“Yeah. Well, your uncle went to hospital for two months. And my granddad went to prison, for aggravated assault, for four years.”
All that terrible winter and the following spring, Cade had stayed on the StarO, struggling to hold things together. But with no money to pay the hands to help him, and the school district chasing him for truancy, and the bank for mortgage payments…“Finally the bank foreclosed. The sheriff came to get me, take me to a foster home, and he cornered me in the barn.” Like his grandfather, Cade had fought for his freedom—for the sheer outrageous injustice of it all.
He’d ended up in a juvenile lockup. When his grandfather died in his cell of a heart attack…“Or a broken heart?” Cade hadn’t been there for Matthew. Hadn’t seen him in over a year. “I swore to myself that the Ashaways would pay. That they’d taken everything that mattered to me—every last thing—and so I’d do the same to them.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Raine’s tears trickled, wetting his skin. “I’m so sorry. There’s no amends I could make for this!”
“Yeah, not in one lifetime. But come here anyway.” Cade’s arm tightened around her waist and he rolled, until she lay on top of him.
She wriggled up his body till they fit perfectly together; her face in the warm hollow of his throat, her forearm pillowing his neck, her legs clasped between his. They shuddered at the contact, then lay still. Heart to heart, breathing as one.
“That’s what I’ve been starting to realize,” Cade said after a while. He stroked her hair. “No matter how you want to, no matter how you try, you can’t go back and make it right. It’s over. Matt’s dead. Your uncle’s dead.
“And taking my revenge out on the rest of the Ashaway clan doesn’t seem to feel quite as good as I imagined it would, when I was fourteen. Hasn’t seemed such a great idea, since the day I met you.”
“But still…” Raine protested. So much pain—pain dealt out to a man to whom she wished only happiness. And she had benefited from her uncle’s sleazy deal, even if she hadn’t known.
“It wasn’t yours to fix,” Cade said as she kissed his jaw. “And even if it had been, you’ve thrown something on the balance tonight. Twice today, in fact. I owe you my knees and I owe you my life. Szabo would have shot me for sure, there at the end, if you hadn’t netted him.
“So if one Ashaway stole my life away? Looks like another gave it back.”
“But you saved my life, too!”
“Yeah…Who owes who what is getting kind of hard to figure.” Raine couldn’t see his smile in the dark, but she could hear it. “So…what d’you think? Maybe we oughta just kiss and make up?”
“Or…make out?” She squirmed a few inches higher. Cupped his face with her palms. Her hips rocked a slow, joyful suggestion.
“Both,” he agreed instantly.
Though the dark hadn’t lifted in their lover’s nest, somehow Raine knew it was morning. Cade slept on, his chest rising peacefully and steadily under her palm. She smiled to herself. Wish we could stay here a week, just send out for pizza.
At the first thought of food, her stomach grumbled. Other practicalities came to mind. Like what to do about Szabo?
If she was going to drag him back to civilization, hand him over to the authorities, she’d need to bring him back alive. He needed antibiotics and he needed them badly. Bees, she reminded herself. Cade had told her about finding the cave by watching the bees. She’d have to locate their hive, stupefy them with smoke, steal some honey. You could treat even gunshot wounds with raw honey; it was a superb antimicrobial.
Tie him up, stick him so full of morphine he doesn’t feel a thing, then deal with the hooks, she told herself. Then pack him full of honey. That should work.
But to treat her troll, first she had to catch him. Slowly she untangled herself from Cade and slid away. He seemed to have suffered no lasting harm from that knock on the head—at least his lovemaking certainly hadn’t suffered for it! Raine paused, smiling dreamily—then recalled her purpose and moved on. If she was lucky, she could deal with Szabo, then slip back for some more bedroll snuggling, before Cade woke to the day.
Once Raine turned the corner out of the alcove, she found the faintest rays of light reached even back here, reflecting from the distant hole. She stood motionless, letting her eyes adapt while she listened—heard nothing. Maybe Szabo was sleeping, too?
Two hours later, Raine dropped by the dino cave. She walked over to the T. rex and sat before it, crosslegged. Leaned back on her hands and stared thoughtfully upward for a while.
“Szabo’s gone,” she reported at last. “I don’t know how he did it, but somehow he found his way out of here.” She’d discovered his bulletless gun dropped to the ground, not far from where she’d netted him. Found her net, quite a bit worse for wear, in the outer cavern near the hole.
Raine sighed. “Well, it’s probably for the best.” Three would have certainly been a crowd, heading back.
And she didn’t care that much about dragging Szabo back to civilization’s version of justice. In the end, there were all kinds of ways to work out one’s fate. “What goes around, comes around.”
The skull before her seemed to crackle with the faintest jeweled fire for a second, some trick of the light that, still, seemed eerily like agreement.
“And you, you angel.” Bad…good…maybe reflecting the spirit of whoever found it? “Can you be patient for one more wet season? We’ll come back for you early next year, with a proper team to free you from your stone…escort you off to someplace where the whole world can come admire you. Learn that dragons once walked this Earth.”
Can I be patient? Fire sparkled along the fangs like laughter. After sixty-five million years, what do you think?
Raine smiled and rose. “I think it’s time I went and woke up my guy.”
Szabo damn sure set a record, getting back to the lake. Things were chasing him—ghosts or gooks, or God knew what—speeding him on his way. He kept finding weird sticks in his path, curly with peeled bark, carved with strange notches. Once, a dart had nailed a tree trunk only inches above his head. Somebody trying to tell him something, like, Get the hell out of our jungle!
“Only too happy to oblige,” he told the trees.
He was making good time, staggering along in magic boots. Couldn’t see his feet; they seemed to be miles below him, but they kept trucking along, day and night and now day again. And he was careful not to look at his arm. No news was good news.
“But I’m gonna beat that bitch in the end,” he told a big red no-tail monkey that hung from one branch, peering down at him. “Beat her back to Pontianak. Get me some medicine, sleep straight on through for a couple of days, then wake up in time to whack her, before she catches her plane. Her and her fuckin’ boyfriend, who won’t stay dead. But this next time, oh, yeah. Deader ’n doornails.”
Then next year, when he was feeling better, he’d come back with a chopper and crew, whip that old lizard out of there. Make a jillion dollars. “You hear that, Gran? Maybe I’ll even share it with you.”
Or maybe he wouldn’t. She sure wasn’t helping him out, when he needed it most.
But all the same he’d win in the end. The angels were on his side. And if he’d had any doubts, Szabo knew it for sure, when he reached the butterfly lake. Somebody had left him a kayak, and a paddle, just pulled up and waiting on the shore. “Dang!” Cutting straight across the lake would save him two days of walking around it by the cliffs.
“On the other hand…” he muttered, scratching his arm.
A dart smacked into the kayak by his knee.
“Shit! Now there’s a tiebreaker!” He shoved the craft out into the shallows, scrambled in, paddled frantically. Looked back to see what the hell had been hunting him.
With evening drawing nigh the mist was rising. But for a second there, Szabo could have sworn he saw a little man. Standing there at the edge of the bushes, blowgun propped on his shoulder, one hand resting on the head of a big white dog. And d
amned if he wasn’t grinning like a crocodile.
“So long, sucker!” Szabo yelled, baring his teeth.
On he paddled, without another glance behind. He’d seen enough of the jungle to last him quite some time.
Behind and off to the right, a V-shaped ripple broke the dark water, pacing him through the lily pads.
Epilogue
Once the latest storm had rumbled on through, Raine and Cade shifted end for end on their sleep platform. Now they lay, peering lazily out their foot hole at White Dog’s camp. Raindrops sifted down through the high green leafy canopy; pattered on the thatch overhead. Somewhere nearby, a woman sang what had to be a lullaby. Soft laughter drifted on the misty air.
“Really ought to move on today,” Cade murmured, nuzzling the nape of Raine’s neck. “Ngali should be back at the Kapuas by now, wondering what became of us.”
“Mmm,” Raine agreed drowsily. She lay spooned within his heated length, her cheek pillowed on the hard swell of his bicep. “Could leave this afternoon, if the sun comes out. Or maybe…tomorrow?”
After they’d sealed up the dinosaur cave, they’d slogged for three days through the increasingly sodden jungle. When they’d straggled into the Punans’ camp, White Dog had studied his tired, muddy guests, then smiled to himself and set his men to building another sleep platform.
From the jokes the men had made, and the site they’d chosen for the construction—a stone’s throw away from the main camp—Raine gathered they’d been given a honeymoon suite.
The past two days had certainly felt like a honeymoon. Nobody had intruded on their bowered bliss, though, whenever they’d crawled out of their cocoon, they’d been cheerfully welcomed into the tribe’s easygoing circle.
A shaft of sunshine filtered down through the treetops, setting the colors of leaf and orchid ablaze. Gibbons hooted in the distance. “Green mansions,” Raine murmured.
“Hmm?” Cade’s fingers trailed the taut curves of her arm, her hip, her thigh, then wandered up again.
“Oh, just the name of an old book about the jungle.” But this was more than any mansion. It’s a living cathedral, she thought, as the sunlight intensified and the forest glowed like stained glass.
Shrieks of childish laughter rose as the children tumbled out of their family’s platforms to seize the day. Their parents followed, pausing to stretch and yawn and survey their kingdom with sleepy smiles. Couples who’d passed the storm as Raine and Cade had done touched each other in farewell, then wandered off to hunt or gather.
White Dog’s youngest baby staggered across the clearing, hanging on for dear life to the shaggy shoulders of his father’s hunting dog. Teaching himself to walk, with the help of a patient friend.
“Glad I got a chance to see this,” Cade murmured in her ear. “Guess it’s been like this from the dawn of time, but how much longer can it last? Do you remember all those rafts of logs, we saw, floating down the Kapuas? Tropical hardwoods are in demand, the world over. People don’t realize what they’re destroying, when they buy a mahogany bureau or teak decks for their boat. Another ten years or so, and the bulldozer and chain-saw guys will make it up to here, and then…”
“Yeah…” Raine shivered agreement, then turned in the circle of his arms to rub her nose along his collarbone. “You know, I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh-oh!” he teased as he brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes.
“About that—and about this.” She lifted the stone feather that dangled between them. Yesterday, she’d removed it from her own necklace. She’d hung it on a leather cord with a few red beads to set it off, then draped it around his neck with a kiss. It was Cade’s family totem, not hers, after all, and among the Punan, a hunter would be naked without some emblem of his prowess.
“I said, back at the cave, that there was no way I could make amends for all the harm the Ashaways did you and your grandfather.”
“And I told you to forget it,” he reminded her roughly. “We’re even now. What’s past is past.”
That’s what he thought, but forgiveness wasn’t an effort of will. Raine wanted his feelings healed, too. His heart at peace. “No matter how you want to, you can’t go back into the past and fix it,” she mused, rubbing the ancient stone along his shoulder. Can’t erase the grief, or soothe the pain. Give you and your grandfather back your lost freedom. Your lost home.
“But what you can do, sometimes, if you’re very very lucky, is you can pay your debt forward, into the future. Pass it on to somebody else who needs it. Saving somebody else’s home, now maybe that would bring the world back toward…some kind of balance? Harmony.”
Cade laughed softly as he bent to kiss her. “So what’ve you got in mind, Ren-Bungan?”
The New York Times [Late Edition (East Coast)]. New York, NY
A world record price for a dinosaur fossil was hammered down today at Sotheby’s Auction House, when a consortium of twenty-seven philanthropists and nonprofit institutions bought the fire opal T. rex known as Lia. A ferocious bidding war amongst private collectors and international institutions for the only known specimen of an opalized Tyrannosaurus rex ended with a staggering purchase price of fifty-seven million dollars.
“Lia would have been very proud, I think, to be remembered in this way,” said microbiologist Ravi Singh, a friend to the dinosaur’s late namesake.
“We all won today!” exulted auctioneer Tom Winslow, executive vice president of Sotheby’s. “Lia’s buyers plan to donate her to the Smithsonian Institution, where she’ll be on permanent exhibit for all the world to see and admire. Then, after the consignors deduct their expenses, her sales price will go to the Indonesian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, to acquire an enormous tract of land in the Borneo highlands as a forever-wild biopreserve.”
Discovered jointly by the commercial fossil-collecting firms of Ashaway All and SauroStar, the spectacular fifty-four foot carnivore, a female, is also the largest and most intact specimen of the thirty-nine T. rexes found to this date. “We hoped she’d go to a public institution,” said collector O.A. Kincade. “She’s a world wonder and as such, she belongs to every kid who ever dreamed about dinosaurs. We’re delighted that they’ll be able to come and visit her whenever they please.”
Kincade’s partner in this paleontological find of the century is Raine Ashaway of Ashaway All, a third-generation, family-owned, fossil supply house. Ms. Ashaway was not available for comment. She’s currently leading an expedition to Ethiopia, in search of the first entire specimen of a Paralititan, the few bones of which, discovered so far, suggest that it will be the world’s largest known…
ISBN: 978-1-4268-5448-4
AN ANGEL IN STONE
Copyright © 2005 by Peggy Nicholson
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*The Bone Hunters
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