Dark Paradise (12 page)

Saint and Satan began cutting the dry bones off at the knee and hip, slicing through the bone, causing jellied splatters to mix with the human blood and cover the area.

“Elder!” she screamed and buried her ax between the hollow eyes of a dry bones. She felt a stabbing in her side and a hard, strange push in her back and knew she’d been hit yet again.

She would not let them turn her into one of them. She would not. She’d kill herself first and hope that was enough to save her.

In that second, when she put the ax to her own throat and readied herself for death, she was taken down. They knocked her to the ground, and the greedy dry bones went in for the kill.

She couldn’t think of Mach then, still fighting the demons, or of Elder whom she’d seen moments ago beneath a pile of dry bones. All she cared about, in that second, was herself.

The world slowed. Every sound was suddenly magnified, and every movement came in excruciating, leisurely motion.

Then the dry bones began to move off her. Not just move off her but
explode
off her. She saw blurs of movement and realized help had come; somehow, help had come. Their saviors were moving fast, tossing dry bones like sticks, hurling them through the air, giving the humans a reprieve.

Unable to believe what was happening, she managed to pull herself to her knees, looking desperately for Elder.

He lay not ten feet from her in a puddle of blood, unmoving.

Mach still stood, still fought, but he was a mass of wounds, his huge, dear arms hanging with shreds of torn flesh, bathed in blood.

She groaned and couldn’t move. Couldn’t rise to fight, couldn’t even crawl to Elder. Her body was numb, and she knew that was a good thing.

The tossed dry bones simply came back.

One of the blurs paused, bent down, and looked her in the eye.

“Get up,” Elif said, and hauled Cin to her feet. “Fight.”

“I can’t.” Her hair fell over her eyes, and she sobbed, unashamed. “I can’t.”

“All you have to do is survive until the moon rises. They will go back to the ground then.”

Elif’s words penetrated her fuzzy brain, and she looked up into the sky. It was growing dark. The moon was coming.

“You’re sure?” she asked. But there was no time for Elif to answer. One minute she was there, and the next she was just…gone.

The other blurs seemed stronger than little Elif. She could make out no features, barely got a sense they were there. They were just swirling, whirling clouds of motion. Lifesaving motion.

She would fight. She had no weapon; the ax had disappeared. But still, she would fight.

Scooping a jagged rock from the ground, she clenched her teeth and smashed it into a dry bones’s hideous, leering face, rage and terror giving her strength.

The moon appeared like a specter of death, its light somehow ominous, as though it knew what was happening below and meant to stop it.

Seconds before, twilight had ruled the world, but the moon appeared with a quick intensity Cin had never seen before.

And the dry bones stopped. Just stopped. They clattered to the ground, and the earth began to swallow them, much as it had their victim earlier.

She didn’t take time to watch. Panting, sobbing, filled with emotions she couldn’t even identify, she ran to Elder.

Mach was already there, gathering up the fallen man, his face like stone.

She fell to her knees beside them. “Is he…”

“He lives,” Mach murmured. “Not for long.”

She reached a shaky hand to touch Elder’s bloody face. “Elder. Please…” She hooked a desperate gaze on Mach’s hard face. “What can we do?”

“You know,” he said.

And suddenly she did. “
Paradise
.” She got up and stumbled through the clearing, searching for her bag. The blurs had gone, and she hadn’t even noticed. Gone as suddenly as they’d arrived.

She found her bag, and then realized Saint and Satan hadn’t come back to her. Horrified, she called for them. “Saint! Satan! To me!”

She didn’t really think they’d come. She was sure they were buried beneath the earth, stuck in the bone of a creature she’d never heard of.

But they did come. A lot slower and a little duller, they came. She kissed them, polishing their silver blades with her tears, then pushed them into their beds to sleep.

Her precious shrube, she held out to Mach. “Take it. Take it and go. Get him to paradise.”

“You’re hurt.” He still knelt on the ground, Elder held in his arms.

She shook her head. “I’ll be okay. Go save his life.” She held his gaze for a moment longer, then leaned forward to kiss Elder’s cold cheek. “Tell him…”

Mach said nothing, simply watched her and waited.

“Tell him I’ll see him again,” she whispered.

He nodded and rose, grimacing. Mach was hurt too, but somehow she knew he would be okay. So would she. But Elder, she wasn’t sure about.

She hooked Mach’s bag over his shoulder and tucked the extra shrube inside. Who would have thought her one lousy shrube would help save a man’s life?

“Cin,” Mach said.

She wiped her eyes, trying hard not to beg him to stay. She didn’t want to be alone here. She didn’t want to lose the men. “What?”

He leaned toward her and kissed her mouth, a hard, lingering kiss. At last, he pulled away. “Go to the mountains.”

She nodded and pressed her fist against her lips when a ragged sob escaped. There was no time for her to be selfish, to wish for things that could not be. “Good-bye,” she whispered and turned away. She couldn’t watch him leave.

Those who’d been in the trading post when the trouble started were standing in front of it, watching them. She counted twelve men and two women. The gargoyles hadn’t left the building. “Fucking assholes,” she screamed. “You could’ve helped!”

They simply watched, quiet. No one made a move to help her, to comfort her, to talk to her. She hated them all.

“I just wanted to have sex and gather items,” she whispered. She wiped blood from her cheek and stared at it for a long moment, and then the day caught up with her.

Every injury she’d been given roared suddenly to life, and she doubled over, gasping. “Ow.”

Finally one of the women stepped from the crowd and stood beside her. She put her arm around Cin’s shaking shoulders and tugged her toward the post. “Come on, honey. Let’s get you looked at.”

Cin resisted. First she had to know, and she couldn’t bear to look. “Have they gone? My men?”

The woman, older than Cin by perhaps fifteen years, blew her frizzy hair from her eyes and threw a glance back over her shoulder. “They’re gone, honey.”

Cin started nodding and couldn’t stop. “Gone, then. That’s good. That’s really good.” She burst into loud sobs and let the frizzy-haired woman lead her away.

Chapter Thirteen

She let them bandage her up and feed her, then traded her items for supplies and headed west toward the mountains.

Her wounds were bad, but she wasn’t inclined to spend the night with Shell, the frizzy-haired woman. Shell wanted more than Cin was willing to give. Despite her need for comfort, she wasn’t going to find it in the arms of Shell.

So she did exactly what she’d promised Mach she’d do and headed for the mountains. She’d find her shrube, and she’d join Mach and Elder in paradise. If Elder lived.

She shook the thought away. He did live. He had to. Paradise was not for the dead. She’d think of them there as she journeyed to the mountains, picture them on a hot, safe beach, where they stared at blue waves and drank cold fruity drinks with little umbrellas in the glasses.

Or maybe it was cold in paradise. Maybe snow blanketed the ground and clung to the naked limbs of skinny trees, and they had feasts and music and snuggled together under piles of blankets.

In paradise there were no zippers or dry bones. Maybe paradise was like her world, except there were no governments who sold their people to aliens.

She was alone. Funny how she hadn’t known how bad it was to be alone before. She’d preferred it. But now she knew what she’d been missing.

It took her twelve days to reach the mountains. With her injuries, she had to rest often, and because of the fresh horror of the dry bones, creatures she still didn’t understand, during the first couple of days she was only willing to walk at night. When the moon lit the sky, she walked. Those early days were spent high in a tree with Saint and Satan and her bag, sleeping as best she could.

She didn’t think the dry bones could climb.

Shell had told her the dry bones were only rarely seen. A person might never see one, or have the misfortune to cross their paths just once in his or her time on Ripindal. Ripindal was huge, and the dry bones were wanderers. Still, that fact didn’t reassure her. Not then. It was too soon.

Some days she found a cabin in which to sleep, and those were the days she thought she understood the one-legged man and the blind woman. They’d found places they felt reasonably safe and didn’t want to leave. She had to force herself from the huts on those days.

She wanted to lie down and give up. She wanted to lie down and nurse her wounds and cry, but she didn’t. There was only one way to be with her men again, and that was by gathering the fucking shrube. And that’s what she’d do. That was her purpose.

On the twelfth day, she stood at the base of the mountains, wondering if she had the strength to climb them. They rose before her like a vast mirage, blue and smoky and sharp, filled with mysteries and treasure and life.

She took a deep breath, sick of her sadness. It wasn’t going to bring them back. Walking around all morose and gloomy wasn’t going to get her to them any quicker.

“Get a grip, crazy lady. The shrube await.” She forced herself to laugh. Not because she found anything amusing, but because laughing just made a girl feel better. And she’d be damned if she was going to waste any more time feeling sorry for herself.

She stood there holding her stomach and laughing, and eventually the laughter became real. And when she finally wiped her tears and started up the mountain, she
did
feel better.

As soon as she stepped on mountain soil, the search began. Treasures were everywhere, one just had to look. But the main thing she wanted was the shrube, and she set about looking for them with a grim determination.

She would share her bag space with only extra edibles like certain greens and mushrooms and a few of the potatoes she found when she dug into the dirt.

Some kind soul had stuck crude signs into the hill at various intervals, guiding miners toward water. It wasn’t often a person found such signs of kindness on Ripindal, and she paused to run her fingers gently over the face of the weathered sign. She knelt down before it and carved
Thank you
then
Cin was here
into the old wood.

Images of the dry bones still intruded, but she shrugged them away, unwilling to be prisoner to some fucking skeletons she’d only seen once in all her time on Ripindal.

Fuck ’em.

“Hey.”

Startled, she jumped to her feet, knife held before her.

Elif sat on the low limb of a nearby tree, swinging her legs, munching an apple.

“You scared the piss out of me,” Cin told her and thrust the knife back into her belt.

Elif nodded. “I saw that. You’re too jumpy.”

“I have reason to be. Are you following me?”

“Maybe you’re following me.”

Disgusted, Cin tightened the straps on her bag. “I have to work.”

“You’re welcome.”

Cin stopped walking, and sighing, turned back to the urchin in the tree. “I’m sorry. Thank you for…” She gestured.

“Saving your life?”

“For helping save my life. Yes. Thank you. Please thank your people for me.”

“I will.”

Cin tilted her head, curiosity getting the better of her. “What are you, exactly?”

Elif picked the seeds from her apple core, pocketed them, then jumped to the ground. “I’m a Weechin. Otherwise known as a tourbillion, a vortex, a whirlwind…”

She showed some of her eerie speed as one moment she stood at the base of the tree and the next she stood in front of Cin, holding her palm out. In it sat another apple.

“Show off,” Cin said and took the proffered apple.

“Your people are gone. You should have listened to me.”

Cin felt a quick spurt of anger. “
You
should have been clearer.”

Elif shrugged. “I gave you the warning. You didn’t listen. Not my fault.”

“So why did you help us? And why are you here now?”

“Searching. As always.”

“Oh. For shrube.”

Elif cocked an eyebrow. “No. Shrube are for the humans. We have no wish to leave here. The Gamlogi wouldn’t take us even if we did.”

“What are you searching for?”

“Reefer.”

Cin paused with the apple halfway to her mouth. “Pardon?”

Elif giggled. “Humans call it reefer, weed, pot… We like reefer.”

“Why?” Cin began walking again. The girl could follow if she liked. There was no time to stand around talking about getting high. She needed to find shrube and get the hell away from Ripindal.

“We trade it to the Z’s. They treasure it above all else.”

“What? Why did I not know this?”

Again, Elif cocked an eyebrow. “There are many things you don’t know.”

“Well, if you’re going to hang around, perhaps you could—”

But before she could blink, the girl was gone.

“Dammit. I wish she’d stop doing that.” It occurred to her that if Elif hadn’t wanted to be caught back in the reach, Cin wouldn’t have caught her. The kid really had been trying, for some reason, to help.

Feeling less alone and chuckling occasionally at the thought of a stoned gargoyle, she went to work with a vengeance. Few treasures went into her bag, but armed with new knowledge, she did cram in some marijuana when she came across it.

Elif was like her own personal guardian angel. Kinda sorta.

Mach and Elder never left her thoughts. Their absence left a hole inside her, one she couldn’t fill with work or food or exhaustion. But at least mining gave her a purpose, a light at the end of the tunnel. At the end of that tunnel, Mach and Elder would be waiting.