The town consisted of the trading post, a few huts in which the gargoyles—the Zathmanians who minded the post—lived, and a smattering of outhouses in which to relieve themselves. There was really little else, besides the random camp set up by desperate miners too ill to hunt.
She’d heard one of the camps was inhabited by a one-legged beggar who, for some unknown reason, hadn’t been put down by housekeeping. Another was supposedly occupied by a blind woman. How she’d been blinded no one could say. How either one of them survived was as much a mystery as anything else.
“It’s quiet,” she said, her fingers hovering over Saint and Satan.
“Too quiet,” Mach said. The low hum that heralded the start of a growl was sounding deep in his chest.
Her stomach clenched as threads of unease floated through her body. Something was wrong. She glanced toward the usually busy post, where no man stirred, no voices raised in argument or song floated through the glassless windows. The door remained solidly closed.
Elder glanced at her. “Arm yourself, sugar.”
He and Mach pulled weapons at the same time, and she hurried to do the same. They’d made it through the fucking reach with no problem, only to find danger in town.
Mach lifted his face, sniffing the air.
“What is it?” she asked.
Mach finally stopped scenting the air and looked first at Elder, then her. “Dry bones.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
Elder’s hand shook on his sword. “Fuck me. Are you sure?”
Mach nodded. His big fists were full of sharp short swords, with more holstered on his body. For one instant, he looked uncertain.
That scared her more than anything.
“That’s why even the reach was quiet,” Elder said, and in his voice was a dreadful understanding that she did not want to hear.
“What the fuck are dry bones?” She meant to sound aggressive and pissed off. The wobble in her voice gave her away. She cleared her throat. “Tell me!”
“You should hide,” Elder said. “Come out when it’s safe. We’ll distract them.”
“Fuck you! You should hide!” She knew she was freaking out but couldn’t seem to stop. They were scaring the shit out of her.
“Dry bones are—”
But before he could explain, a man ran into their field of vision, screaming, sobbing, begging. “No, no! God, no!”
Cin frowned. She saw no pursuers, nothing that would rouse that kind of fear in a man. And he was not a small man.
He stumbled and went down on one knee, started to rise, then bowed his head and stayed put. He mumbled something she couldn’t hear.
“What’s wrong with him?”
Elder put a finger to his lips. “Wait.”
They crept from the edges of the clearing, and she knew instantly these were the dry bones. She frowned, unable at first to process what she was seeing.
“What…”
“Shut up.” Elder’s whisper was barely audible, but she heard it.
But she couldn’t. “Let’s just go back,” she whispered, and began to actually tiptoe backward before Mach’s bruising grip on her arm stopped her.
“Do not move. They will feel it through the ground.”
“But—”
“Stay still, sugar. They—”
Mach hissed at them, and she knew if the danger were not so severe, he might have hit them in his rage. He wanted them quiet.
Terrified, too afraid to look but too afraid not to, she lifted her gaze to the dry bones, and to the poor man kneeling in the dirt.
Zombies. That was her first thought. But even the fictional zombies of her youth were not as frightening, surely, as these monsters.
They had been dead once, she had no doubt. Maybe still were. Bits of clothing and flesh clung to bones, and dried up, shriveled, black organs peeked through the bones on some of them. Some of them were simply, as their name suggested, dry bones.
Skeletons with clacking jaws and empty eye sockets, long yellow teeth, and stiletto fingers.
One of them advanced upon the kneeling man and with one of those fingers, drilled a hole into the man’s head.
He screamed and fell over.
Cin waited for him to die, but he kept screaming. Kept screaming and screaming, hideous sounds she knew she’d not be able to forget for a hell of a long time. If ever.
She couldn’t put her hands over her ears because she held her knives.
The dry bones had surrounded him, and as though it was a game, they destroyed him. They ripped his skin with sharp teeth, stabbed him with long fingers, pulled the flesh from his body as though it were simply clothes he wore.
And still he screamed.
“They don’t…kill,” Elder said. “They torture. When it’s over, he’ll be one of them.” He looked at her, his eyes full of the deepest horror she’d ever seen.
And then she understood. “They live? He’ll live? Like that?”
“With a certain intelligence, at least at first. Eventually, he’ll just be mad. Craving a warm body to eat.” His whispered words just made what he said all the more terrible.
Because yes, they were eating him. Eating him down to the bone.
She leaned over and retched, suddenly so weak with terror she nearly lost her grip on Saint and Satan.
“Most of them came from the earth,” Elder continued, even though by now she wished he would just be quiet, “and they feel the earth. They feel vibrations when someone in the area moves.”
How had she avoided them until now? Maybe there was a secret to that, she didn’t know, didn’t care. She’d rather face the fucking zippers.
“Stand still,” Mach said.
She wanted to scream, wanted to turn and run, wanted to lose herself in an empty field of madness. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t, not because it would mean her death but because the men weren’t. And she would never be less than the men, would never humiliate herself that way.
So she forced herself calm, stood straight, and waited. Mach met her gaze with his own, and she took courage in his icy eyes. He nodded, once, and she grinned.
Saint and Satan vibrated in her hands, eager to be released, eager to find the blood they craved. They wouldn’t be getting any blood from the dry bones, though, and she wasn’t sure what they’d do in their disappointment. Break the bones, maybe. Could the dry bones be destroyed?
The victim finally stopped his horrendous screaming and lay torn and destroyed upon the bloody ground. He didn’t move.
The dry bones finally began to move away, quietly and quickly, the clacking of their bones the only sound.
She held her breath.
The murdered man stirred, then sank with an impossible suddenness into the earth. The spot where he’d been slain bucked and boiled as it sucked him into the ground, until finally, the only proof anything had happened was the scarlet splashes on the rocks and dirt, and the torn remnants of fabric from his clothing.
The dry bones faded into the copse of trees from which they’d first appeared, their movements jerky but fast. Very fast. Had they chased her, she knew they would have caught her. She wouldn’t have been able to outrun them.
“This,” she said, “is why a person would commit suicide instead of having to live here if there was no hope of a paradise.”
Elder looked at her, his face pale, eyes empty. He said nothing.
She holstered Saint and Satan and touched his cheek. “There is paradise, Elder.”
Mach put away his weapons. “To the post.”
“Can wood stop them?” she asked. “If we were inside a building with the door locked, could they get inside?”
Elder answered her. “Depends on how determined they were. We’d have a better shot inside than out.”
“Why didn’t that man run to the post?”
Elder’s laugh was bitter. “Do you honestly believe the Z’s would have opened the doors to save a human and risk themselves?”
The
Zs was an easy way of referring to the Zathmanians, who ran the trading posts for the Gamlogi. She preferred calling them gargoyles. “No. I guess not. But he didn’t even try.”
“Let’s go,” Mach said. “Be watchful.”
She should have known it wasn’t going to be that simple. Perhaps the dry bones had been created by the devil, with blackness and torment and evil mischief the things that kept them going.
When she and the men stepped from their hiding place, watchful but content the dry bones had left the area, they discovered they were wrong.
The dry bones were waiting.
Chapter Twelve
There was no time to think. Her desire to survive kicked in. Her mind crept back from the horror, and her reflexes took over.
She’d known Saint and Satan wouldn’t be able to do a lot with the dry bones, but when she loosed them with a despairing battle cry, they shot from her hands with a determined lust to try.
Maybe because no one who encountered the dry bones had lived to tell the facts, Cin discovered quickly that the term dry bones was something of a misnomer.
The bones looked dry, picked clean of flesh, but they were soft. At least inside. The outside was a shell of brittle bone, but when Elder tossed her a small but deadly ax and she made contact with one of the dry bones, the ax sliced through the bone and stuck briefly on a thick jellied middle.
The two men were seasoned warriors, and though she hadn’t been on Ripindal for long, she had years of mean living behind her. She could use a fucking knife.
She could fight.
Facing away from one another, the three of them fought the dry bones, but it wasn’t like with the zippers. This time, the humans were losing.
She was hurt; the dry bones had struck her several times and had stabbed her with their knifelike fingers. She felt no pain. There was only white noise and adrenaline.
But they were losing.
Mach was yelling, cutting through the dry bones like a madman, using his blades as though they were extensions of his huge, muscled arms.
She caught glimpses of him and of Elder, who fought nearly as well. But even as she watched, he slipped and fell, and the dry bones he’d been holding off fell upon him.
Cin screamed, but there was no time to help him. She couldn’t make the dry bones wait a minute while they regrouped, while she went to care for Elder.
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.
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