In Bonds of the Earth (Book of the Watchers 2)

by Janine Ashbless

  We didn’t talk much for the next three days and two nights. Egan wanted us to move as quietly as possible and pass unnoticed. Truth be told, it was hard enough work just walking with all our gear that I didn’t have much breath to waste, so I put my head into neutral while travelling and just followed the big rucksack in front of me, letting my hindbrain take care of my footing through rock and bog and undergrowth.

  The weather had turned again and we were getting the full fall show now; brilliantly sunny days and crisp nights that flirted with frost. If it hadn’t been for where we were heading, our little expedition would have been pleasurable. I’d grown up in the mountains of Montenegro and a big part of me missed the wilderness now that I’d moved to the city. The trees here seemed to be in competition to flaunt their fiery colors against the cerulean sky, so that we walked across drifts of copper and under showers of gold. Sometimes it was so beautiful that I couldn’t help stopping to gape in amazement, or to snatch at a leaf as it flickered past me like a gilded sprite. Then Egan would turn and stare at me and I would muffle my brief impulse of delight, embarrassed.

  But all the time Azazel lurked at the back of my thoughts, a great black thundercloud. I walked in brilliant sunlight, but my heart yearned for the darkness.

  By the time we’d pitched camp at the end of each day I was too tired to want to talk. We’d eat and then I’d crawl into my sleeping bag, aching all over and with most of my clothes still on, and pass out so soundly that I didn’t even hear Egan follow me in. I was far too tired to have inappropriate impulses concerning the big warm body pressed up against mine in sleep.

  I can’t vouch for his thoughts, but they were his business. We had reached a state of truce which we both seemed able to cope with. We needed each other and we had feelings for each other that we could do absolutely nothing about, and those were the facts of the matter. For the moment we were companions, and for me at least it was a melancholy comfort to just be in his presence.

  And I appreciated him anew, seeing him in action. Quiet and methodical and patient, his version of masculinity was everything that Azazel’s wasn’t. He read maps and landscapes easily, he could light a fire, and he fed us with fish he caught at dusk and dawn at the lake margins and with squirrels he brought down with the slingshot. The latter tasted much like rabbit.

  “Good against Goliath too I hope,” I joked as he scored a serendipitous squirrel meal for us from where we sat by the fire.

  He smiled. “Want to try?” So I spent a half-hour whizzing ball-bearings at a tree trunk while he gutted and skinned and set dinner on to roast.

  I’m not saying I was morally purified now that I’d made my confession. On the first morning I was brushing my teeth behind a bush when I glimpsed Egan walking back up from the lake, bare from the waist up, carrying his shirt and still damp from his splash-wash. The misty dawn sunlight cast a sheen on his muscles, and that sight made me nearly inhale my toothpaste, I admit.

  It was a good job I had the walking to keep my energies focused elsewhere.

  On the second night I woke up in near-total darkness needing to pee. I could feel Egan’s solid back against mine through the separate sleeping bags that cocooned us, and hear the slow, deep draws of his sleeping breath. I didn’t want to get up. I liked it lying there close to him, and I could feel the nip on my exposed nose that warned it was going to be chilly out there.

  But there was no way I could drift back to sleep, my bladder told me.

  Trying not to disturb Egan, I wriggled with painstaking slowness out of my bag and slid out into the night. The stars were hard points like silver nail heads beyond the thinning canopy of the trees, but the moon was nearly down. I thought of the Nails of the True Cross that had so nearly pinned Azazel, and I shivered.

  He was out there, only a few miles away now. I’d dreamed about the cave again, just as I had done every night since the flight. I was dreaming deliberately, trying to make some sort of contact, but the details never changed. That stark white domed room, sticky with honeycomb; the two winged figures motionless behind the wall. I couldn’t reach them no matter how hard I pounded on the glass. The only detail missing was that I didn’t see Roshana anymore. But I tasted her gleeful presence, like a perfume lingering in the air.

  I’m coming for you, Azazel.

  Feeling my way into my boots, I went off to take care of business.

  Just as I got back to the tent, I paused at the flap, feeling the hair rise on the back of my neck. I hadn’t heard a thing, but I was seized by the conviction that there was something out there watching me. I turned and stared into night. Without a direct, full moon, it was hard to make out anything but layers of shadow.

  I went as still as I could, all motion leaching out of me into the earth. And as I stood, my pupils widened, and the cool gray light of the night bloomed on every surface until I could see trunks and branches and even individual leaves, the whole forest opening up as if someone had lifted a shadowy curtain.

  There: under the trees, across the banked fire pit from the tent—a paler shadow, moving so slowly and fluidly that it seemed to flow into the open. For a moment I thought Ghost, but then the starlight caught on moist eyes with a hint of a green glow. It was a wolf—a big pale timber wolf, watching me. I could see its shaggy pelt and the tips of its teeth, exposed by the curl of its lip.

  We had wolves in the Durmitor Mountains, back home. They sometimes killed sheep and the village shepherds hated them, but as a girl I’d had more sympathy for the wolves than the men, and less fear of them too.

  Silently, Egan slid his arm around my waist from behind. I’d sunk so far into my stillness that I didn’t jump, just trembled against him. His right arm extended over my shoulder, and the steel of the gun in that hand caught the night’s ambient glow with a cold shine.

  I heard a faint growl from the beast.

  “No,” I breathed, laying my hand on Egan’s forearm. I could feel his ridged muscles.

  If I am a witch now, then I am of the night too, and witches have power over wolves. I focused on the animal’s lambent eyes. Go away, brother wolf. Do not come near us. Leave us be, and we will not harm you.

  The pale shadow flipped and vanished into the deeper darkness. I watched it run away among the trees.

  “Wow,” said Egan softly.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come back, though.”

  “It won’t.” His arm was heavy on my shoulder and I twisted out from beneath it, turning to face him. I didn’t know how good his night vision was—pretty good, I guess, since he’d spotted the wolf—but I could see every detail of his face down to the individual blond hairs of his stubbled jaw.

  “Milja, what the hell’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “What?” I put my hand on his cheek, caught up in the marvelous clarity of my vision, and how handsome he was all tousle-haired from sleep.

  “They’ve gone black. I mean, all black,” he whispered.

  “All the better to see you with,” I laughed, but it was a nervous giggle and I dropped my gaze, self-conscious.

  His left arm tightened forcefully around me, and I didn’t resist. Though the night was cold, he felt blazing hot—and very strong. He was holding me terribly close, as close as a lover, but I was also conscious of the gun in his other hand.

  The Church takes a very hostile stance toward witches, of course.

  I could feel his heartbeat against my own breast. I could feel…

  “Christ give me strength. Milja.” He dropped me abruptly and turned away. “You should go back to sleep. I’ll…sit up for a while. Get the fire going. We don’t want the wolf to come back.”

  “Yes,” I whispered. Falling to my knees, I crawled in under the tent flap. “The wolf,” I whispered to the lining of my sleeping bag. The blood was racing in my veins, waking parts of me that exertion had quelled until now.

  I stuffed my hand down the inside of my thermal leggings to comfort myself.

  T
his is not fair. Goddamn, it hurts.

  I pictured Egan coming into the tent behind me and seeing me lying like this with the curve of my ass up, my thighs apart. The fantasy warmed me further. I could see his expression in my mind’s eye; that look of surrender as he gave in at last to his base instincts. He wouldn’t say anything, I thought; there’d be no point in speaking. He’d just pull down my tight grey leggings to reveal my two bare cheeks and everything he needed in the whole world right there in between them, and then he’d take hold of my hips and pull my ass up and back to sit in his lap. I was so juicy already that he’d slip inside me with no trouble at all, giving me exactly what I so desperately craved. My fantasy was so intense that I could almost feel the physicality of his bulk inside me. He’d hunch over me under the ridge of the tiny tent and thrust until he’d filled me to every last inch, and then flood my own wetness with his spill.

  Or no—that was more Azazel’s way. Egan… Egan would flip me over so that he could look into my face as he pushed up between my open thighs. His hands would touch my skin like he was afraid he’d break me, and I’d writhe with impatience until the wet suck of my sex on his fingers drove away all doubts and made him lurch into action. He’d kiss me, his mouth oddly tentative even as he drove home into my depths, his eyes wide with helpless guilt, pleading mutely for absolution. I’d twine my arms and legs about him, pulling him closer, and he’d groan my name. I’d meet his mouth with mine and find him suddenly hot and ravenous, his kisses wild arrhythmic things through which we would both gasp for breath as his cock powered into me. And I’d forgive him everything—every hesitation, every betrayal—for the sake of those kisses and that beautiful, big, achingly-hard length thrusting, thrusting—

  I came, alone, my hand trapped between my body and the tent floor. Fire flooded through my whole body. My whimper was a long-drawn-out sob of need and despair.

  And then, even in the backwash of flames, I froze. Had he heard me? It was only a tent, and offered no sound insulation. Was he outside right now, listening?

  I heard only an autumnal owl, screeching as if in mockery.

  The next morning I saw the first ghost. It was an old man in a blanket, sitting before a fire and singing nasally. Egan walked right past him without seeing or hearing a thing. I glanced down into the man’s face as I walked past, and saw a cluster of pox lumps at the corner of his mouth.

  He didn’t stop singing, but he frowned a little and his eyes tracked me.

  Why do I see them? I wondered. There must be a million dead people in Chicago, but I never saw anything. Just my father back home, and that girl in the tower in Montenegro—but I didn’t see the Turks chasing her. I suppose I might have been related to her somehow. But not to these people here. Why am I seeing them?

  The ghosts were more and more numerous as we pressed on that day. We came down into that little valley of Roshana’s from the far end, following the map and going nowhere near the track from the ranch. Our pace dropped as we took more caution, moving through cover wherever possible. There wasn’t much of that; the trees here were almost bare.

  “I think it might be that there,” I whispered to Egan, pointing at a massive lump of rock jutting from the valley-side. It looked too different from this angle for me to be sure.

  “Wait there behind that trunk,” he told me, offloading the rucksack.

  “I want to come.”

  “If there are guards…” He didn’t need to finish the grim sentence. He checked he had gun and knife and slingshot, then set off at an angle.

  I waited for what felt like far too long in the dappled sunlight, feeling my stomach churn, watching the slow fall of leaves and the last of the year’s mosquitoes landing on my arms. I’d given up slapping at them since I found that I could quell the itch and inflammation of a bite with a touch and a focused thought. Now I only waved my hands to keep them from tickling my nose and ears.

  It was better than looking at the scarred and suffering ghosts.

  Why’s he been so long?

  Is he coming back for me? Or is he going in to find Azazel on his own?

  Is he going to betray me again?

  At last my anxiety grew too much and I jumped to my feet—only to see Egan coming back toward me. He held his finger to his lips so I knelt again until he crouched next to me.

  I eyed the strange walkie-talkie in his hand. “Where’s that from?”

  “She has set a guard. I could only see the one but there may be others. Come on. Leave the pack here.” He dropped the radio.

  We sneaked back down toward the rock. Ghosts lurked in every direction I looked. Just as I grew sure that yes, this was the right place, we passed a motionless body stuffed under a bush—and this one was real; that black uniform was too dark and too modern to be part of the phantasmagoria. For a moment I cringed, thinking the guard was dead, until I realized that he was hogtied with his own bootlaces. It was the guy who’d put a gun to my head once and come unnervingly close to it a second time. There was blood in his hair.

  It might be mean, but I couldn’t help hoping that whatever Egan had done to him, it had hurt.

  Egan had his pistol out as he took the lead into the rock passage. We waited in the shadows, breath held, straining for any noise from within the cave itself as our eyes adjusted to the gloom. But we heard nothing. Then Egan ducked his head around the doorway briefly before pulling back.

  “Arse,” he whispered. “There’s a camera set up in there—I can see the LED. We’ve got to assume we’ve been spotted. Let’s do this quick.”

  I nodded, and we scurried into the round belly of the tomb. Egan gave it a once over and remained by the door on watch, but I peeled wide my inner eyes so that I could see everything clear as day, and walked right in.

  The static charge in the atmosphere made my hair rise and crackle. All of a sudden it was hard to breathe.

  We were the only humans in here; that was a good start, I thought. The ghosts still hovered over the pile of bones, shifting restlessly, but they were no more than a distraction right now. In the center of the chamber, just as I’d dreamt it, Penemuel lay supine on the stone slab that covered the pit, and Azazel knelt over her with his hands on her breast. Neither was winged of course—I only really saw them winged in my dreams. They were naked and gray, like stone. For a moment I thought it an artefact of my enhanced vision, but as I approached I realized that they really were horribly bleached.

  The tiny camera mounted on the wall died with a sharp crack as Egan put a steel ball-bearing through its lens.

  I reached across Penemuel to put my hand on Azazel’s shoulder and a static spark flitted from my finger, making me jump. What should have been muscle felt far too cold and hard for flesh, more like boiled rawhide. Even his unkempt hair was stiff, like horsehair soaked in plaster. His eyes were opaque and sightless.

  I’d never seen anything quite like this, even when he was starved and weak, and it creeped the hell out of me. “Azazel,” I whispered. “I’m here.”

  No flicker of recognition or even life rewarded me. I couldn’t see either of them breathing.

  Penemuel was dead-eyed and gray too, except for the wound in her chest, which was black and sticky like tar. The gag still stretched her mouth and the Roman spear was still lodged firmly in her sternum. Azazel’s hands were clasped around the iron head and the wound as if trying to staunch the blood that had welled up and congealed all over his fingers. The spear shaft was black with dried blood all the way up.

  I circled the scene with horror. They looked more like some vile art installation than living beings. Then my foot kicked over something that sounded like glass as it fell. I looked down. Bottles. Empty Jack Daniels bottles.

  Something else.

  I’d come far enough around now to see Azazel’s back. He’d been wounded by the spear too, of course, and it hadn’t healed. A ragged hole remained, and from that hole protruded a plastic tube which drooped down to one of the bottles.

  The bottle was h
alf-full of bright crimson blood. As I picked up the loose end of the tube, a single drop slipped out and spun into the dust like a tiny autumnal leaf.

  17

  ONLY BLOOD IS FOREVER

  You know, I think I’d assumed that even if Roshana was cruel and crazy enough to take blood instead of, say, asking for a donation, that she’d have taken it from Penemuel. Not her own father.

  “Egan,” I said, “Oh fuck. She’s been bleeding him!”

  “What?”

  I wrapped my hand around the tube and pulled it from the wound. I didn’t stop to think if this was safe, or wise; I just wanted the horrible thing out of him. It was tipped with valve and a wide-bore cannula needle. I thought I was going to throw up. “Look,” I gasped.

  “Ah shite.”

  The wound dribbled a little more blood, then stopped.

  “Egan, you have to come over—”

  From outside came a faint shout. A man’s voice. We weren’t alone anymore. Maybe we’d missed other cameras hidden in the trees.

  “Stay,” said Egan grimly, gun up and heading for the arch. He slipped out into the passage while my mouth still hung open.

  “No,” I whispered, “I should go—” but it was already too late. “Crap,” I hissed. I was alone and holding a bloody transfusion tube—but my entire plan entailed Egan being in here. I needed him to be the one to rouse Penemuel.

  And yes, I hadn’t explained that bit to him as fully as I might have. Here was a beautiful naked woman, badly injured and in dire need. Egan might not like the news, but he was tailor-made for this situation—how could he help but want to save her? Whereas I… I’d had a plan, yes, and I wanted it to work, but all my feelings right now as far as angels were concerned began and ended with Azazel. I had nothing over to spare for Penemuel.

  I dithered hopelessly as my plans fell apart, running first to the door to hiss, “Come back!”—but the light was blinding in my sensitized eyes and Egan had already moved out of range—and then back into the shadows to grab at Azazel, as if I could wake him by slapping my hands on his leather-hard skin. “Azazel—please!”