“Notice what?”
“John wants you, Sasha.”
“John’s my friend, Quinn. My penpal.”
Quinn smirked and nearly rolled his eyes. “I keep forgetting how innocent you are.”
“I’m not innocent.”
“Pure then.”
“I’m not…”
He kissed her, pulling her into his embrace and cupping the back of her head to keep her in place, to keep her silent. He kissed her mouth. He kissed inside her mouth. He licked her and bit her and tried to consume her. And when she clutched him and began making those little kitten-like cries he enjoyed so much, he lifted her up in his arms and settled her down on a shelf of stone outside the cavern and kissed her hair and ear and neck and slid his hands beneath the hem of her Moja-made tunic. He pulled her tight against him so she could feel just how much he wanted her.
“Quinn,” she said.
“Yes, my dear,” he said, finding her neck very tasty.
“John might see.”
“John’s hunting a Deenie, Sasha.”
“He still might see.”
He lifted her up and carried her inside the cavern, which was just as well. Suddenly she felt so weak she wasn’t sure her legs could hold her own weight. Inside the cave, the light was dim and flecked with spirals of light from some prehistoric version of fireflies. It was cool and Sasha shivered in the subterranean dark.
“Shall I warm you?” Quinn asked in a soft voice.
She loved his pillow talk, how sweet and intimate he could be. She wrapped her arms about his neck and nestled her head under his chin. Quinn carried her to the back of the cavern and pressed her against the stone wall amidst some stalactites and kissed her again, cupping the back of her neck and pushing his tongue deep inside her mouth. When he drew back, he looked as flustered as she felt. “John could be back anytime, so we’ll need to be quick about this,” he said, moving his hands under her tunic to cup her backside and lift her weight so it rested partly against the wall and partly against him. “Please don’t assume my haste is in any way a reflection of how I feel about you, my dear.”
“Yes, Quinn,” she answered, kissing his neck and breathing in the warm, damp, male scent of him. He smelled of desert and pine needles and hunting and a unique scent that was just him.
“Move just a little…yes, like that.”
“Yes, Quinn.”
He kissed her forehead tenderly and ran one hand over her braids while the other stroked her beneath the short skirt of the tunic. “A complacent Sasha. I never thought I’d see the day.”
“Spider,” she said breathlessly against his neck.
“Spider?”
“There’s a spider on your back. A big one.”
Quinn’s eyes went wide and he nearly dropped her in his haste to brush himself down. He made frightened noises as he did so, and stomped and gasped until Sasha was laughing at his antics. Finally, he’d stomped the spider into bits under his boots. “Why are bugs always so bloody attracted to me?” he cried, running his hands over his hair to check for more.
“Spiders aren’t bugs. They’re arachnids.”
He gave her a surly look.
She covered her mouth with her hands to control her giggles. “They like you because they know you’re afraid of them, Quinn.”
“I’m not afraid of them,” he insisted.
“I’m sure that’s why you became so unglued in the beginning with that beetle.”
“I did not become unglued,” he said with supreme insult. “And that was not a beetle. It was a giant scarab…or something.” He stomped on the spider a bit more. Then he looked at her again, perhaps a bit sheepishly. “Are you going to challenge every single thing I say after we’re married?”
She leaned against the wall and gazed shyly up at him. “Yes.” She reached for him, working the tails of his shirt out of his trousers and sliding her hands over his bare skin until he shivered at her touch and his eyes seemed to glaze over. He was a tough, dangerous, cynical man until she touched him. Then he became all soft and tame and sweet. She tugged him close, close enough to breathe his breath and draw her tongue across his bottom lip. He smiled against her mouth. He had so little in common with the heroes she’d read about in the popular novels of romance. He wasn’t young, dashingly handsome, or even very witty. He didn’t read books, knew almost nothing about science or poetry, and she wasn’t entirely certain he was even very bright. But he was funny and irrelevant, and he made her laugh when there was very little to laugh about. She loved him. She loved him better, she decided, than any perfect prince or valiant knight or gallant suitor.
“Will you let me win arguments?” he pleaded at a whisper as they came together, his breath tickling the side of her neck as it came in ever-shorter bursts. “At least sometimes?”
“Quinn.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Will you please be quiet and just love me?”
He did.
CHAPTER 6
The next morning, she felt Quinn lean over her and shake her gently awake. “You might want to take a look at this,” he said in her ear.
She blinked the sleep out of her eyes and was on instant alert. She had gotten very good at transitioning from sleep to full wakefulness in a second or two. In a world like this, it often meant the difference between life and death. Throwing off her blanket, she followed him out of the cavern and up a steep incline. Together they stood on a high cliff overlooking the valley. It was absolutely breathtaking when expressed in full lighting—like something out of a science romance, green and verdant. “Where’s John?” she asked, squinting out over the valley to see what Quinn was pointing out.
“He went down a ways to look for prey.” Last night’s hunt had been unsuccessful. When John had returned, he’s even commented on the curious lack of animals to hunt in this area.
“Alone? He shouldn’t go alone.”
“He’s been here alone a lot longer than us. I don’t think he feels the same way we do.”
That was true enough.
She could finally see what Quinn was pointing out.
The Valley of Song stretched perhaps ten miles down the ravine between the two great plateaus surrounding it, following the twisty, snakelike bends of the riverbed. Between the two plateaus were a great number of natural stone bridges that formed loops and eroding curlicues, some small and linked to others, some huge and extending the full distance of the valley. They were quite obviously natural formations, the results of millions of years of erosion in a huge, natural rock bed, but Sasha had never seen anything quite like it, and there was nothing on earth that could compare to it. True to its name, the valley caught the wind and channeled it through the hundreds of small arches like a massive flute, creating a dull symphony of noises when the wind picked up. That was the beautiful and amazing thing about it.
The less beautiful and amazing thing about it were the birds.
At least, Sasha thought they were birds. They were the size of grown men, had bat-like shapes and sported some kind of rudimentary feather-like coat and enormous crests. Their wingspans must have stretched twenty feet in length. They wheeled almost lazily in the warm updrafts from the valley below, cawing not unlike blackbirds back home and periodically diving down toward the river to scoop up prey in their long, pouchy beaks. She thought there must be two or three hundred of them, at a quick glance. Both sides of the valley were lined with big, heavy, basket-like hanging nests.
“Dragons,” said Quinn observing the birds as if mesmerized by them.
She looked, and her mind instantly jumped to everything she had read about prehistoric birds. “Those aren’t dragons, Quinn; they’re pterosaurs.”
“They look like dragons,” Quinn said all big-eyed as if these were the greatest creatures he had ever seen. “I used to dream about dragons when I was a lad. I wanted to be a knight and slay them.” He smiled a little, as if he felt foolish. But Sasha had learned to treasure those small smiles. Quinn almo
st never smiled.
One of the birds turned on an updraft and grew larger as it zeroed in on them.
Quinn stiffened beside her. “Are they aggressive?”
“I don’t know. There’s very little literature about them, and few fossil finds. I did not even know they looked like this. In 1800, a German-French scientist postulated a pterosaur with big round wings—”
The creature took that moment to descend upon them, screaming.
Quinn gripped Sasha around the waist and yanked her down so they both wound up face first on the hard-packed ground with the beast screeching overhead, the wind from its wings so powerful it tore at their clothes and hair like claws. Sasha screamed. Quinn rolled over onto his back while simultaneously pulling his survival knife from his boot.
The creature jabbed at them, trying to maintain its lift with its stiff, unmovable wings but still angle its enormously long beak toward them. The angle wasn’t right for its attack—it was built to catch fish, not humans—so it hung over them like a malevolent kite, rising and falling, screaming in frustration. Quinn muttered a savage curse and sat up, driving the knife at it. The first time, he hit the bird’s bony beak and the knife bounced off, doing almost no damage. The creature turned its head, its eyes rolling wildly in its head, and tried to hit Quinn with the side of its beak. Quinn jerked away, then scooted lower in the dust, aiming for its vulnerable breast.
The knife went solidly in and the bird screamed all the louder, so loud that Sasha screamed in response and tried to roll away, but a wing caught her upside the head and she saw literal stars for a moment. Then blood gushed down.
Quinn, still cursing, gripped the handle of the knife in both hands and yanked it upward, unzipping more of the bird’s flesh and delicate bones so the beast gave one last yelp and fell down solidly upon them, heavier than it looked and bleeding all over the two of them.
Sasha stopped screaming and stared heavenward, the stunned bird lying like a stone upon her chest. Quinn shoved it over so it landed in the dirt, its body shuddering in its death throes, wings curling, crumpling, his knife sticking out of its heart. Then it fell still, just like that.
Sasha let out her breath and looked over at Quinn, who lay exhausted in all the blood and dust. His eyes seemed to swim in his head. Then he refocused and said in a constricted little voice, “Sasha, I don’t think I like dragons anymore.”
CHAPTER 7
The pterosaur turned out to be rather stringy and tough, and though a large animal, most of its body mass was made of bones and skin. It did not make for a pleasant meal, though Quinn, Sasha and John did their best. In the wilds of a prehistoric planet, one could not afford to be picky about where one found a meal.
The three of them sat around a fire inside one of the caverns at the foot of the butte and picked the bones of the big bird clean.
“Deenie,” said Sasha, licking at the grease on her fingers.
“Much better,” John said.
“Hypsies,” Quinn said. “Much sweeter.” He broke off the last of the meat and offered it to Sasha.
“Thank you, Quinn,” she said.
“Camptosaurus,” said John.
“Tough,” said Quinn. “Fatty.”
“Too big,” Sasha said. “Hard to hunt.”
John was watching her again. He seemed to follow her every move and concentrate on every lick of every bone. She turned to look at him and John smiled. Quinn bristled beside her. He showed no outward indication, but she could feel the fission in the air. Quinn, though, had promised her he would be a gentleman, and if it was one thing about Quinn, it was that he always followed through on his promises.
“So you see what I mean about the birds being dangerous,” John said to break the sudden, uncomfortable silence.
John had explained about the pterosaurs. But she never would have believed it had she not seen it with her own eyes. She said, “Yes, were it not for Quinn, I would have been its dinner instead of the other way around.”
John’s smile slipped. He turned to Quinn. “How did you know to strike at the breastbone?”
Quinn sat up and gave the young, blond American a courtly smile, showing no antagonism at all. “I didn’t. It just seemed like a likely place.”
“Do you stab a lot of animals in the heart, Lord Quinn?” John asked with mock severity.
Quinn offered him a little smile in return, not vicious but sarcastic. “Only when they threaten my woman.”
“John,” she said to interrupt, “you said the birds are strictly diurnal, correct?”
John nodded and bit off the last bit of stringy flesh on his bone.
Sasha turned to include Quinn. “That means the birds only come out during the day.”
Quinn nodded in appreciation. “That must make working on whatever you’re building fairly difficult,” he said to John.
John nodded in return. For once, he seemed willing to set aside his differences. “It does. I’ve only been able to work on the new Tuning Machine at night, and even then I have to be careful not to make any sudden noises and wake them.”
“So you do have a Machine you’re building.”
John shrugged. “It’s little better than a composition of natural elements, but I’m very excited to show it to you, Sasha. Perhaps you can make some sense of it.” He turned to glance at Quinn. “It was Sasha who developed the mechanics of the Tuning Machine in the first place. I only postulated it.”
“Sasha is a very smart girl,” Quinn said.
Sasha blushed at that.
Normally, after supper, Quinn took the first watch of the night while everyone else bedded down. But Sasha was too excited to sleep and asked John to show her the Machine. The sooner she saw it, the sooner she could begin any needed alterations. And the sooner they might get home.
They had to wait until full dark before they could pull up stakes and begin the journey down into the valley. The idea didn’t sit well with Quinn. There were simply too many predators stalking the night, he said. Plus, there was the possibility of encountering She again. He armed himself with two bows, in the event one malfunctioned, and three javelins. He slid his survival knife as well as two backup hunting knives the Moja had given them as gifts into sheaths that hung low on his hips. Sasha armed herself with a javelin and one knife. If it turned out she was unable to use one of the weapons in a fight, then it was probably already too late for her, she reasoned. She didn’t have the fighting skills or reflexes that Quinn had. John, laden with notebooks and tools, a great deal of homemade hemp rope and crudely fashioned metal hooks, carried only one small survival knife. Quinn wondered aloud how he’d managed to stay alive these past three months without a sheer artillery of weapons.
“My defense is knowing how the animals of this world behave,” he explained, setting his rucksack more comfortably on his back. “For instance, the pterosaurs won’t attack until early morning, when they’re most active, and the predators down in the valley won’t attack anything they don’t recognize as easy prey. As long as you don’t have any open wounds, for instance, you won’t attract them.”
“What predators?” asked Quinn, suddenly standing at full attention and clutching the straps of his pack in one hand and one of his javelins in the other.
John lifted his brows with interest. “Velociraptors. Birdlike dinosaurs that hunt in packs, not very large. Smaller than Deenies but more vicious. Once they smell blood, they’ll attack a creature and pick at it until it dies of its injuries. I saw a pack of twelve take down a full-grown Camptosaurus just last week. They started eating it before it was even dead.” He smiled, grimly. “So I suggest nobody bleeds.”
Sasha swallowed hard against the lump in her throat and said nothing.
“More bloody dragons,” sighed Quinn, sounding unhappy.
Together, they started down the mountain and into the valley of dragons.
CHAPTER 8
The hike down the mountain took longer than she expected and was more treacherous than it looked, es
pecially in the dark. John had discovered a narrow, eroded path cut into the mesa that zigzagged down to the valley below, but it was little better than a goat path,full of loose rocks and sand. In the dark, with only some weak moonlight filtering down, it just looked like a path of darkness carved into more darkness. At one point, the path ran out, and John had to pound his homemade hooks into the rock and secure ropes so they could rappel themselves down one slow inch at a time.
Sasha did not consider herself a cowardly person—at least, not anymore—but the idea of dangling off a cliff face a few hundred feet in the air in the dead darkness with only a rope between herself and certain death was enough to erode anyone’s courage. Halfway down, she froze up and could only cling to the knots in the rope, weave lazily, and whimper while Quinn climbed up her rope and eased her down.
Planet of Dinosaurs, The Complete Collection (Includes Planet of Dinosaurs, Sea of Serpents, & Valley of Dragons) Page 22
