Planet of Dinosaurs, The Complete Collection (Includes Planet of Dinosaurs, Sea of Serpents, & Valley of Dragons)

by K. H. Koehler

  “We made it,” she told him. “We made it we made it we made it home!”

  Seconds later, John raced up to them, still bearing his pack, and Sasha and Quinn welcomed him into their circle and together they hugged and danced and kicked up mud while coaches veered off and people looked on in aghast horror at the fools dancing and whooping in the filthy street.

  And then the gateway, which was not quite closed yet, spat out one more thing.

  And that thing was She.

  CHAPTER 28

  The creature landed firmly in the narrow streets, scattering coaches and people wide. Blinded, confused, She struck out at the chaos surrounding her, snapping wildly at anything within biting distance. A large cart carrying produce down the street was the first thing she attacked. The horses reared and She leaped upon them, overturning the cart and sending it crashing into the street. A wheel spun off, missing Sasha by inches as it skipped down the road.

  She snorted and spun about, scattering more people as she tried desperately to find a target.

  Quinn pulled Sasha away, and the two of them darted down the crooked, narrow street with John close on their heels. “That creature really dislikes you two,” John helpfully pointed out when they had reached the bottom of the hill, panting and wheezing from both terror and exertion.

  Sasha spun about and grabbed John by the arm. “Can you get help? Get the police?”

  John looked stricken, his eyes wild. “Yes, of course.” Then he looked around, noting that She was presently entangled in some wash lines that had been strung between two buildings. “Um…eh, where are we?”

  Sasha looked too. They seemed to be in Covent Garden, Quinn’s old stomping ground, the seedy square full of night-houses, low taverns and squalid, unbecoming slums.

  “Don’t bother. The police won’t come here,” Quinn said, resting wearily against a tall, iron gas lamp. His eyes swam in his head and he breathed only in broken gasps. Sasha was reminded that Quinn had been running almost nonstop all night and had to be close to collapse from exhaustion. “Believe me. Not unless there’s a terrific row.”

  “There’s a damned dinosaurs in the middle of the streets!” John cried, gesturing wildly. “How can the police not come?”

  “This is the East End. They’ll think some drunks are hallucinating,” Quinn gasped, sounding angry now. “At least until it’s too late and the bloody thing has torn up half the slums. Trust me on that. If they couldn’t catch Jolly Jack, do you think they’ll have any luck with She?”

  Sasha glanced around a corner. There was another calamity as She turned in the narrow streets, knocking aside more coaches and trampling vendors and newspaper carts in her clumsy search for them. People—scoundrels mostly, the homeless and prostitutes—raced wildly past their hiding place.

  There had to be a way. Sasha pushed John toward what looked like a pub, probably brimming with criminals. “Go inside and make a row until the police come. But for heaven’s sake, John, keep your wits about you!”

  He looked at them, nodded and started off.

  It was only once he was gone that Quinn spoke. “You did that on purpose to spare John,” he said. He reached up for a laundered shirt on a wash line, slipped his arms into it, and began to button it up over his terrible, bleeding back.

  “Yes, of course,” she admitted, breathing hard. “She isn’t after John, Quinn. He has no business suffering for what we’ve done.”

  “What have we done, Sasha?” he asked, offering her a chemise.

  “Something necessary,” she said, sliding like a snake into it. It wasn’t proper, but it was far better than the ragged shirt she’d been wearing. “But still, something a lot of innocent people may pay for.” She shuddered as a number of people screamed on the street while She roared and stomped the ground in rage and frustration. She swallowed hard. “We can’t let this continue, Quinn. She has to die.”

  He took her hand as they both huddled against the shelter of the wall. “Sasha, your altruistic intentions both amaze and frustrate me to no end. What do we do?”

  Sasha nodded. “We kill She.”

  Quinn grunted and glanced past her down the street. “There’s a butcher shop a block south from here.”

  “Is that relevant?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  Sasha smiled. “Yes, of course.”

  Quinn kissed her hand. Together, they hurried down the street.

  The shop was full of hanks of flyspecked meat hanging from skews supported by long racks. The moment they entered, the proprietor tried to stop them. Quinn ignored him, moved to the racks and unhooked one of the long, iron rods that supported a number of butchered pigs. The meat flopped to the floor in a bloody, insect-crawling pile. Behind the shop, the pigs that had not yet been dressed were squealing, already alerted to impending danger. Good, Sasha thought. Their distress would undoubtedly draw She on. Meanwhile, the shop owner threatened to fetch the local constable before racing off, which was just as well. The sooner the police got here the better. Sasha picked up several long butcher knives and secured them to her waist with the catgut the shop owner kept behind the service counter. She imagined the two of them looked like wild, primitive cave people.

  Back in the street, Quinn had caught some horses pulling an abandoned coach. “Help me, Sasha,” he said. Then he spotted her knives. “Find me catgut, as much as you can.”

  Sasha helped him walk the horses to the front of the butcher shop, then returned to the counter and the butcher’s supply of catgut on an enormous spool. She kicked it onto the floor and rolled it out into the street. Quinn had set the horses free and was using the coach as a brace for the rod. Already Sasha could see what he was up to.

  “Will She come?” she asked. “Do you think the pigs will be enough to attract her?”

  “Let’s hope.” He took the catgut and the knife she had found and began winding the tough, fibrous material around the rod to hold it in place so it projected like a javelin from the floor of the coach up through one window.

  “I should get more knives,” she said, her heart racing. And then, for one moment, she stopped. “I love you, Quinn.”

  He looked up as she reached for one of the horses standing nearby, eating from a barrel of apples at the grocers next door, and it was only then that she realized her mistake. He knew what she was going to attempt. What she had to attempt. Quinn was finished, so feverish there was no way he could do more than he was doing right now. It was up to her. But that didn’t mean Quinn was happy about it. “Sasha…don’t.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she told him. She pulled the broken reins of the horse around and slipped up onto the long, warm back of the animal. For one moment she reveled in its familiarity, then she turned the animal’s head to smile at Quinn. “I have every intention of returning so you have the opportunity to make a proper wife of me.”

  “Sasha, I absolutely forbid you from doing this thing!”

  By that time she was already halfway up the street, and Quinn’s voice was a distant echo. She resolved to obey him after they were married. And, of course, if she lived long enough to do so.

  On her shoulder, Newton chattered a warning seconds before She leaped out at her from a narrow side street, much swifter and more graceful than Sasha had anticipated. The horse reared and she screamed and held tight as the Ceratosaurus’s fetid breath blew down at her. She jerked the horse’s head to one side, and just in time as the enormous slavering jaws clacked shut inches away from her, spattering her with hot saliva and blood from her already numerous kills.

  Sasha jerked the horse’s head around, and for one scary moment, the horse’s hooves slid on the cobblestones, then she righted herself and Sasha kicked her in the sides and they were off with Sasha shaking the reins. She could practically feel She’s hot breath on her neck, feel her heat like a blast furnace as she followed. She snapped, and Sasha felt the tip of one braid break away. She resisted the urge to scream.

  The cobblestoned streets tremb
led and cracked as Sasha drove the horse on, dodging the debris strewn across the abandoned street.

  She roared, the sound nearly stumbling Sasha’s horse with the force of it. It was only her long experience in riding at her Aunt Margaret’s farm that allowed her to regain control of the panicked animal and direct her down the hill toward Quinn and his homemade trap. As Sasha closed it, she eased the horse to one side.

  She, blinded, desperate, raging, never saw the trap. The rod sank deep into She’s belly, carried along by her own momentum. The whole coach collapsed onto its side, but the damage was already done. She screamed as she fell upon the coach, the rod still embedded in her belly, her voice venting all of her rage and her pain, her voice amplified by her nasal horn to a near-deafening pitch so that Sasha toppled off her irate horse and found herself tumbling on the ground only a few yards away. She clapped her hands over her ears, and still the sound filled her head until she felt tears spring to life in her eyes. Quinn appeared beside her and she reached up and clutched him about the neck, burying her face in his shirt, sobbing in victory and utter exhaustion. They clung to each other and waited, trembling, as She’s cries faltered and the great beast collapsed, kicking and writhing in the street.

  Lord Sirius Quinn and Sasha Strange stayed with her until it was over, until the last breath went out of her huge, tortured body, and her respiration slowed and finally stopped. The beast filled the narrow street with her blood and her chaos, but they stayed and watched over her death until the police finally arrived and led them away.

  EPILOGUE

  London, England

  10 Years Later

  Even though she had come to love Africa, Sasha had found herself eagerly awaiting the sound of the Britannia’s steam whistle. In fact, the moment she heard it, she excused herself from her family’s dining table in a very ladylike manner, then raced like an overly exuberant child up the stairs to the starboard deck. From there, she rushed to the rails and peered out at sea at the Port of London. Distantly, little more than a dim line on the horizon, was the Customs House and Tower Bridge. She leaned out precariously far in the salty, foggy air, hoping to catch a better view of it. A stiff wind caught her unawares, and her best hat slid off the shiny reams of braids piled high on her head and blew down into the sea. “Oh bloody hell!” she cried, making a snatch at it even though she knew it was hopeless.

  A steward standing nearby looked on her with great alarm.

  “Sasha?” said a voice behind her, coming out of the fog. “Sasha, what are you up to, my dear?”

  She continued to lean out. “Oh bugger it all! I lost my hat!” she cried.

  A pair of large powerful hands took her by the waist and hauled her back to safety. “Well, I don’t need you going over the rail as well, my dear,” Quinn said.

  “Oh, Quinn, you worry so much,” she told him, turning about and smiling demurely. Despite the years, he was still very fit and strong, despite his now silvery hair. He was very brown from the hard work of cultivating their fields. And very wealthy. They had done well in building their fortune together.

  He raised his brows at that. “I always worry about you, my dear. I have to.”

  “What happened to Mama?” their son Isaac asked, creeping up to the rail to peer over, his sister carefully in tow. Newton clung to Elizabeth’s neck, chattering excitedly.

  “Mama has hat problems. Nothing a trip to the hat shop wouldn’t fix,” Quinn told him, laying his big hand protectively on Isaac’s shoulder before bending to scoop Elizabeth into his arms. He lifted the girl high until she pointed at Tower Bridge and said Bridge very carefully, drawing the letters out so they sounded a bit too much like Breech. Isaac laughed at his sister. He was almost ten, but his sister was a dainty, shy five years old…and the complete and utter apple of her Papa’s eye. As far as Quinn was concerned, she could do no wrong. He did anything she asked, gave her anything she requested—the greatest of things humbled by the smallest. Elizabeth did not like to socialize quite the way their precocious Isaac did, but she was talented in many other aspects. She loved shiny things, loved taking them apart in order to understand how they functioned. Quinn had not had a decent pocket watch in years.

  “Dada, I want to see the Bridge,” Isaac said, pulling very hard on Quinn’s worsted striped suit coat.

  Sasha put her hand on the back of the boy’s neck. “You can see the Bridge from where you are.”

  “No, I want Dada to lift me up!”

  Sasha eyed their son. “Isaac.”

  “It’s perfectly all right, my dear.” Quinn handed Elizabeth off to her and lifted the boy up, wrinkling his suit coat terribly just so he could set the boy on his shoulders. Finally, Isaac, pleased, started pointing at landmarks and naming them one by one.

  “Nanny taught us all of them,” he stated imperiously, reminding Sasha very much of his father. His blue eyes, his red hair, his arrogant stance and sometimes overbearing temperament were all Quinn through and through. The only thing that saved the boy from the switch at times was the fact that he was absolutely fearless and fiercely protective of his sister. “I know all of them. I’ll never get lost in London.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that, young man,” Quinn told him. “London is a very dangerous place.”

  “Quinn, you worry far too much,” Sasha told him, taking her husband by the arm while still juggling Elizabeth. “London is a perfectly wonderful place, Isaac,” she said, managed to pull an altered pair of opera glasses from the case around her neck. They allowed her to see at much greater distance and were one of her favorite inventions. With two precocious children filling their house, plus all her inventions, Sasha had become very good at multitasking.

  “I have to worry every minute, Sasha,” Quinn said. “He’s your son.”

  In the beginning, Sasha had lived in fear that Quinn would lose his temper with their very trying boy. She’d even feared that something of Quinn’s father would surface in him. But Quinn was a patient and loving father, a good husband, even if he was rather proud and arrogant at time. That had never changed. And though he’d certainly mellowed over the years, he was still capable of his infamous redheaded anger. She and Quinn sometimes engaged in rows so powerful it drove their Nanny and other staff members right out of their house in Africa. It always began the same way, with Sasha doing something Quinn regarded as dangerous. It ended the same way too, usually with one or both of them laughing as they quickly forgot what they were fighting about. By now, the staff were utterly convinced their master and mistress were mad with jungle fever.

  The Britannia had finally docked and the gangway was being lowered. Sasha scanned the faces of those waiting on the receiving dock. It only took her seconds before she spotted her father and his coach. Holding Elizabeth tight, she raced down the plank to the sound of Quinn cautioning her not to trip.

  Papa held his arms out to her. “Sasha, my darling!”

  She hugged her Papa tight with Elizabeth caught between them as people made a steady stream around the two of them. This was their first visit in five years, and the first he was seeing of his granddaughter. He was absolutely delighted by Elizabeth’s huge brown eyes, so like her mother’s, he said, and her curling ginger hair, which Quinn seemed doomed to grant all his offspring.

  Quinn wandered over, piloting Isaac forward despite the boy’s desire to run off in every direction, and shook his best friend’s hand heartily. Albertus Strange, large and round and clutching his walking stick, smiled cheekily at his son-in-law. “You look fine, fine, my friend! How is she treating you?”

  Quinn put a hand over his heart and mocked bowed. “Every day is a tribulation, sir.”

  Sasha twisted her face into a scowl.

  “Now, see there, you’ve made her angry, Sirius.”

  “She never stays that way for long, I assure you.” Quinn reached across the space between them and ran his hands over his wife’s cornrows, a familiar gesture that Sasha had come to relish. “Actually, Albertus, she is a deli
ght…except for her cooking, her housekeeping, and the fact that she will not obey her husband at all and contends everything I say. She told me only last week that she wants to hunt lions.” He raised his brows at that. “We have a pair of rogues haunting one of our villages just outside Zimbabwe.”

  Albertus gave his daughter a disapproving look. “Lions, is it?”

  “I’ve hunted worst,” she told them, waving her homemade spyglasses around. Why did the men in her life insist she could not handle herself? Her history proved otherwise. With a javelin she could hunt anything.

  Isaac pulled on his father’s hand. “I want to hunt lions, Dada!”

  “You absolutely cannot hunt lions, Isaac,” Sasha insisted. “Not unless I can.”