“Can you get up? You can’t stay where you are. Something will come along and mistake you for its next meal, I promise you that.”
Not waiting for a reply, he shoved his arm behind Emil’s back and dragged the man to his feet. They both had to move, if only to get back to where he’d left Hallie protecting Calypso. Though unsteady, Emil appeared sound. Hauling on his arm, Burke dragged him over the rough terrain, glancing over his shoulder once or twice to make certain they weren’t being tracked by something in the air or on the ground.
“Come on, man, move!” he urged. Ahead, Hallie’s commanded Calypso to be quiet as the dancer’s lilting accents rose in hysteria. Letting go of Emil’s arm he left the man to fend for himself as he broke into a run, blood hammering in his ears. A colossal snapping and crashing vibrated the ground beneath his feet. Racing the final distance flat out, he ignored Emil’s pleas for his return.
“Hallie!”
Lurching into a deep rut that had not previously been there, his knee twisted painfully as he stumbled to the ground. Lurching upright despite the injury, he staggered forward, desperate to see through the tiny winged objects filling the air, each no larger than the last joint in his middle finger but blocking the scene ahead.
“Hallie!”
He waved both arms in an attempt to clear the creatures away. Behind him, Emil came at a stumbling run, gasping for oxygen and mumbling incoherently. Burke spared no concern for him, thrusting his way head down through the horde of translucent, winged organisms. Beyond them, the thrashing noise continued, moving steadily away.
“Hallie!” he shouted again, bursting through the swarm into a putrid, cloying atmosphere dancing with the remnant of unknown debris.
Of Hallie and Calypso there was no sign.
II.
THE HUNTER ABOVE
The stench of decomposing flesh nearly overwhelming her, Hallie set one foot behind the other as she held the creature at bay, the lathesa whistling at irregular intervals in the air between them. When the beast had fallen from the rotted branch high above it had injured itself. As far as Hallie could tell, that was the only reason she and Calypso were still alive.
The creature was, indeed, serpentine, an undulating body lashing back and forth into the forest behind to a point where it disappeared in the gloom. At the fore, however, it possessed what once had been two sturdy appendages with a girth the size of a man’s chest, possibly used for propelling it along the ground. The one hung shattered and useless in its casing of moldy skin. Nevertheless, it managed to move with remarkable agility, curling up from the ground again and again as it lunged forward to snatch at them with its single, unbroken leg. This ineffective groping caused it to tumble to the soil each time, only to rise up again in determined aggravation. Hallie couldn’t see the eyes, but its mouth was horrifyingly evident.
She kept the lathesa away from the mouth to avoid having her weapon seriously shortened. Instead, she struck swift blows when she could to the injured limb. So far, this action had sufficed to keep the creature from making a more decisive attack, but she’d begun to wonder about the beast’s intelligence. It almost seemed to be herding them, deliberately forcing them to some position of its choosing.
“Tell me what you see, Calypso,” she instructed quietly. For now, the island woman was her eyes, directing her from misstep. If Hallie turned her head for even the briefest glance to her rear, one if not both of them would be dead.
“N-n-not sure,” Calypso answered, stuttering in her fear. “Look like everything d-d-drop away.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ground drop away. Level fall off. I don’t know! Maybe cliff, like at edge of big water at home.”
Perhaps this was the creature’s intent, driving them to a point where they could go no farther. A standoff would ensue and Hallie had no doubt how it would end.
She’d heard Burke calling her right after the beast had made its accelerated and unanticipated descent, but not since then. He was either following in silence, seeking an opportunity to dispatch the creature, or something had happened to him.
“Let me know when we get closer, Calypso,” she said, spinning the narrow branch in her hand. Having learned a canny wariness, the creature withdrew slightly at the whistling noise. “And when I tell you to run, I want you to do it, do you hear me?”
“No! No leave you, Hallie. I won’t!”
“That’s quite commendable, but you have to. I need the creature to be distracted and I need you to be the one to do it.”
Calypso was silent for the space of a drawn breath. “Which way I run?”
“Right or left. Doesn’t matter, as long as you run safely away. Do you understand?”
“Understand. You brave girl, Hallie.”
“No, I’m not. I just don’t want to die this way.”
Even without Calypso’s warning, Hallie knew when they had drawn closer to the lip of land Calypso had tried to describe. The forest suddenly sounded different, more vast and whispering, and the wind funneling up past them told its own story. The drop off, wherever it led, was bound to be precipitous.
Weaving a pattern in the air between herself and the serpentine beast with the ends of the branch, Hallie attempted to confuse the creature, put it on the defensive. She wanted whatever move it made to be swift and disorganized.
“Close now,” Calypso said. “What you want me to do?”
“How close?”
She didn’t dare turn to judge for herself. She only hoped Calypso’s estimate would be accurate.
“One, two, three big steps.”
“Look over the edge and see if you can judge how deep a drop it is. Move slowly, then come right back.”
Thrust, turn, thrust, thrust, spin, eight-pointed star, then repeat the exercise with a small variant. The creature tried to judge her next move while she waited for Calypso’s return.
“Can’t see bottom, Hallie,” Calypso informed her from somewhere near the vicinity of her shoulder.
“Good.”
“Run now?”
“Not yet. When I say.”
Reminding herself to respire evenly, she timed the expiration of each breath, the space in between, like the rhythm of a dance. Think nothing, know everything. Soon…very soon.
“Now, Calypso. Run!”
With a little shriek, laudably contained, Calypso darted away, pale in the twilight, her dancer’s grace carrying her swiftly. The creature turned. Hallie lunged forward, striking first at the beast’s face, then bringing the improvised lathesa down hard on the creature’s snapped leg. As the creature swung back around Hallie darted toward the precipice, hoping she would not misjudge the distance based on Calypso’s description. With pain as well as bloodlust as its impetus, the creature lunged at her. Hallie dropped, rolling, grounding the end of the long branch into the soil and pointing it as close to the moving gravitational center of the beast as she could manage to judge. Despite its unwieldy size, she still hoped to use its weight against it, planning to catch the beast as it dove toward her in the expectation the mass of the undulating body behind would drive it over the cliff.
If not…
“Calypso,” she screamed, as the pliant branch bent, vibrating in her hands, “find Burke!”
And then she spared no more effort on speech, lowering her lids over her eyes in a concentration of power as the branch caught and held in the hard, ridged exoskeleton of the creature’s main body, bending, bending, the huge, stinking shadow of the beast towering over her for one brief and paralyzing instant before being carried by its own weight toward the cliff’s edge.
As the creature plummeted over, the end of its tail, thick as a man’s arm, wrapped around her leg and dragged her down into the soughing darkness with it.
* * *
Running, especially with a clear indication of injury, attracted all manner of predator. Fortunately, they had been of a variety easily fended off, but it had taken time.
“Emil, are you all right?
”
“Could be better,” Emil responded with a grim attempt at humor. Despite himself, Burke smiled. He had never expected from Emil’s demeanor to find the man was a fighter, yet when motivated by the need for self-preservation the man had proven himself more than capable. Still, he was wheezing rather noticeably now that the battle had concluded. Burke couldn’t allow him even a few seconds of recovery. Limping on his injured knee, Burke hurried on, urging Emil to follow.
The swath of damage left by the creature that had descended from above was chilling. Hallie needed him. She needed him now.
Burke wished for sunshine, if only a little, enough from his to see ahead more than a fistful of strides. Or Shane’s eyes. Shane’s eyes would have worked rather well in this murk, but the last thing he wanted was that bastard at his side.
“How did you find us?” Burke asked Emil.
“Could hear you talking. Followed the sound.”
“I thought you had decided against coming.”
“Calypso said we had to. Nearly hysterical suddenly. Damned crazy dancer.”
Despite the content of Emil’s clipped statements, Burke heard an underlying affection beneath the winded delivery. Well, well.
His recognition of that fact was fleeting. “Hallie!” Nothing. He increased his pace. “Grab something to use as a weapon, Emil, and do it quickly. Hallie!”
Abandoning caution despite the risk of drawing more predators, Burke ran in uneven pace along the debris laden trail and headlong into Calypso. He caught her by the arm before she fell.
“Where’s Hallie? Damn it, Calypso, where’s Hallie?”
Hanging from his arm, Calypso gasped for air. “She save me, then go over. Thing drag her over.”
No! “Where?”
Calypso dug her fingers into his sleeve, pulling him in the direction she’d been coming. Shaking her off, Burke hurried ahead.
“Land drop away! Take care!”
Burke sensed the gaping chasm before he saw it, black in the darkness and running perpendicular to his position. From the depths a dank and potently chill wind blew, meeting the clinging warmth of the forest in a curl of fog. At a brief distance he saw what might be the tops of trees stretching up from the depths below, but their appearance was sporadic. Mostly what he saw was nothing.
His heart sank into the pit of his stomach. Dropping to his wounded knee, Burke anchored his arm around a sturdy limb before leaning out over the precipice. The gorge was deep, deeper than he could visually fathom, and black as pitch within roughly three times his height from the lip. He heard only the sighing of the wind.
For several moments he closed his eyes, breathing and thinking. He needed to climb down to search for her, but he couldn’t leave Calypso and Emil up top undefended. No. Actually, he could and he would. It was Hallie who mattered. “Calypso, how did the creature take Hallie over the edge? Deliberately, or was it falling and she went with it?”
The dancer and Emil had come to stand at his back. “Don’t know,” she said. “Couldn’t tell.”
“Stay here. I’m climbing down.”
Calypso made a tiny noise of protest, quickly subdued. From the corner of his eye Burke saw her bend and pick up a branch from the ground. He couldn’t be certain, but it looked like the one Hallie had been carrying. Calypso held it close to her breast, her look determined, her strange eyes glimmering pale and golden in the twilight. Emil stood beside her.
Without another word Burke swung around and lowered himself over the edge.
* * *
Tears of frustration coursed Hallie’s filthy cheeks. Grateful she was alive, that she had managed to survive thanks to the stinking hulk of the creature breaking her fall before it continued to plummet, she had been left hanging across a charred and broken branch. But her strength had left her. She couldn’t even manage to pull herself up the rock face now that she had reached it. Every muscle, every bone in her body hurt, and possibly a portion of that tissue and bone was damaged or broken. Leaning her cheek against the flat, cool surface she rested, her gaze moving over the darkness where tiny beings flew, iridescent and delicate. They were rather beautiful—also probably lethal in some fashion. She expected everything on this planet capable of dealing out death.
Clinging to the cliff, she smelled damp soil and cold hard stone and the green of living things, so different from the scents she remembered. She thought of her old bed, where she’d slept throughout her growing years. Low to the ground, cool and pleasant, it always smelled of freshly laundered fabrics left to dry in the sun. She missed it. She missed her home. She missed the life she had known.
Yet when she tried to envision it now, a life she had looked longingly back on over the last years of her marriage, blissfully absent of Arad in her musings, that childhood bed of comfort and familiarity and safety seemed empty. She did not want to be alone. And premature and baffling as it might seem, she knew exactly who she wanted lying down beside her.
With an angry expletive, Hallie blew away the tendrils of hair clinging to her lip, loosening her fingers long enough to push the flying strands from her face. Tipping her head back, she gazed up in the direction from which she’d fallen. Down here in the darkness the twilight above appeared almost bright.
“Now,” she said to herself, “start moving.”
The sound of her respiration matched the noise of the leaves overhead. Beneath her, the silence was disturbing. Even the wind rushing past her, drying the perspiration on her brow, her neck, came without noise until it passed her to accelerate through the leaves. If anything else was down there with her, moving in her direction or merely watching with eyes accustomed to the blackness, she had no ability to discern them. However, anything living in the chasm could no doubt see as well as hear her. She did not call out for help.
Shrugging her shoulders beneath the pack on her back to ease the tension, she shifted her body about in search of a solid hold for her feet and hands. The pack felt heavier now, but she couldn’t afford to discard it. If she managed to make it to the top and find the others, they would need the supplies inside. Despite the circumstances of her reunion with the pale island dancer, Hallie had not failed to notice Calypso carried nothing with her.
Allowing herself a few more minutes of rest, she contemplated her situation. There were two ways to accomplish what needed to be done. She either had to go carefully, slowly, knowing she would tire far short of the top from the strain and have to rest again clinging in a precarious position, or she must go quickly and carelessly, hoping the impetus of her upward climb would permit her to reach the top before her returning strength gave out. The latter, of course, included the risk of a fall from which she might not recover. The possible loss of life was only a minor consideration, really. The most unnerving aspect was how long she might be falling before she struck bottom. She had not heard any noise to signify at what point the creature that had dragged her over had met its demise.
Or even, she thought suddenly, if it had.
Roused by the image of being stalked again, Hallie began a quick assent, only taking long enough to assure that a hand- or foothold was not going to break away once she entrusted it with her weight. Every muscle screamed in objection and she began to alter her breathing, her concentration, ignoring the ascent and focusing only on each moment, each movement, as if none had come before and none were to follow.
Sweating and trembling, she found she had risen into the level of the leaves, heard them whispering at her back. No, it truly was whispering she heard, wasn’t it? Her name. The sound of her name being called from somewhere. Or was it a trick of her imagination?
She climbed twice her height and paused, listening again. Yes, her name was being called, but in the close atmosphere she couldn’t tell the direction or the distance. But the voice was Burke’s! He shouldn’t be taking the chance of calling her name aloud, but the sound of it had never sounded so welcome. With a sound of her own, half sob, half reply, Hallie hastened her ascent with renewed vigor,
disregarding the pain in her ribs, her legs, her arms.
And then he was there, reaching over the edge for her as her hand lifted toward his. Clamping around her arm, his fingers dug into her flesh as her strength gave out and dragged her up and onto the ground above. She collapsed stomach first onto the humus, panting, blinking away tears. Slowly she struggled to her knees, lifting her head and shoving her tangled, loosened hair from her eyes.
“Well, hello pretty lady.”
Hallie’s blood chilled. Her breath caught in her lungs. Looking into Skelly Shane’s blue eyes, she saw nothing resembling sanity.
III.
JUSTICE WELL SERVED
Hallie stumbled along urged by the pressure of Skelly’s hand tight on the back of her neck. Every time she attempted to speak, he commanded her to shut up while keeping up an irrational conversation with himself.
“Walk at a normal pace,” she hissed at him, “or you’ll attract predators.”
“How do you know that?”
“Burke said—”
And that was exactly the wrong answer.
Picking herself up, Hallie backed away, shaking with anger and pain. “How did you get this far without learning that for yourself? And don’t you dare hit me again, Skelly. You won’t have another chance, I swear it.”
Clutching her battered ribs with one hand while massaging her jaw with the other, she figured he’d call her bluff. She might be able to fend him off for a time, but in her present condition she wasn’t at all sure she could disable him. Even so, she saw a flicker of hesitation in his eyes.
“You left me to die,” he said.
“I didn’t leave you anywhere. If you’re talking about Zebulon, you probably had a better chance of survival there then you do out here. How did you find us—me, anyway?”
“Followed the gambler and the dancer, and they were following you. No one knew I was there. Nothing knew I was there. I walk like a ghost when I choose.”
Emerald Twilight: Bundled Edition Page 12
