“You’re alive,” she said, to cover her embarrassment.
“You too,” Toby answered, running his hands over her tangled hair and down the sides of her scratched and dirty face like he couldn’t believe she was there, that she wasn’t a dream. “I was so afraid you’d been hurt, Sasha, or that you’d left me, that Quinn had taken you away with him.”
“No, of course not.” How could he even think such a thing? They were in this together, all three of them.
He must have sensed her unease, because he added, “I’m sorry, Sasha, it’s just…the last few days have been difficult. I’ve missed you.” He smiled that familiar, lopsided smile.
She smiled back. “And I you.” It felt good to see Toby, to feel his warm hands, to know he was alive. But at the same time, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Quinn was watching them coolly, in that calculating way he had.
Toby’s smile grew. “I have something important to tell you, Sasha. Something I should have said long ago.”
She got a very bad feeling then. “Tell me later, Toby,” she said as carefully as possible. “When we get out of here.” She rocked back on her heels and looked up at Muk. He was as ugly as she had remembered, but at least he had kept his word. He hadn’t harmed Toby, as he’d promised he would not. He seemed, as Quinn put it, an honorable bloke. She showed him the heavy black claw around her neck. He approached her, tilting his head to one side as he examined it, making low clicks in his throat as if he were deliberating.
Sasha held her breath.
He narrowed his eyes. Finally, he spoke. This is not the claw of She, he said. Now all three of you will die.
CHAPTER 22
In one smooth motion, Quinn grabbed one of the young Sen standing nearby, drew his Bowie knife from his boot, and raised the razor-sharp edge so it sat just under the creature’s chin, making it chirp excitedly. Quinn’s eyes were blue and pale and deadly, like fired steel. “I’m not dying today, Muk. Not after everything I’ve gone through to earn my freedom.”
Muk’s eyes flared. Release that boy, he said.
Quinn grinned, evilly. “Why? Is he yours, old boy? That’s just too bloody bad. Now show me the door!” He jabbed the edge of the knife in deeper, cutting the boy enough that a thin trickle of blood dribbled down his hairy chest. The young Sen began making panicked shrills in his throat. Quinn ignored him.
Muk bared his impressive set of saber teeth. What about your people? He glanced at Sasha and Toby. Don’t you care at all about their safety?
Quinn looked the two of them over. His eyes were cold, dead. “Why should I care about that lot? The boy despises me and the girl only used me to get back to her childhood lover. I’ve no time for those two fools, and no love lost in their deaths.”
Each of his words was like a nail to Sasha’s heart. Each one pounded a little more love right out of her. The resulting empty space was quickly filled with pity and fear…and bitterness. “Quinn,” she began, biting back the awful tears clogging up her throat. All she could think about was the last kiss they had shared, the way Quinn had held her like she was precious to him. Like he loved her. “You’re lying. You’re just making all this up, aren’t you?” A small part of her hoped, wanted to believe that Quinn was merely trying to escape so he could free them at a later time. But was that too much to hope for in Quinn? She feared so when she looked into the soulless chambers of his eyes.
“Quinn,” she insisted, “I know you’re lying.”
“He’s not lying,” Toby said, face darkening, voice dropping in pitch and timber. “He’s a drunk and a coward. He really does hate us. You hate everyone, don’t you, Quinn?”
Quinn smirked emptily on them. He raised the knife a hair and more blood flowed from the young Sen. “I hate only when someone betrays me. When they lie. When they use me.”
Toby looked to Sasha, but Sasha had no answers for him. She took a step toward Quinn, then stopped when she saw it was hopeless, that she would never be able to convince him otherwise. She wanted to plead, to rage, but she couldn’t pull her eyes away from him, his twisted mask of despair…disappointment.
“That escort, Muk,” Quinn said, his knife hand dead steady at the throat of the young creature. “Now.”
Sasha continued to stare long after Quinn and his hostage were whisked away from her. She continued to stare even after she’d crumpled to her knees and the hungry, shadowy shapes of the Sen closed in around her, chirping excitedly.
“Quinn!” she cried.
And then the Sen were upon her.
***
SEA OF SERPENTS
CHAPTER 1
Sasha Strange screamed.
The looming, bat-like Sen clutched the bars of her cage and stuck out its long, barbed tongue, teasing her. The tongue slithered across the floor like a snake, but it could easily penetrate her flesh like a spear, Sasha knew. She had seen it done. She screamed again, grabbed up a sharp stone lying on the floor of the cave, and smashed it down atop the encroaching tongue. The Sen roared and retreated from her cage.
She clutched the stone, a solid, reassuring weight in her hand, her only weapon. She wished she still had the javelin she’d used to help kill She’s mate, but that was long since gone, lost when she and Quinn had brought the great male Ceratosaurus down on the beach. Now all she had was this stone. She gritted her teeth and boldly took a step forward, much to the astonishment of Toby crouched on the floor nearby. “Next?” she asked.
She was proud of herself. And amazed. A short time ago, she would have been happy to stand by and let the men in her life handle this. No more. If she had learned anything from her journey with Quinn, it was that she had an indelible appetite for survival. She wanted to survive—needed to—in order to spite Quinn. She would find him and spit in his face for leaving them all to die this way. She clutched the rock in her trembling hand, imagined lobbing it at his head. Or at his chest, where no heart beat.
The Sen went into a frenzy. The one with the bruised tongue turned and chattered excitedly with Muk, their leader. Muk looked to his clansman, then her. He nodded, and the clansman unlatched the door of the cage and climbed inside with her and Toby, moving awkwardly with his big, unwieldy wings. Sasha shuffled back a step, keeping herself between the creature and Toby, so weak from days without nourishment he could not even crawl. She clutched the stone in both hands, prepared to pitch it at the monster the way they pitched balls in cricket games at home in London. The creature hissed at her.
Sasha wound up and threw the rock. It bounced harmlessly off the chest of the creature in front of her. The creature emitted an ear-splitting cry and bared it long saber teeth. Then it lunged, driving her to the floor under its weight.
“Sasha!” Toby cried. But he so weak from days without food or water; there was nothing he could do.
Sasha began to fight, scratching and kicking and even biting at the tough fur and tougher skin of the beast pinning her to the floor. If she must die, if there was no other way, it would not be easy for the Sen, she vowed. She was punching at its sides and kicking at its legs when she smelled damp woodsmoke for the first time. The creature must have sensed it too. It immediately leaped off her and turned to face Muk, seeking instruction from its leader.
Muk tilted his big shaggy head and scented the air. It smelled like a bonfire out of control, something that the Sen probably knew very little about, seeing how they did not utilize fire. Muk turned and pointed to the ceiling of the cave where a natural chimney acted as their exit, making a high screeching noise of emergency, directing his clansmen to escape.
At that moment, a puff of woodsmoke began crawling into the room.
CHAPTER 2
The Sen’s home was nothing more elaborate than a maze of caverns carved into a dormant volcano, so they filled up fast with smoke. Within minutes, the Sen had cleared out through the chimney exit in the ceiling and Sasha and Toby were alone. Sasha coughed and tried to get Toby to his feet. Smoke stung her eyes and hung like heavy, torn veils
in the air all around them. The formerly cool cavern was quickly heating up; the fire was eating its way through the mountain passages and rising like any good fire would.
“Toby!” Sasha cried as she worked at levering his weight onto her. It was difficult; Toby was a big muscular man and outweighed her by almost a hundred pounds. She stumbled as the heat and smoke began to choke her, but someone caught her, steadying her on her feet. At first, she feared it was a Sen, but then she saw the hands that had her were human. Large, long and thin, and lightly freckled along the backs. She squinted up at the familiar face looming over her through the curtain of smoke. She immediately recognized the pale rain blue eyes. “Quinn?” she said, almost afraid to believe that it might be true, that he’d come back for her.
“There’s no time to talk,” he said matter-of-factly, his voice muffled behind a handkerchief tied cowboy-style around the bottom half of his face. He took her arm. “We need to get out of here now.” He looped an arm under Toby’s armpits and hefted him to his feet. “Take his other side,” he said, and Sasha immediately raced to his other side and took as much of Toby’s dead weight as she could.
Together, the two of them started down a long tunnel so smoke-filled it made Sasha gag. “Are we going the right way?” she asked, blinded by smoke. It seemed like they were walking right into the thick of it, and further down the tunnel she could see the glimmer of flames.
“This is how I got back in, so yes.” Quinn directed them into a branch tunnel. Suddenly it was easier to breathe. “Keep moving,” Quinn advised. “We need to get out of here. It’ll only get worse soon.”
Sasha kept going, each step a struggle with Toby’s mostly unconscious weight pressing on her. The smoke gradually lessened, and then at last she saw daylight further down the tunnel. It galvanized her like nothing else. She could not wait to escape the Sen’s caverns and see the open sky and breathe fresh air again!
They charged into the jungle with its myriad of buzzing insects and its fresh damp earth smell, then stopped when Sasha crumbled to her knees, gagging until her throat felt like rough sandstone. Her head swam and she realized she was on the verge of passing out. She was surprised to suddenly find herself in Quinn’s arm. “My darling,” she heard him say, or thought she did. Then all was darkness and silence.
CHAPTER 3
It was all like a bad dream. Sasha opened her eyes and looked up at a clear, dark tropical sky full of strange birds she had never seen before. A huge orange orchid lazily dripped water onto her cheek. She tasted its unfamiliar nectar and sat up.
They were camped at the foot of the Sen’s mountain. For a moment her heart thudded in her chest in panic. She glanced around, afraid a Sen might swoop down on them at any moment. Instead, she spotted Quinn a few feet away, working on starting a fire for the oncoming night. Toby lay beside her, breathing roughly but obviously alive when she checked him over.
She was too dizzy to climb to her feet so she crawled through the jungle debris to Quinn’s side. She watched him spark a small flame in a pile of dry sticks with the flint in his pocket. He worked steadily at kindling the fire, without looking at her. She had judged him harshly, she knew. She’d assumed he would leave her and Toby to die. She’d assumed he was full of hate. She’d been utterly convinced of it. And the realization made her ashamed.
“Quinn,” she finally said when the silence became too much.
He ignored her. He was not classically handsome like Toby. He was too tall, too gaunt, middle-aged, freckled, redheaded pale and perpetually unsmiling. He looked rough, like the whole lot of them. He smelled of jungle and time and trials. He gave off a faint vibration of rage at all times, like a man who might do anything. And yet…he’d saved her. He’d treated her with enormous tenderness. She’d kissed him and nearly swooned like some silly heroine in the romance novels. He infuriated her, confused her, and the more she learned about him, the more she wanted to know.
“Quinn,” she said again. She thought about touching his arm, but she didn’t know how he would react. He might brush her away. “Quinn, is it safe here? What if the Sen return?”
“They won’t,” he answered tersely. “The cavern is all smoked out.”
“Will that stop them from returning?”
“The Sen navigate by echolocation, and smoke interferes with their senses. They won’t fly anywhere near here until the smoke clears out, and that will likely take all night. By then, we’ll be away.” He sat back on his heels. “In fact, the smoke will probably keep most of the animals away from us until morning.”
She just looked at him. “How did you know that? That the smoke would work?”
He sat with his back to the mountain, hugged his knees, and watched the flames like they were the most interesting things in the world. “I remembered how bushmen flush bats out of caves in Africa. They smoked them.” He shrugged his thin but powerful shoulders. “It worked, didn’t it?”
She knew she ought to check on Toby, make sure he was doing all right, but she didn’t want to leave Quinn just then. Quinn had saved her. Again. She didn’t know what to say, how to apologize for what she had said—and thought. But she had to say something. She swallowed and found her courage, courage that Quinn himself had taught her. “You came back for us.”
Finally, he looked at her. He looked hurt, as she had expected he would. “Did you think I would not?”
She stared down at her hands clenched in her lap. “I don’t know what I thought.”
The silence pressed in. She could feel him staring at her, his gaze so piercing it hurt.
Finally, he said, “Your young man hates me.”
“He’s not…” she began. Then she stopped. She didn’t know what Toby was to her. “He doesn’t hate you, Quinn.”
“Yes,” Quinn said. “He does.” He looked back at the fire burning so fiercely before them. “Perhaps it would be best if we parted company here.”
Sasha’s heart lurched. “What? What do you mean?”
“It would perhaps be more…advantageous if I went one way and you and Toby the other. We could cover more ground that way, and if one of us found your friend Dr. Ulysses, we could devise a signal of some kind. A smoke signal, perhaps, something that could be seen for miles.”
“Quinn, I really don’t think that’s a very good idea.” She stood up. It was important they found her friend John—Dr. John Ulysses of Cornell University in the States. He was perhaps the only man who could get them home, and she knew Quinn’s logic was flawless, but she also knew he was doing this for reasons other than convenience. “Let’s discuss this at a later time. Please. At least until we reach the coast. Right now we need each other.” She touched his shoulder, but he was cold, so cold.
CHAPTER 4
By morning, Toby was better. Not perfect, perhaps, but he insisted he was fit enough to travel. Since the Sen could return at any time, they packed their camp and were off.
It was a painfully silent journey out of the jungle and across the open plains. Sasha had everything and nothing to say to Quinn. Toby seemed to sense that something was amiss, but chose to say little unless he saw something truly amazing. Sasha and Quinn knew what to expect—they’d been this way before—but for Toby, the incredible variety of dinosaurs perambulating along the plains was something new. He gaped at the ship-sized sauropods in massive, earth-moving herds, the giant armored stegosaurus, the small, quick-witted dinosaurs no larger than cats that darted in and out of their paths. Some of the creatures seemed to follow them for a ways before bounding away toward their companions. The only creature to stay with them throughout was Newton, the little orange mammal that had attached itself to Sasha one night while she and Quinn were sleeping in a cave. He stayed on Sasha’s shoulder and played the part of lookout. If any dinosaurs wandered too near, he would chirp excitedly until everyone went on alert, manhandling the new, flint-headed javelins they’d made until whatever curious creature was drawing near changed its mind.
Sasha thought about the n
ight they had found Newton—or, rather, Newton had found them. It had been a good night. A wonderful night. Quinn had kissed her for the first time, and they’d fought, and she’d wanted to kiss him some more. Now it was nearly impossible for her to look at him and not want to kiss him, to touch him, which was patently ridiculous. He was the most infuriating man she had ever met, and it was ridiculous that she should even feel this way. At least in Miss Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice Mr. Darcy had been fantastically beautiful and romantic as well as abrasive and proud. It came as something of a mystery to her as to why she felt any kind of attraction to Quinn at all. Perhaps, she thought (not for the first time) she was fevering from some unknown jungle disease.
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