Toby’s whole face clouded over. “That evil old git? That old drunk? You like him?”
His words stung. Her first impulse was to tell him he was wrong, that he didn’t know Quinn at all. Quinn had saved both their lives. But then Toby’s attention was drawn away from her. The subject of their conversation was heading down the beach toward them, carrying his javelin and unbuttoning his shirt, ready to fish for more traveling food before they moved on. He watched them both, looking churlish.
Sasha started swimming for shore.
Quinn tossed the chemise to her. “I have fish to catch, if you two wouldn’t mind.” He glared at Toby, the hostility in his eyes burning brighter than the sun overhead. “You two would best be getting back to the cave. You’ll only disturb my fishing.”
Sasha ducked under the water to slip into her chemise and to give Toby the privacy he needed to get to shore and dress. When she finally popped back to the surface, Toby was halfway up the beach, dressed and carrying his boots, and Quinn was watching her reproachfully. She felt like a small child that had been caught doing something wrong as she climbed from the shallows to gather the rest of her clothing up.
Quinn scrutinized her carefully up and down but said nothing. She was happy not to receive another verbal scolding from him—after all, he’d laid no claim upon her and it wasn’t fair. She picked up her shoes and hurried back to the cave, and it wasn’t until she was halfway up the beach that she realized the water had made her chemise diaphanous.
CHAPTER 9
John had left no more cave notes; Sasha made sure by exploring the inside of every cave they came upon. She did find primitive, worn pictures on the walls in some of them, mostly simplistic men chasing and hunting simplistic animals. That worried her some. She knew from the periodicals she’d read that something with humanlike creativity had painted them. That meant humans might live here—or some form of human, anyway. She thought about Neanderthal men, huge, hulking creatures almost more beast than man. Neanderthal were expert hunters. They wouldn’t stand a chance if they encountered one.
Sasha kept her concerns to herself as they migrated down the coast. There was no reason to worry Quinn and Toby, after all. The cave drawings had looked faded. They could have been years or decades old, made by a people who had long since moved on to other territories. Only if she saw additional signs of habitation would she warn them.
She was also afraid to add more fuel to the fire already burning a half-mile high between them all. They had been friends once—or, if not friends, exactly, then at least allies. Now they were all angry with each other. Toby was angry with her since their swim; she knew his pride was hurt, and probably his heart. Quinn was angry with her since seeing the two of them together. And, of course, Toby and Quinn disliked each other immensely. She’d never realized until now how much. They ambled along with their respective packs carried over their shoulders and javelins in hand, occasionally talking to her, but never to each other, and any task they were forced to do as a team became a competition.
It was sad, a hardship, but Sasha endured it. When the men became overbearing, she spent most of her time talking to Newton on her shoulder or trying to spot Dotty along the coast. Since leaving the secluded little lagoon, Dotty had followed them. Sasha picked the big juicy pro-gooseberries wherever she could, both for Newton and in the hopes of luring Dotty to shore. At least they weren’t angry with her!
There were fewer dinosaurs along the coast. There was little vegetation for them to eat, and most of the heavier animals were too afraid of the sinking sands to draw near. For that, Sasha was grateful. The first day of their trek, they saw some Rhamphorhynchus gliding overhead and diving for fish, that was all. On the second day, they encountered a herd of young Iguanodon on the beach, scratching for sea kelp that had washed ashore. Sasha stopped to observe the tall, bipedal herbivores, trying to memorize everything about them.
Some years back, two life-sized reproductions of Iguanodon had been built at the Crystal Palace in London. Sasha had gone to see them twice. But now she saw how inaccurate the statues really were. The creatures had been depicted as elephant-like quadrupeds, their thick, horny thumb spikes reassigned as nose horns. She watched them feed, and since she had no notepaper, sadly, she tried to memorize everything about them in the event they ever made it back to London. Eventually Quinn urged her to move on. He didn’t touch her, only said, “The tide is moving in. We should be moving along.” Which, in Quinn-speak, meant that the larger sea predators would be swimming closer to shore. Already she was able to spot their huge sail-like dorsal fins on the horizons, and a part of her started to worry about Dotty all over again. Immediately after they moved on, the young Iguanodon had the same idea and started moving inland.
As they trekked onward, Sasha no longer described the habits of the dinosaurs they encountered as she had in the past. Since none of them was speaking to each other, it seemed a pointless venture. Each of them had their assigned tasks; each concentrated on that. Quinn was their hunter, fisherman and tracker. Toby prepared their shelter, tended their fires, scaled or skinned the prey that Quinn caught, or did any manual labor that Quinn wasn’t strong enough to do. Sasha’s job was to prepare the food, monitor their supplies, refill their waterskins, and play lookout anytime the men were to be exposed to the environment for any length of time. Newton helped her stay alert for danger, chittering excitedly if anything dangerous drew near. Even Dotty did her part. Sasha had learned that when Dotty breached, it meant the waters were clear of predators. If she couldn’t find Dotty anywhere on the sea’s horizon, it meant she’d dived to avoid a confrontation with something larger or hungrier than herself.
But the silence and tension weighed on them all.
On the third day, Sasha woke from a sound, exhausted sleep and sat up in the early, predawn hours of the morning, looking about the cave they had chosen for their nightly camp. Even though Quinn was still cross with her, he continued to cover her each and every night with his frock coat, always after she’d fallen asleep—presumably so she could not protest. It was almost a ritual now. The frock coat was more holes than substance; in no time, there would be no coat left at all. She stood up and restlessly moved to the entrance of the cave. She listened intently for a repeat of the noise that had stirred her, but it didn’t come. Was it She’s call that she’d heard in her sleep? Sasha couldn’t be sure. Maybe Quinn was right; She was just an animal. There was no way her little primordial brain could have developed a vendetta against them.
Taking a deep breath to steel herself, she stepped outside the cave. She was still damp from her swim the evening before, her hair hanging in heavy saturated ropes around her shoulders. Quinn sat on the beach just outside the cave, a small bonfire burning fitfully beside him. Maybe he too had heard something and couldn’t sleep. He was designing a primitive bow and a number of homemade quivers. They weren’t perfectly straight quivers, but they were functionally close, and each tipped with a diamond-hard piece of flint. She knew he was making them as a more effective way to hunt and fish. He was very practical that way.
Sasha knelt down beside him and picked up the heavy Bowie knife with the ivory handle that he’d been using to carve the quivers. She fingered her long, wet, cumbersome hair. “I should cut it,” she said. It was too long, always windblown and full of debris from their daylong treks. When she swam, it took forever to dry, and when it finally did, she had no way to untangle it. It was snarling up on her.
“Don’t. Let me,” said Quinn, setting his half-finished bow aside. He gathered the fullness of her hair up in his hands, and it was almost more than he could handle. Sasha waited patiently while he divided her hair into small sections and finger combed it, then began braiding each tiny piece. It took a long time, but it felt very good to feel his fingers working through her bothersome locks, to feel his warm touch on her again.
“What are you doing?” she asked after a time.
His voice tickled the back of her neck, raising goose
bumps. “All across the African continent you’ll find women who wear their hair in cornrow braids. It keeps the hair neat in otherwise rough and primitive conditions. Often, beads or small cowry shells are woven into the hair, but I’m afraid we don’t have those available.”
Sasha laughed, couldn’t help herself. “How did you learn to style women’s hair, Quinn?”
“Gabrielle wore her hair that way during the summer months. She…” he stopped speaking as if he suddenly realized what he’d said.
Gabrielle. His woman back in Africa. The woman he’d planned to return to since breaking off their engagement. Gabrielle was one of the reasons she had refused to take any direct orders from Quinn. If Quinn’s heart belonged to the mysterious and probably very beautiful Gabrielle, then he had no claim on her and she had no obligation to obey him. She fell silent and let him work on braiding her hair while trying very hard not to hate Gabrielle completely. She imagined Gabrielle was tall and bold and curvy—everything that Sasha was not. Why else would Quinn reject Sasha as a suitable wife? The thought made her angrier than ever.
She glanced down at herself. She was nineteen, almost twenty years old, and yet she still looked like an underdeveloped child. She had never given it much thought until now. But, really, how could Quinn ever love someone like her? The thought was ridiculous. Her eyes were welling up with unwelcomed tears by the time Quinn declared her done, her hair bound up in all these beautiful tiny braids. She was trying to be brave, to be everything Quinn wanted, and here she was, ready to cry and run away. She turned to face him and the braids spilled over her shoulders. “Quinn, am I pretty?” she asked, trying not to let the worry show in her voice.
Quinn’s eyes halved as he considered her. “Very.” He ran his hands along the sides of her head, smoothing the braiding there. “You look like an African princess, my dear.”
She felt her heart lift. She looked directly into Quinn’s pale azure eyes. In the near dark they were full of the flames of the fire. Fire and ice, she thought. She thought about kissing him then, but the trumpeting noise that she both dreaded and yet somehow expected rang out in the feral night like a clarion bell, making them both jump. The sound seemed to vibrate in the air between them and Sasha found herself shuddering in its aftermath. “It’s She,” she said.
“It can’t be She,” Quinn answered angrily as he struggled to see past the firelight. “There is no way she can cross this beach. The sand is much too soft.”
“She’s out there, Quinn, somewhere beyond the beach.” In the dark, Sasha’s hearing was almost painfully acute, and she knew that sound. “She’s following us. She’s waiting…” She had to struggle to find the words. Her heart was beating so rapidly in her chest that it hurt. “She’s waiting for us to go further inland, and...”
She didn’t say the rest, that She would hunt them down and consume them all in retribution for what they had done to her mate. She waited for Quinn to protest, to call her a fool, but he stood up instead and grabbed his javelin. “Go back inside. I’ll bank the fire.” He didn’t say what she thought, what they both knew to be true. The creature knew the light of the fire meant they were close at hand. She knew they could hear her. She knew they were afraid.
She was stalking them, haunting them, terrorizing them. Waiting for her chance to strike.
CHAPTER 10
In the morning, Quinn developed the brilliant idea of hunting She.
“But don’t you see that’s what she wants, what she’s counting on?” Sasha gestured wildly and—she feared—Ineffectively at the open plains beyond the beach. She looked to Toby for support, but he was hunched down on the beach, putting his pack together, and he refused to meet her eyes or offer any kind of assistance. “She wants us on the plains, Quinn. That way, we’re in her territory.”
“Precisely,” he said.
“You’ve gone completely mad!”
He gave her a veiled look as he adjusted the pack on his back. “You remember how we trapped the male by luring him onto the beach with carrion. This is the same principal. Except, in this case, I won’t be using carrion, since our friend seems to be a bit smarter than her mate.”
She just stared at him. “You’re going to use yourself to lure She down to the beach and try and trap her?”
“By my estimation, She is nearly twice the weight of her mate. That means she’s likely to sink twice as fast.”
“She’s also likely to run twice as fast.”
“There’s a risk in anything we do to capture her.” Quinn fingered his javelin. “At least our theory about the beach is workable. We’ve tested it and found it to be true.”
He could be so bloody arrogant! “But why do we have to capture her at all?”
Quinn looked surprised, like she ought to know the answer to that question. “You said yourself she’s hunting us. I say we turn the table.” He glanced at the sun, his only timepiece now that his pocket watch was long gone. “It’ll likely take me a day to track her, and another to lay some kind of ambush. So I’ll be back around this time in approximately two days.”
If he came back at all.
He gave her a falsely cheery smile, looked her over in her ragged dress and braids like he’d like to eat her, and stalked off, trekking across the sands of the beach. Sasha waited exactly five minutes before grabbing up her own pack. Newton jumped to her shoulder, and together they followed Quinn’s footsteps.
Five minutes later, she’d caught up to him.
Quinn looked over and frowned. “What are you doing?”
“Helping you to capture She.” She was carrying a new javelin she herself had made. She showed it off by jabbing at the open air. She was very proud of it.
“I don’t need your help, Sasha.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Yes. You do.”
They stopped and faced each other in the sand like adversaries. Between them raced a small bipedal dinosaur the size of a dog, chasing a giant dragonfly. It disappeared over the next ridge.
Quinn stared at her ferociously. “Sasha, I command you to go back immediately!”
“Quinn,” she stated simply, refusing to wither under his look. “Who is Gabrielle?”
He looked taken aback by her change of subject. For some time, she knew not how long, they simply stood there, glaring at each other.
Finally, Quinn frowned. “That is not your concern…” he began, but she immediately cut him off.
“Is she the woman you mean to marry?” She would not be put off. They’d stand here all night if need be until she had the answers she needed.
He looked stunned. It wasn’t the expression she had expected to see. She saw a deeply buried hurt leaking into his very blue eyes. “Oh Sasha,” he said at last. “Gabrielle was my first wife. She died in Africa fifteen years ago, during an outbreak of Malaria.” He hesitated, and his eyes turned inward. His face twisted for a moment, painfully. “Along with our son Percy.” He closed his eyes, seemed to armor himself mentally against the past, then continued. “They both died within days of one another. Gabrielle was only a little older than you. Percy was two years old at the time.”
She was dumbfounded. “But you said you were going back to Africa to see Gabrielle.”
“Gabrielle and Percy are buried in Africa, Sasha, on my estate. I go back there every few years to see them, to be with them.” He hesitated as if he’d said something very foolish. “I enjoy being near them and talking to Gabrielle. They loved Africa almost as much as I did. I suppose you think I’m a fool. An eccentric.”
Sasha felt her shoulders slump. All the fight went out of her with Quinn’s statement. “My mother is buried on our estate. I visit her mausoleum all the time. I even bring flowers.” She hesitated. She had to try very hard to remember her mother after all these years. “My Papa says I remind him of her. She was very willful, he said, always getting in trouble. She died when I was very young so I never had a chance to find out if that was true.” She
stopped and smiled. She took another deep breath. “Your son was only two years old?”
He looked whimsical for once; it was a very odd expression for Quinn to wear. “When I see Gabrielle’s grave, I always talk about Percy, about how he might have lived, the man he might have become. He would be seventeen years old this year, almost a man.” He stopped and stared at the sand at his feet and seemed to consider. “He might have been planning for marriage, or continuing his studies at university. Perhaps it isn’t healthy, but I can’t help but wonder.” He looked up, his eyes sincere. “I think about Percy all the time.”
“I’m sorry, Quinn.” It was all she could think to say.
“You are, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course.” She jabbed the javelin into the ground between them and boldly took a step toward him until mere inches separated them. She reached out and brushed her fingers against his scratchy cheek. He closed his eyes to her touch. “When my father originally planned for your arrival, he told me you were perfect for me, that I ought to give you a chance. I didn’t believe him, of course. I thought you an evil old git.”
Planet of Dinosaurs, The Complete Collection (Includes Planet of Dinosaurs, Sea of Serpents, & Valley of Dragons) Page 13