop it!” I screamed, clawing at my head. “Get out! That’s not my voice! That’s not how it happened!”
My own laughter filled my head, ringing off the inside of my skull like it was a great rusted bell. Isn't it, though? Lie all you want, little cat. You destroy everything you touch. Just look at this planet. You've brought about the doom of all of these people. The voice changed then, no longer my hideous doppelganger. It was not the voice of a human at all. It was a disgusting, writhing mass of rotting, feeding maggots, shaped into a voice. It was a wasp's nest kicked open, the horrible clockwork abomination of their spawning chambers exposed for the whole world to see. I gagged and retched thin bile onto the ice. NOW BE A GOOD LITTLE KITTEN AND DIE ALONE.
Huge, crushing footsteps shook the ice beneath me. I looked up and saw something straight out of a nightmare charging straight for me. It was like something out of a Lovecraftian re-imagining of old Greek myth. Rotting, seething flesh covered its horrible humanoid frame, dead muscle piled on itself into a physique that never could have existed. Its head was the bleached skull of a bull, framed on either side by the magnificent horns of a great steer. All through its vile body was woven twists and strands of metal, and it bore armored plates in place of skin, seemingly at random. It was, impossibly, some kind of Minotaur, and it was coming straight for me.
Something inside my skull broke then. The mask I had worn for so long shattered into a thousand pieces, and I grinned, wider than I had in fifteen years. Sure, that little dream pageant hadn’t been entirely accurate. Sure, the whole fucking thing was some kind of horrifying night
mare/false memory meant to make me doubt myself, meant to tear me apart from the inside. Or maybe it wasn’t. I honestly couldn’t remember who Pim had really been. But the thing in the defaced standing stone was right about one thing. I was a monster. I killed Pim, a beautiful boy with pale blue eyes on a road outside Los Angeles. Maybe he had been my friend; maybe he had been just a mark I shot in a rage. Maybe I had been a bandit; maybe I had been a slave. It didn't matter now. Oh yes, I was a monster. I was the Tigress. And the thing in the monolith had just decided to piss me off and pit me against a glorified cow.
I snatched up the billhook I had dropped and leveled it like a spear, the lantern falling free of its hook and clattering to the ice. I showed the charging minotaur all of my teeth and screamed, “Come and get it, Bessie!”
...
Chapter Fourteen: The Minotaur
Volistad
We walked for a long time, down beneath Ravanur's frozen skin. I took the lead, my metal bow in my hands with its impossibly thick wire bowstring bearing one of the precious arrows from my limited supply. Thukkar followed me; his concentration was mostly fixed on keeping his footing on the uneven, barren rocky ground. He was doing well, but I could tell he was in pain even through his tightly maintained mask of traditional ranger stoicism. Nissikul had been working on him whenever we stopped to rest, and the regular contact seemed to be making them more and more familiar with each other, to the point where I had to suppress my long-maintained elder brother instincts to run the wounded ranger off the scent of my admittedly beautiful sister. She was a grown woman, and a Stormcaller, and could take care of herself. It hurt me to see the horrible stump of her missing arm, but she seemed to have adjusted to it with her characteristic mental agility. She couldn't summon a simulacrum here, not while touching the stone of the Great Mother, but the lack of an arm seemed not to be bothering her much at all- at least not while I was watching. She brought up the rear of our ragged hunting party with one of my axes in her hand, her little glowing orb of cold light circling us slowly and lighting our way in the crushing darkness.
I could not precisely say what I was following, or how I knew in which direction to go to find Joanna. But there was a power, somewhere out there, an energy that I could almost feel rather than seeing, hearing, or smelling it. I didn't know what that feeling could be, but it made sense to me, and I followed it. It was only after our third break of the day that I realized what I was actually sensing. I had turned to help Thukkar sit and rest his injured back, and I felt some of that same energy that I was following, flicker across my mind when I accidentally brushed against his Deepseeker blessing, a silvery cuff strapped to one of his forearms. It was running out, possessing little more than two week's energy in its subtle design, and I could feel that power in my mind. Was this some kind of side-effect of my magick heart? When we resumed our trek a short time later, I tried to focus on that feeling and compared the sensation from Thukkar's blessing to the one I somehow knew connected to Joanna. I couldn't tell anything about distance. That didn't seem to be how it worked. But I had a definite direction, and I knew that whatever blessing she was wearing was seething with power. If it worked the same as the ones I was familiar with, then her blessing could last her for a very, very long time.
Behind me, Nissi stopped, suddenly. I turned to look at her and found her frozen in place, her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly to the side as she listened for something that she couldn't quite hear. Thukkar and I froze as well, and I scanned the darkness. I couldn't see anything. Then I heard it: the scream of a woman, distant and faint. It seemed to be coming from somewhere just ahead. Nissi made a throwing motion, and her little orbiting ball of light lanced out ahead of us, growing to several times its previous size and illuminating a dense forest of the same sort of strange pillars I had seen where I had landed. The scream came again, and this time, I recognized it as one of wild rage. Was it Joanna?
Without waiting to confer with the others, I sprinted ahead, fixing my grip on my bow, dodging between the irregularly placed standing stones. I quickly outpaced Nissikul's orb of light, and shadows fell upon me, but I kept moving. Something was casting a steady, warm light a little way ahead, and though it was dark, I could still see more or less where I was going. The woman's voice came again, a wordless cry of challenge, and this time, her shouts were answered by a crackling, seething roar that sounded like it had been ripped out of shredded lungs. It was not a sound I had heard before.
I burst out from behind a great pillar and into a small clearing and saw it all. The stones here had been arranged in a tight circle, as if they had been placed to create a tiny arena for the duel which was unfolding within. A monster like no creature I had ever known roared and lunged around the little clearing, its body fashioned from semi-frozen, spoiled meat. It was huge, shaped like a hideously overgrown man, and it was covered in metal and wire at seemingly random intervals. Its head was not a normal head- rather it was the skull of a beast I had never seen before, cunningly fashioned from some enameled metal, and great curved horns jutted from both sides of the false skull. Locked in combat with the beast was something even more remarkable- a single woman, fighting the beast, and apparently keeping it at bay with a polearm of a design I didn't fully recognize. She looked like one of us- like one of the Erin-Vulur, but it was hard to tell due to the tattered ranger's furs she wore, and the hood that obscured most of her face. The strong sense I had followed to this point was now indistinct, and I couldn't tell if this was the god I sought or just another lost traveler beneath the skin of the world. It didn't matter. She was a warrior, she was brave and fierce and strong, and though she fought admirably, I could see her beginning to tire. It was time for me to put my new tools to use.
I raised the bow and drew to my ear, sighting quickly along the strange arrow and aiming for the raging monster's chest. The drawn bow felt like an avalanche held in check, so much force waiting, just waiting for my command. I loosed. The bow snapped forward with a sound like the closing jaws of a trap and the arrow vanished. An eye blink later, the monster reeled, and rotten black blood spewed out over the stone. The beast did not fall, but as it staggered and regained its footing, I saw that arrow had not lodged in its body at all, but rather it had exploded out of the creature's back and taken a chunk of flesh the size of my fist along with it. The arrow, still straight as ever, lay innocently on the stone in front of one of the monoliths, surrounded by vile gore. Palamun’s teeth! The monster turned its great skull-face toward me, and tiny pinpoints of red light flicked around and settled on me from within the gaping sockets. I showed the creature all of my teeth, already drawing back my bow once more, this time sighting on one of those glowing eyes.
Then the woman with the spear appeared from behind the raging monster, not sparing me a single glance, and thrust her weapon up at its neck. It turned at the last second and tried to swat her away with the back of its great, oozing paw, but the woman ducked the blow expertly and stabbed the point of her spear into the creature's columnar leg, right in an unarmored spot in the center of the thigh. Sensing the retaliatory blow coming, she let go of the spear and rolled back out of the way, coming up in a crouch with a ranger's climbing axe in one hand. The monster roared again and slammed a disgusting fist down on the spear, but the weapon, made entirely of iron, just ripped itself out of the brute's thigh and clattered across the stone. I loosed just as the great fist touched the ground- when the monster would be too committed to its strike to dodge the blow, if it were even smart enough to try.
The arrow vanished into the dark socket and exploded out the back of the "head" in a shower of foul fluids and shattered bone, but the beast did not go down. It lowered its horns and charged me, and I didn't have time to get out of the way. I was struck low in the belly by one great curving point, and the momentum of the impact flipped me wildly forward so that I came crashing down to the stone at the same time that the horned beast smashed headlong into one of the standing stones. The monolith didn't seem
to react to the impact at all, standing still strong, undamaged, and obdurate. I, on the other hand, gasped for breath and pushed myself back to my feet, my legs wobbly. The Deepseeker's armor had saved me from impalement, but that blow had been immense. The woman pushed past me, snatching up one of my iron shortspears from where they had spilled out of my quiver. She took a quick three-step and flung the weapon into the creature's back, striking just to the right of the spine.
The horned monster turned again, enraged, and then leaped into the air, intending to come down on both of us with a great double-fisted body slam. But Nissikul had just arrived, and she had other ideas. She came sprinting in impossibly fast, ducking low under the foul bulk of the creature in a blur, and dropped my axe at my feet, trading it for my greathammer. She whirled with the grace that only a Stormcaller could possess, the head of the hammer flashing above her in a shining halo of motion. She met the beast mid-strike, smashing in the side of its head as neatly as if the movement had been rehearsed, viciously and totally checking its momentum. The monster crashed to the stone, the enameled skull deformed, one of its curving horns smashed deep into its own head. But still, it stood, if a little shakily.
The beast roared again, but the sound came out metallic and distorted, robbing it of its intimidating potential. The warrior woman snatched up her spear and stalked straight past Nissikul without a word. Then, in a rush of frenzied movement, she sprinted straight at the beast and jumped. She seized the edge of its skull-head with one hand and vaulted it so that she ended up perched atop its shoulders, her legs wrapped around its thick, corded neck. It thrashed about and tried to get its arms up to rip her free, but she was not finished. She gripped her spear in both hands, trusting the grip of her legs to keep her astride her unwilling mount. Then she drove the point of the strange, hooked weapon down through its head, angling the spearhead so that as it burst from beneath the monster's nominal chin, it pierced its broad chest and buried itself deep in the thick, half-frozen muscle.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 53
