Kill

by L. J. Smith

"Well-I just remembered a nightmare I had once about a cave."

  "It didn't flood, did it?" Jenny asked, thinking of the miners in the scene on the train ride.

  "No. It just sort of collapsed."

  Audrey said, "I don't think we should be talking about this. Tu comprend?"

  She was right, of course. They shouldn't be talking, or thinking, or anything. Blank minds were what they needed. But Jenny's mind was out of control, following Dee's words like a spark running down a fuse.

  "On you?" she said. "Did it collapse on you? Or were you just trapped-"

  That was as far as she got before the ground started to rumble. Only it wasn't just the ground, it was the ceiling, the walls, everything.

  "Which way?" Dee cried, as good in a pinch as always, even if this was her nightmare. She swung her flashlight around, looking up and down the shaft. "Where's it coming from?"

  Jenny saw rocks falling from the vertical shaft behind them. Michael's flashlight was on the same thing.

  "Come on!" he shouted, starting the other way. "Come on! Come on!"

  "It's all coming down!" Audrey shouted.

  "Come on! Come on!" Michael just kept yelling it, his voice higher and higher.

  The floor was rocking-like the tremor Jenny had felt earlier, only much, much bigger. She couldn't see anything clearly. Flashlights were waving all over the place.

  "We can't go that way-"

  "Watch out-the rock-"

  Above the shouting voices was the voice of the rock, a grinding, shuddering, smashing sound.

  Jenny was trying to run, bruising herself on outcrops that seemed to jump into her path. She was being thrown from side to side.

  "The floor-!"

  She heard Audrey's shriek, but was too late to stop herself. There was a gap in the floor of the shaft, a vertical cavern down to another shaft. Small rocks were falling into it, and Jenny's flashlight illuminated dust particles swirling madly in the air. Then she was falling, too.

  The first blow hurt, but after that she was in shock and just bounced off the outcrops numbly. She felt her fanny pack tear free. Her hammer and flashlight were already gone, along with the bota bag. Then she was rolling and sliding, part of an avalanche that carried her with it effortlessly.

  Then the noise and confusion receded and her mind went blank.

  She was alone, in complete darkness and utter silence. Her throat was full of choking dust. And she was terrified.

  Jenny knew this before she remembered who she was or how she'd gotten there. It was one of those terrible awakenings-like the kind she used to have in the middle of the night, when she jerked out of sleep knowing that something was out there in the dark, and that it was bad. And that in the daytime she would forget all about it again.

  The worst thing was that this wasn't a dream. There was no bedside light to turn on, no parents to run to. Instead there was only darkness and the sound of her own breathing.

  "Dee!" The shout came out pathetically weak. And it didn't echo properly. Jenny turned her face up but couldn't feel the slightest air current.

  She was in an enclosed place. The rock must have blocked up the entrance she'd fallen through.

  "Dee! Audrey!" Oh, worse than pathetic. Her voice died out completely in the middle of "Michael!"

  Then she sat perfectly still, listening.

  If I don't move, it won't get me.

  That was ridiculous, of course. It only worked for monsters under the bed. But all her muscles were locked, so tense they were shaking.

  She couldn't hear a sound. Not even a faint after-rumble from the cave-in. The darkness folded on itself around her.

  She felt herself begin to panic.

  Oh, please, no... just keep calm, think of something . . . but I'm scared. There must be some way out... you can move around, see what this place is like.

  But she couldn't. She couldn't move. It was too dark. She could feel her eyes widening and widening, useless as the blind bumps on white cave fish.

  Anything could be out there-coming at me- from any direction . . .

  The panic was now a riot. She was utterly terrified that she would hear a noise, a noise of something approaching in the blackness.

  But I fell in alone. This is a small place; I can feel it. I'm alone. Nothing's here with me. Nothing can get in. Nothing-Rock scraped lightly on rock.

  Jenny twisted to face it, still kneeling. The faint sound was lost now because her heart was going like a trip-hammer and her ears were ringing with sheer terror.

  Oh, God-

  "Ragnarok," said a musical voice, "means both a rain of dust and the end of the world. To the people who discovered the runes, I mean. Don't you think that's interesting?"

  CHAPTER 6

  Julian . . ." The sensation was exactly like falling down the mine shaft.

  Then she said sharply, "Where are you?"

  "Here." Red light blossomed.

  Jenny tried, in the moment before her eyes adjusted, to brace herself. But she could never brace for Julian-he was as much a shock to her senses as ever.

  A beautiful shock, like a completely unexpected riff in a dull jazz piece. Like a picture you could pore over for hours and still find new and startling details in. Everything about him was so perfect and so perfectly outrageous that your eye darted from feature to feature in dazzled confusion.

  Just now the red light glinted off his hair like fire on snow. It turned his impossibly blue eyes to an equally impossible violet. It threw dancing shadows across the planes of his face, bringing into relief the

  sculpted beauty of his upper lip. It cast an unholy glow all around him-which was entirely appropriate, because Julian was as seductive as mortal sin and as haughty as the devil.

  He was wearing black like a second skin, pants and vest without a shirt. The red light came from the torch he was holding.

  Jenny, devastatingly aware that her jeans were crunchy from drying wrinkled and her denim shirt looked as if she'd crawled through a chimney, said, "You invited me to come-and here I am."

  He answered as easily as if they'd been talking for hours. "Yes, and you're off to a bad start.

  Couldn't even avoid this simple trap. Don't even know what game you're playing."

  "Whatever it is, it's the last Game," Jenny said.

  It wasn't the same as it had been before, when she'd felt as if she were fighting him all the time in her mind-whether he was physically present or not. Fighting his sensuality, fighting his beauty, fighting the memory of his touch.

  In those days part of her actually longed for the moment when she would stop fighting, for the final surrender. But now . . .

  Jenny had changed. The fire she'd passed through in the last Game, the one he'd created to trap her, had changed her. It had burned away the part of her that had responded to Julian, that had craved his danger and wildness. Jenny had come through the fire alive-and purified. She might not be as powerful as Julian, but her will was as strong as his.

  She would never give in to the shadows again. And that meant that everything was different between them.

  She could see that he saw the difference. He said, "More light?" and made a gesture, like tracing a line in the air.

  Kenaz, Jenny thought. The rune of the torch, one of the runes she'd carved on her grandfather's oak door. It was shaped like an acute angle, like a lesser-than sign in mathematics. When Julian's long fingers made the gesture, the light seemed to ripple, and with a magician's flourish he plucked a second burning torch from the air.

  Jenny, stony-faced, clapped her hands two or three times.

  . Julian's glance was blue as a gas flame. "You don't want to get me angry. Not this early on," he said with dangerous quietness.

  "I thought I was supposed to be impressed."

  He studied her. "You really don't want to get me angry."

  Oh, he was gorgeous, all right. Inhuman, incomprehensible, and so alive he looked as if he should be dripping fire or electricity from his fingertips. He brou
ght a shine with him like diamonds in coal. But Jenny had a core of steel.

  "Where's Tom?" she said.

  "You haven't been thinking about him," said Julian.

  It was true. Jenny hadn't. Not continuously, not constantly, the way she had in the old days when she'd never really regarded herself as a separate person, but as part of a unit: Tom-and-Jenny. It didn't matter.

  "I came here for him," she said. "I don't need to think about him every minute to love him. I want him back."

  "Then win the Game." Julian's voice was as cold and ominous as thin ice breaking.

  He stuck one torch into a wide horizontal crack in the wall. Jenny hadn't really taken in her surroundings yet-when Julian was around it was very difficult to focus on anything except him-but she saw now that she'd been right in her guess earlier. This was an enclosed place, and a very small one, scarcely as big as her bedroom at home. Three of its walls were stone; the fourth was solidly packed boulders.

  Below the crack with the torch was a sort of natural stairway, each step broader than the one above it. Like the fake waterfalls in the mine ride, Jenny thought, only without the water. She noticed her flashlight, apparently dead, lying by the bottom step.

  There was no entrance or exit to the room. The ceiling was low. It had a very trapped feeling about it.

  Jenny's heart sank a little.

  No. Don't you dare let him frighten you. That's what he wants, that's what kicks him.

  Besides, what's to be scared of? So you're buried alive under tons of rock, alone with a demon prince who wants you body and soul and will literally do anything to have you. Who might kill you just to make sure no one else can have you. And you're pissing him off deliberately, but so what, why sweat the details?

  She tried to make her voice quite steady and a little blasé as she said, "So just what is the Game this time?"

  "The clue will cost you."

  Icy fury swept over Jenny. "You're horrible. Do you know that?"

  "I'm as cruel as life," Julian said. "As cruel as love."

  The fury, and the steel at Jenny's core, gave her the courage to do something that astonished even her. She wanted to slap Julian. Instead, she kissed him.

  It wasn't like the tender, cozy sort of kiss she gave Tom, and not like the terrified, half-wild kisses Julian had extorted from her in the old days, either. She jumped up and snatched his face between her palms before he could do anything with the torch. She kissed him hard, aggressively, and without the slightest vestige of maidenly shyness.

  She felt his shock. His free hand came up around her, but he couldn't pull her any closer than she was already pressing herself. She ignored the danger of the torch completely-if it was close to her hair, that was Julian's problem. Let the great master of the elements figure it out.

  Julian recovered fast. It was possible to take him off guard, but he didn't stay nonplussed long.

  Jenny felt him trying to take control of the situation, trying to soften the kiss.

  But she knew the danger of softness. Julian could spin a web of shadows around you, with touches like the brush of moth's wings and kisses soft as twilight. He could turn your own senses against you until the kisses left you dizzy and breathless and the moth's-wing touches put you on slow burn. And by the time

  you realized what was underneath the softness, you were shivering and melting and lost.

  So Jenny kept this kiss strictly business. A cheap and nasty sort of business she'd never had to do before because before Julian she'd only ever kissed Tom. She kissed him angrily, with a clinical coldness and all the expertise she could muster. At the end she realized she'd managed to startle him twice in just a matter of minutes. When she pulled away-which she did easily-she could see the shock in his eyes.

  Didn't think I could resist, did you? she thought. She stepped back and with utter coldness said,

  "Now, what about my clue?"

  Julian stared. Then he laughed mockingly, but she could see him losing his temper, see the blue eyes glitter with rage like exotic sapphires. She had struck at his pride-and hit dead center.

  "Well, now, I'm not sure I got my money's worth," he said. "I've known icicles that were better kissers than that."

  "And I've known dead fish that were better kissers than you," Jenny said-untruthfully and with an insane disregard for danger. She knew it was insane, but she didn't care. The freedom of knowing that the shadows had no power over her was intoxicating. It made this encounter with Julian different from any other.

  She'd struck home again. She saw the menacing fury well up in his eyes-and then his heavy lashes drooped, veiling them. A half smile curved his lips.

  Jenny's stomach lurched.

  He was evil, she knew. Cruel, capricious, and dangerous as a cobra. And she'd been stupid to goad him that way, because right now he was planning something bad-or her name wasn't Jenny Lint-for-Brains Thornton.

  "I'll give you your clue," he said. He slid a hand into one skintight pocket and brought it out again, flipping something gold on his thumb and catching it again. The gold thing winked in the torchlight, up and down. "Heads I win, tails you lose," Julian said and gave her a smile of terrible sweetness.

  Then he flicked the shining gold thing at her so quickly that she flinched. It hit the stone with a wonderful clear ringing clink. Jenny picked it up and found that it was cold and quite heavy. It was a coin, round but irregular, like a very thin home-baked cookie.

  "A Spanish doubloon," Julian said, but even then she stared at him a moment before getting it.

  Oh, God-of course. The game-the one the real Joyland Park was holding. What had that kid said this afternoon? "You get three tokens and they let you in free. ..." And the billboard: collect three gold

  DOUBLOONS AND BE THE FIRST TO SET FOOT ON ... TREASURE ISLAND.

  And Julian had invited them to come on a treasure hunt. But Jenny hadn't made the connection, not even when that giant treasure chest had been the only thing moving in the park tonight.

  "You modeled this whole place after Joyland because they were having a treasure hunt? Why?

  Because I used to go to the park when I was a kid?"

  He laughed. "Don't flatter yourself. This whole-Shadow Park, if you like-already existed. It was created ten years ago and for a very different reason.

  A special reason . . . but you'll find out about that later." He gave a strange smile that sent a chill through Jenny. "It was built on an old coal mine, you know-a pit. The Shadow Men have been here a long time."

  A pit. Deep into the Pit, Jenny remembered. That was a line from the poem she'd found on her grandfather's desk in Julian's first Game. Was that how her grandfather had found the Shadow Men in the first place? Had he taken a question deep into a pit, into some place where the worlds were connected?

  She would probably never know-unless Julian told her, which didn't seem likely. But it cast a vaguely sinister light over the real Joyland Park.

  Forget the conjectural crap, she told herself. Get down to business.

  "Tom and Zach are on Treasure Island," she said.

  She got a wolfish smile back. "Right. And don't even think about trying to swim there or anything.

  The bridge is the only way, and the toll is three gold doubloons. You'll find the coins hidden throughout the park."

  "I've got one already," she reminded him, closing her fist on the coin.

  His smile turned dreamy, which was even more frightening than the wolf look. "Yes, you do, don't you?" he said pleasantly. "Now all you have to do is get out with it."

  On the word it, everything went dark.

  It happened so fast that it took Jenny's breath away. One moment she was conversing by the light of two ruddy torches, the next she was in pitch blackness. Blackness so profound that it made her heart jump and her eyes fly open. She saw ghostly blue pinwheels, then nothing. It was like being struck blind.

  Okay. Don't panic. He made a mistake-he got mad and screwed up. He left the flashlight.


  I hope, her mind added, as she stuck the doubloon in her pocket and cautiously felt her way in the darkness.

  Her hand closed around cold metal. She held her breath and thumbed the switch.

  Light. Only a tiny light, a dull orange-ish glow. Either something had happened to the flashlight in the fall or the batteries were going dead. But it was enough to keep her from going crazy.

  You shouldn't have made him mad, Jenny. That was really, really dumb.

  Because, even with light, she was in trouble. By holding the flashlight very close she could see the rock walls of her prison quite clearly. She could examine every inch of it, from the low ceiling, to the uneven floor, to the solidly packed boulders that blocked the entrance.

  There was no way in or out. She couldn't possibly shift those boulders by herself-and if she did move one, she'd probably bring the rest of them down on top of her.

  Don't panic. Don't, don't, don't panic.

  But the flashlight was already getting dimmer. She could see it, but not anything around it. And she was alone in the midst of solid rock and absolute silence. There was no sound, not even the drip of water.

  Wait. You thought your way out of a fire in the last

  Game-why not a cave now? Come on, try. Just imagine the rock wall melting, imagine your hand moving through it. ...

  But it didn't work. As she'd suspected before, here in the Shadow World, Julian's illusions were too strong to be broken. He was the master here.

  Which meant she was stuck, unless someone came to help her.

  Okay, then. Yelling time.

  She made herself shout. And again, and again. She even picked up a fist-size rock that lay at the bottom of the pile and banged on each stone wall, slowly and rhythmically. In between each burst of noise, she listened.

  There was absolutely no sound in answer.

  At last, with the flashlight nearly out, she sat down with her back against the boulders, drawing her arms and legs in like an anemone.

  Then the whispering began.

  It started so softly that at first she thought it might be the blood rushing in her ears. But it was real. The voices were distant and musical-and menacing. What they were saying was too indistinct to be made out.