He stopped as if coming face-to-face with an invisible barrier. Mother Eve caught herself with a lurch, her splayed footing causing a piece of the pathway's edge to crumble. The sound of raining gravel skittered down the bluff.
Half something like smoke, half something like tar, the tendril felt its way up the mountain path, a bit more of its ambiguous mass and another billowy tentacle or two appearing out of the fog.
Jayx felt an uncommon tingle of alarm, taken aback by the creepy sight. Never in all his years inhabiting Paradise had he seen anything like what was crawling toward them now.
He back-pedaled, knowing it was ill-advised to grapple with uncharted mischief. Just as swiftly as he'd spirited Mother Eve down the mountain, he was hauling her back up. The ledge was too narrow to simultaneously turn the breadth of two people around, though, and backing up the rickety incline was not so easy.
Mother Eve caught onto this almost immediately. As the sooty tendrils felt their way up the mountain in taunting pursuit, she put forth a struggle.
The first thing was the whip of her hair. She flung it over her shoulder into Jayx's eyes, and if the heavy dreadlocks didn't lash severely enough, the beetles were like stones against his face.
Curse those hard, indestructible shells.
He stumbled from the onslaught, and in his haste to steer his precarious footing toward the bluff rather than the drop, his balance only suffered more. Mother Eve followed his unsteady momentum, heaving herself backwards and smashing him into the cliff-side. Pain fissured across his back from the jab of a sharp rock.
A muted grunt escaped him, but he still had a hold of Mother Eve's tethers, and that was what counted. If she thought a little pain was going to undo him, she was wrong.
But the pain jumped from his back to his hand, something thorn-like piercing the meaty flesh between his thumb and forefinger. Another agonizing prick followed, lancing down the back of his hand toward his wrist. They came one after another, making the nerves in his fist jump. Lumbering backwards up the path once more, he stole a glance down between his body and Mother Eve's.
Dreadlock beetles were sinking their pinchers into his fists, and gnawing furiously on the Tribal Queen's bonds.
Cursing, Jayx ground his teeth against the bites. They were unexpectedly excruciating, like poison-tipped metal pincers. His grip faltered, fingers spasming. He couldn't say which was going to be accomplished first – Mother Eve's restraints being demolished, or his hand being immobilized. But she was fast on her way to securing her freedom, if he could not wrestle her back up the path in time.
It was a futile attempt to salvage the situation. They were closer to the ground than the top, and his hand was burning as if immersed in hot coals. He could hear the bones in his jaw skidding against one another as he fought the agonizing sensations. He may be able to curb the pain, at least for a time, but paralysis was not something he could hold at bay.
Never had he known the beetles to be poisonous, but it would not be surprising in the least if Mother Eve had dosed them with poison, somehow. And clearly she'd absorbed enough of their essence over time that she had some affinity for communicating with them, hence their direct interest in destroying her bonds. That should not be surprising either. The fact that she'd secured her immortality this long, successfully coupling her genetics with those of the indestructible roach, was testament to the strength of her link to them. She was probably more roach than human.
Jayx knew a few people who would agree.
He withstood the effects of the insect bites as long as he could, but uselessness seeped through his fingers and pried open his clenched fists. With a cry of distress, he lost purchase on his wily charge.
It was the only window she needed. Launching away from him, the Tribal Queen bolted like water bursting through a dam. She careened headlong down the path, and then threw herself without reservation in the one direction Jayx was guaranteed not to follow – straight off the edge of the cliff, into the cloud of fog.
28 – King of Savages
Ackra had made himself a throne. A vast tree stump draped in fur from the red-and-black Zebra, framed by two smaller stumps for arm rests and flanked by the hulking, broken base of a vine-carved pillar from the architectural ruins of Paradise. He had arranged a few skulls around the bottoms of the stumps for good measure, and even given himself a footrest made out of a weathered old trunk from one of the vessels that was ship-wrecked offshore.
He sat in that throne staring into the musty shadows of his tent, drumming his fingers on the oaken rings of one tree stump. The barbed wire fastened to his fingerless gloves rippled atop his knuckles with the motion. His chest swelled with slow, steady breaths, pressing against the ragged finger bones that dangled from the cord around his neck.
He had a headache. Such a headache.
Maybe from the deadweight of those mammoth crystal antlers strangling your skull.
He dismissed the possibility, unwilling to give up the garish symbol.
“Ackra,” gargled a low, husky voice. The man with antelope horns knelt just inside the tent flap, drawing Ackra's pale, sharp gaze.
“What is it, Vagriel?”
“She...she has returned.”
“Who?”
Horns bowed still, the man searched for the right words. Ackra grew impatient. But really, it was only a matter of seconds that he had to wait for the answer.
“The Mother.”
Something sizzled inside him like a hot coal plunged into water.
Not possible.
“What do you mean, she has returned?”
“She's just stumbled into camp. Alive. Staglord,” he added as a nervous afterthought. The honorable title Ackra had coined for himself and insisted they employ when addressing him.
Obviously, if she had 'stumbled into camp', she was alive. What a bunch of imbeciles he ruled over.
An arc of disquiet ballooned in his chest at the news, followed by a dangerous calm.
“Has she, now?” His words were mildly thoughtful, almost dismissive. Inspecting his fingernails, he picked a half-moon of dirt – or blood – from under one yellowed, chipped shell.
“She came weak and injured, groveling for help.”
“And did you help her?” Ackra could feel his eyes grow more bloodshot, tiny little fissures of hysteria snaking through his wide, unblinking glare.
“Took her to the healing tent. Then came straight to you, Staglord.”
“Mm. Good.”
In a calm flourish he rose, his cloak of Haggardwing feathers falling around his form. He stalked from the tent past Vagriel, weaving his way through the huts to the healing tent. All around his kinmates were preparing for battle – under the impression, the provocation, that their Queen had been killed.
Yet there she was – behind the silver-pelted flap. Ackra paused to consider it, sighing before continuing into the tent.
Vagriel had not been suffering some ill-advised hallucination. Indeed, there was the Tribal Queen. A huge purple knot and a smattering of other bruises and cuts made the right side of her face nearly unrecognizable. One arm hung limp, and, from the look of it, was the result of a dislocated shoulder. Something like a burn created a rash across her chest.
She peered up from where she had come to rest on the tent furs. Took in Ackra's taller-than-usual form. Considered the crystal antlers shining atop his head.
“Ackra,” she panted, breaths unsteady from the pain wracking her form. “Dearest. Vagriel informs me you were so kind as to lead the tribe in my absence.”
“Mother.” The calm he felt at this complication to his rise to power surprised even himself. “You've been gone a long time.”
She coughed, and it rattled in her lungs. “I do hope no one thought me dead.”
Thought you were. Hoped you were.
“We've searched for you day and night,” Ackra assured her.
She extended her able hand, as if reaching fondly for his. “Help me,” she summoned.
He moved forward obediently, taking her hand. “Lie back,” he coaxed, using the leverage of their interlocked fingers to usher her down onto the furs. She complied, letting out a hiss as the ground pressed against her dislocated shoulder, then a sigh as the relief of relaxing washed over her. “You're home, Mother.”
Soothed by his voice, she let her eyelids fall shut. Her dreadlocks took a little longer to settle, beetles crawling across the fur to nestle in choice pockets.
Mother Eve gave a pained swallow. “Water,” she croaked quietly.
“Of course, Mother. Lie still.” Extracting his hand from hers, Ackra fetched a waterskin. He was prudent to note whether or not any attention had been drawn to the healing tent. But it seemed Vagriel had indeed come straight to him, alerting no one. It would not have been hard to slip past their notice – the healing tent was in the quietest, most secluded corner of the camp, and everyone else was caught up in the heat of preparing for battle – clustered in the veils of smoke where they smelted weapons, or indisposed in mock sparring.
He returned to Mother Eve with the water, crouching again by her side. Helping her prop herself up to drink, he watched trickles of excess overflow and run down the side of her face. She started to sputter, and maybe a little too hesitantly he withdrew the waterskin. A harsher cough wracked her form, and it might or might not have been from the extra mouthful.
“There,” he said, laying her back to rest. “There.” The back of his hand touched the side of her face, tenderly, and slowly he wiped away the dribbles of water that ran down her cheeks to the side of her throat.
Her throat... So soft. So vulnerable.
Ackra cocked his head, letting his finger drift over the flutter of her pulse. It was a weak pulse. He did not suppose she could withstand much more than she had already been through. Anything might send her over the edge at this point.
A prong of barbed wire from his gloves hovered just offset from the faint throb of her pulse. A pale eyebrow twitched upward into a dangerously intrigued arc at the notion rolling about inside his head. He shifted his hand, and the prong gleamed in the light filtering through the breezy tent flap.
Trailblazing over the mountains of fur, a beetle crawled onto his slanted palm, tickling his flesh and breaking his consideration. He tightened his fingers around it – gently at first, and then tighter and tighter until he was crushing it in his fist.
Iridescent blood oozed out between his fingers. It took a lot to crush them, but they were not completely indestructible.
She was not completely indestructible.
His fist trembled from the strength it took to break the beetle's shell, and Mother Eve's eyes fluttered open at the patter against her neck.
He did not let them get more than halfway open before he struck. Using the power built-up from squeezing tight his fist, he slashed hard and fast, a jagged line of prongs puncturing and tearing right across her jugular.
Blood caught him in the face.
The Tribal Queen's gaze flared to its full wide-eyed potential, her mouth gasping open in shock. Her pupils telescoped into gaping black vortexes, then receded to pinpoints. Ackra mused at the intensity with which her gaze focused on the roof of the tent. Those all-seeing, all-knowing eyes.
Now they knew what Death looked like, too.
I'm sorry, Mother.
He wasn't, though. Not really. He had gotten a taste of what it was like to be Alpha, and it was not something he was willing to step down from any time soon.
Or ever again.
He did nothing as she died, letting her bleed out in front of him. Her blood soaked into the carpet of fur, crimson on white. And then, when it was done, when she'd choked on her last breath and the last trickle had ebbed from her neck, he licked a drop of her blood from where it was spattered on his lips, and stood to leave.
The cold air hit his flushed face, and he stood looking over the camp and let the tent flap fall heavy behind him, flapping languidly in the wind.
Also flapping in the wind, more frantically, were the red and black playing-card tags pinned across his garb. Flutter-flutter-flutter, flutter-flutter-flutter. Only one seemed a nuisance, really. It was the Queen of Clubs, vibrating against his right thigh.
With a quick snap of his wrist he pinned the Queen between two fingers, stilling her fit.
Be still now, Queenie.
Be still.
And when he sauntered forward, releasing the card, she was stained red from the blood on his fingers and hung like a dead thing at his side, swaying only like a corpse in the gallows.
29 – The Edge of the Sky
When Shiloh returned to the hilltop retreat, Jayx stood at the edge of the plateau as stoic as a statue. Legs spaced slightly apart, arms at his sides, features clouded by more than the darkness.
“Don't tell me you were worried about me,” she chided, trying to make light of the grim energy she sensed.
He stared into the night, and her attempt at light-heartedness slipped. Making a face at his glum display, she shook her head and continued past him with her harvest of fruit.
“Shiloh.”
Intercepted, she raised a brow at him. Was he going to talk to her or wasn't he? His back looked rigid, still facing her.
“What?”
“She's gone.”
Dread twanged through her. At first she wasn't sure what he meant by 'gone', and then she realized Mother Eve must have succumbed to her ailments.
Failure followed the dread, her shoulders slumping with a heavy dismay. But it was not as if she hadn't prepared herself for this outcome. It was a miracle the Tribal Queen had even still been alive when Shiloh found her.
She swallowed some of her disappointment, trying not to be too crushed by the outcome. It was just...she'd put up such a fight, and now this? All for nothing?
Nodding, she fought down the lump in her throat, suddenly feeling stupid for standing there with a bundle of sustenance for someone who was dead.
“Did she wake up, before she died?”
Jayx's voice was quiet and even, spoken out to the darkness that unfurled in front of him. “She isn't dead.”
“What do you mean? She... She got away? How?”
“She didn't get away.”
Shiloh's brows knitted together, not understanding. What other kind of 'gone' was there?
Jayx rotated to face her. His eyes were completely lost in shadow, unreadable. “I let her go.”
Blankness stuttered through her mind at his revelation, followed by a hot burst of anger. “You what?”
He didn't seem to think it needed to be repeated twice.
“Why...would you do that, Jayx?”
Apparently, he didn't owe her a response to that either.
Suddenly, his stoic silence was infuriating. How dare he? What reason, what right did he have to let her go? Had he just been biding his time until Shiloh was out of the picture so he wouldn't be met by her resistance?
But he had volunteered to get food first, and from the beginning his argument had never been to let Mother Eve go. It had been to kill her.
So what had changed?
“She did wake up, didn't she? She got to you, somehow.”
“Shiloh–”
Aghast at him, she took a step back, shaking her head and dropping her pack full of fruit. A plum-like orb rolled out.
“What did she say to you? What could she possibly have said that would possess you to let her go, after all this? After everything we’ve been through?”
Jayx took a step toward her, and suddenly a million red flags went off in her head. Everything clamored out of balance, making it hard to breathe.
“What have you done?”
“I did what needed to be done.”
What was that supposed to mean? How was the Tribal Queen being freed to take back her reign of terror what needed to be done?
“Yeah, how's that? How is aiding the escape of our most-wanted tyrant what 'needed to be done'?” Shiloh demanded.
> A muscle twitched in his cheek. Was her outburst aggravating him, or was he actually struggling to explain what he had done?
Shiloh gritted her own teeth. “How long ago? How long ago was she freed?”
He gazed at her unblinking for a moment before he realized what she was getting at. “Too long, Shiloh. You will never catch her.”
“Like hell, I won't.” She strode to the edge of the plateau in a huff and cast her gaze heatedly over the inky treetops of Paradise, as if daring them to hide Mother Eve from her.
As if she could ever hope to catch even a glimpse of her quarry from that far-flung, mist-shrouded height.
Not even a twinge of foliage met her determined gaze. All across the island, not even a leaf was disturbed.
Frustration bubbled in her innards.
“It's too late, Shiloh,” Jayx repeated. “Don't bother trying.”
The frustration choked into her throat. “But why?” she floundered for an explanation, voice thick from the lump of emotion.
“Because,” Jayx uttered from closer than she had expected – voice murmuring, in fact, right behind her. She felt his breath on the back of her neck, making the downy hair on her skin stand on-end. “Because I had to.”
He murmured it with a grave sense of finality, and just before the impact, something in her animal senses set off an alarm, flaring her eyes wide.
Then his fist, or knee, or foot connected with her back – and she was flung headlong off the edge of the plateau and into the plummeting abyss of the sky.
Don’t miss the third and final installment in the Deadly Lush saga:
EDEN
Coming 2018
Learn more about the Paradise series:
www.paradiseseries.wordpress.com
About the Author
Harper Alexander is a writer of Young Adult, Fantasy, and Dystopian novels, as well as the occasional shorter story when there's no time to make everything into a full-fledged book or series. She lives in Southern California with her husband and other furry companions (felines Moo, Wolf, and Charlie), a temperamental bearded dragon, and the more questionable voices that whisper to her on a daily basis. She is currently hard at work on the next dozen books demanding an honorary place in her bibliography.
Wonderland (Deadly Lush Book 2) Page 22
