She gnawed the last shreds of flesh from the backbone of her last baked trout and then sucked on the bone for any trace of juice or flavor. She'd never thought that unsalted, unbuttered, half-raw, half-burned smoky fish could taste so good she'd hoard the bones.
Unless some others lurked inside the black mouth of the overflow cave, that was it. Even so, five trout were probably too many for a pool this size. She shook her head with amazement that she could catch the ones she did.
It was wonderful what a little patience could do for her. She just moved slowly, like she was no threat at all, and slipped her hand up behind the fish and snagged it by its tail. Then she gutted and cleaned the trophy with her Swiss army knife and stuck it over the fire of driftwood the stream had washed into the sinkhole.
She was burning the last of that, too, except a few chunks too rotten to even smolder, and she was lucky non-smoking Maureen had carried a Bic lighter in her coat pocket along with the useless .38. Otherwise Jo would've been eating raw fish and shivering.
Or she would have been dead of hypothermia days ago.
She flexed her left arm for the thousandth time and made a face at the lingering ache right under what passed for muscle in her forearm. It was time to try the wall again.
A seasoned rock-climber would laugh at her and walk out like a fly, she knew. Probably take two minutes, max. Those idiots could stick to hand- and footholds you couldn't even see, stick to coarse sandpaper glued on overhanging rock. She'd seen it on TV.
However, she was a city girl. Her idea of climbing was the escalator up to Casual Corner out at the mall. And as far as bodybuilding was concerned, her version of pumping iron involved bedsprings.
At least she didn't need a bath. A zillion falls into the pool took care of that. Her hairdo was shot to hell, though, and she couldn't guess where to find the nearest electric outlet and blow-dryer.
Sore arm or no, logic told her to climb now. Then there would still be some coals and scraps of wood to warm her up after she fell in the pool again. She shoved the gun, the knife, and the life-saving Bic lighter into a pocket and zipped it tight. If she did make the top, it was damn sure she wasn't coming back for anything.
Climb now. If she didn't make it out today, she never would.
This time she tried the other side of her prison, working on the pig-headed theory that if it looked worse for climbing, it really must be better. She'd done a lot of things like that in her life. She'd gotten away with most of them--so far.
The first part was easy. The first part was always easy, just clamber up some loose rock fallen from the walls above as the water ate the limestone.
"Just don't be under the particular part that wants to fall today," she muttered. "You're known for being thick-headed, but that ain't good enough."
Those TV rock climbers used helmets as well as ropes. She ran a tentative finger over the hot raw lump above her right eye, the track of a chunk of sinkhole that had turned into a portable handhold.
She looked down. Just like every time before, the hole gave her eight or ten feet for free, high enough to really drive her ankles up her nose if she fell. What she saw wasn't pretty: one reason she'd avoided this side was that the pile of rock stretched further out. The pool sat off-center; if she fell now, she'd splatter instead of splashing.
She looked up. No fun there, either--the wall overhung her head maybe four feet, five feet in the distance up to the shadow-cut rim. She'd have to hang from her tattered fingernails. She reminded herself that she was the girl who couldn't do a single pull-up in high school gym. Thin was in.
But she thought it might be better to bash out her brains on the rocks than starve to death. This was talking about thin like a sub-Sahara refugee camp, bones sticking out and dry crinkly hair and skin like a banjo head and bug-eyed alien faces. Not pretty. Not chic.
She saw a ledge, big enough to stand on or even sit, up above her head. That's what she needed to keep her muscles working, some place she could slack off and relax. Half of her exhaustion came from tensing up, from her own muscles clenching against each other. Shit, last time her jaw had ached worse than her legs after the climb, from gritting her teeth.
She could fit a boot into that rough spot, wrap her hand around the gritty, chalky knob of stone over there, shift weight onto them and lift the other foot a few inches, rather than trying to swallow the whole elephant in one gulp. She'd gotten herself into trouble just last night, stretching for a foothold about half an inch too high.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on friction, dragging her boot up the rock-face to search for a little nubbin just big enough for the edge of her sole. Her free hand groped blindly into a faint scratch in the stone, a line like the scoring of a cat's claw where the water had flowed and etched the lime away. It ran vertically and she pulled sideways against it, moving the first hand higher.
"Breathe, Cynthia Josephine," she muttered. "Always remember to breathe. It's useful."
Keeping her eyes closed helped. She couldn't see a damned thing, anyway, the stone was so close she had to go cross-eyed to focus on it, nose rubbing its tip raw against the dirty chalk that leaned out as if it wanted to French kiss her right tonsil. Maybe she could use that for support.
Her right hand found another crack and she risked jamming her fist into it rather than wasting the energy of a finger hold. She groped around with the left, banging up against a dangling root and following it back to the lumpy base of a shrub, then clamped on like she planned to strangle the bastard.
Her boot toe snagged on a lump of limestone, going up, then hunted around for the top of it coming down again. Gotcha, you mother. Her other foot inched up, found a hairline ledge and twisted sideways to stick by sheer inertia. She shifted weight from point to point gradually, never committing to any hold before she tested it, just moving one thing at a time. It was a dance, a vertical tango with her bod spread all over her gritty lover. Get to the top, and it would be orgasm time.
She ought to find that ledge any move now, that wide place in the road that would look like downtown Boston in comparison with the microscopic holds she'd been using. Her right hand relaxed and backed out of the crack, fingertips exploring for her lover's hot-spots in the dark. There was the swell of the ledge. She turned her head sideways to look up for the best approach.
The movement pushed her body out from the rock, maybe half an inch. Her left hand jerked and pebbles rattled down the cliff. Jo plastered herself against the stone again, holding on by body-friction and feeling the coarse surface against cheek, breasts, belly, hips. It flowed past her, grain by scratching grain, and then her boots popped loose from the wall and she was falling again.
Her head snapped forward, and she looked into a surrealist parachute ride, the tumbled boulders floating up to her like bubbles in a scuba movie. "Don't land on that one," the image said. "It's sharp and unstable."
Suddenly she felt like a flying squirrel gliding sideways to hit the one over there--it was solid and smooth and firmly rooted. She planted both boots just so, broke her fall with bent knees, threw her weight back just so, and kicked out into a back flip that carried her into the soft cradle of the pool again.
The cold water smacked her in a belly-flop that burned from her toes right up to her forehead. She snorted water and gasped, flailing her way to the edge of the pool and crawling over moss-slick rock to lie dripping and panting at the bottom of the hole again.
Right under the frigging waterfall. That was appropriate. The land showed its amusement by pissing on her head.
Back to square one. She didn't even have enough breath to do a decent job of cussing.
She also didn't have a clue about what she'd just done. That dreamlike sense of flying couldn't have been real. But it had saved her ass again. She reminded herself to quit asking questions. She might not like the answers.
Something tangled with her left hand. The fucking bush. She still had her latest portable handhold, about four feet of scrub, dripping wet and b
leeding clear red sap from its mangled roots. No wonder she couldn't swim worth a damn.
It was probably poison ivy. She didn't know what that looked like, but it would just fit right in. She tossed it on the remains of her fire and glared at it. Traitor bastard plant.
Water sizzled from the coals of her fire, and the bush sparked into flame. She blinked at the apparition. It shouldn't burn. It was green and soaking wet. It steamed and spat and smoked like a smoldering rag-pile, but it burned. Maybe it was her hatred burning.
She crouched over its heat, stripped off Maureen's jacket, and gave three cheers for modern synthetics. If it had been goose down, it would have cost twice as much and turned into a sodden worthless mess when it got soaked. Polyester fiber didn't absorb water, and it had held enough air to act as a lifejacket when she first fell into the sinkhole, hurt and stunned.
She wrung out the water in streaming sheets, stripped off her sweater and did the same, then the boots and socks, then the pants. Shivering, she danced naked around the fire to warm up, cussing the world in general.
"You would be the sister."
Her head jerked up with shock at the voice. A thin shadow moved against the sky and her first thought was, I'm saved!
Her second thought was, That's a man's voice. She blushed and grabbed her pants and shoved legs into cold wet denim. Yecch. Ditto for the clammy top. At least her embarrassment would help to steam the water out. Literal em-bare-ass-ment, she giggled to herself. Soaking wet, her sheer underwear gave about as much cover as Saran wrap. Well, a free show was a cheap enough price for a rope out of this hole.
Minimally decent, she looked up again. All she could see was a silhouette, dark against the afternoon sky, hands casually in its pockets. Watching.
Her ears burned again. "Do you have a rope?"
She sat on a rock and squeezed water from each sock, again, before putting them on, and then squished her feet into the sodden boots. The silence hung a little too long for comfort.
"Oh, I could probably conjure one up. I think my sister left me that much power."
The shadow didn't move. Jo felt the hair on the back of her neck start to prickle. What the hell was wrong with the schmuck? This smelled like one of Maureen's paranoid psycho daydreams, enemies all around.
"Look, I fell in here and can't get out. I'd really like some help."
"It looked to me like you were doing fine: a little flying, burning wet wood with a glance, that sort of thing. Why don't you witch your way out?"
"Left my broom back at the gingerbread house," she muttered. Then she raised her voice again. "A rope would be a lot easier."
The shadow shrugged, and a coiled snake flipped down, splashing in tangles across the water and rock. She stared down at salvation, lying at her feet. Jo relaxed for an instant before she realized something was wrong.
Both ends of the rope had come down. Bastard had thrown the whole thing. Hadn't held on to one end, hadn't tied it off or looped it around a tree or anything.
Her teeth chattered for an instant, and it wasn't just the wet clothing. First dragons, then Skull Alley, finally Norman Bates with a rope: this version of Never-Never Land really sucked. It really was one of Maureen's nightmares.
"Why don't you want to help me?" Her voice came out like a whimper. She couldn't help it.
The shadow shook its head and laughed. "Around here, help is never free. Nothing is ever free. What's in it for me? What are you going to give me, in return?"
Men, she thought. Ninety percent of them think with their balls. Like Momma always said, they only want one thing. 'Course, a lot of women think with their gonads, too. I've been known to do that.
It depended on what he looked like. She was past her fertile days for another month, and she'd promised herself an orgasm at the top of the climb. If he was ugly or smelled bad, she had Maureen's gun.
"What do you want?" she yelled up.
A bitter laugh drifted down. "My sister's head."
Jeezum!
Norman Bates, indeed. Jo shuddered. Fairy tales were like that, she remembered, the real ones that Disney hadn't tidied up for the kiddies. Blood and irrational hate and rape and incest and extremely dysfunctional families.
"I've got nothing against your sister!"
"Oh, don't you?" He chuckled. "Fiona's the one who lured Maureen here and gave her to Dougal for a brood-mare; she's the one who wove a spell to bed brother Brian and gave your handsome young David as a blood sacrifice to the land. I'd think you'd have plenty against darling Fiona. More than enough to help me."
Her blood froze. "David! What's he doing here?"
"Dying, my beautiful drowned rat. Dying, inch by inch, as the strangling python of thorns sucks his blood, his breath, his very soul out of his body and spreads them through the land. Dougal wanted to bring springtime back to his corner of the Summer Country, so Fiona gave him an innocent to kill."
"Oh, God," she gasped. She collapsed on the wet rocks, face in her hands. "David." The worst of it was, she knew that bastard was telling the truth. She could feel it through the rocks.
And then rage took her. Steam rose from her jeans and sweater as her chill vanished. If Fiona could drag David into this, she damn well could drag David back out again. This mocking shadow could have his sister's head, just as long as Jo could ask the bitch a few questions first, perhaps with the emphasis of twisting her guts out of her belly and strangling her with them.
"Get me out of here," she snarled.
The laugh floated down again, harsh as fingernails on a chalkboard. "Maybe I don't want to. Dougal has Maureen to gloat over, naked and starving in his deepest, darkest dungeon. Darling Fiona holds Brian in the palm of her hand, or perhaps between her thighs would be a better choice of words. All I have is you. Maybe I'll leave you down there and watch you die."
"I'll help you kill your sister."
"Ah, can you now? I wonder. Do you have the power? If I have to help you out, how much use can you be to me?"
{Jo, don't trust him!}
David's voice whispered in her head, bringing all the threads of her anger and suspicion and fear together.
That slim shadow, where had she . . .
"I saw you! You were kissing Maureen in front of the store!"
The shadow bowed.
"You bastard, you helped your sister do all this!"
He bowed again. "I've decided to change sides, my dear. My bitch twin stabbed me in the back once too often." He paused and chuckled. "The question is, are you strong enough to be worth the trouble? Prove yourself by getting out of there, and we'll be allies."
Cold clarity flooded through her. Maureen's gun nestled comfortably in her hands. "If I don't need you, the real question is, will I let you live?"
Mocking laughter floated out of the silhouette. "I can't help you kill Fiona if you shoot me. Besides, that thing won't work. This is a land of magic, not of chemistry and physics. Go ahead and try."
She hadn't drawn the gun, hadn't consciously unzipped the pocket and reached in and pulled it out and aimed it. Just, suddenly it was there, steady in both hands, sights notched on the heart of the shadow overhead.
"Then," she snarled, "think of this as magic. Instead of gunpowder, these bullets hold rage and hate and are capped with the poison of betrayal. This isn't a gun, it is the Spirit of Death. Your death."
She squeezed the trigger, smoothly, steadily, just like against the black man-shapes on the target range.
The gun bucked soundlessly in her hand. She brought the sights back in time to see the shadow stagger, and squeezed again, and the sights jumped away again with the same recoil she had felt practicing on the range, silently.
The rim of the sinkhole hung there, empty against the glare of the sky, and she lowered the gun. Mechanically, she flipped the cylinder open and dumped two empty cartridges into her hand. They stank of rotting meat instead of the sweet headachy perfume of burned gunpowder. She slid two fresh rounds out of the speed-loader and into the cylind
er, and snapped it shut.
A slight rustling overhead brought the gun back up. Jo squinted the sights against a lump on the sinkhole rim and found an arm dangling over the edge, out of the light and into shadow where she could see details. The fingers slowly clenched into a fist and then relaxed.
The gun burned like cold fire in her hands. She stared at one palm and then the other. Red prints matched the line of the metal on her flesh, the frame between the wooden grips across her palms and fingers, a negative and reversed Smith & Wesson logo printed on one thumb. The marks ached like frostbite.
She felt empty, as if the rage had burned through her and hollowed out her guts. She'd killed a man. What had it gained her? She was still down in this frigging hole! David and Maureen and Brian were still in deadly danger.
That man up there might have been a Grade A Bastard, but he was still the only person who knew where she was. Why didn't she just shoot herself, instead?
"Rope," she reminded herself, aloud. "Now I have a rope." What could she do with rope that she couldn't do before? It was time to quit weeping like a baby and pull her head out of her stupid ass. She stowed the pistol and re-zipped its pocket, and sat down to study the rocks and trees overhead.
More Maureen-thoughts crossed her mind. It was too damn bad that bastard didn't fall into the sinkhole when he died, the paranoid voice whispered. I could have eaten him.
{Jo.}
David's voice touched her mind again. The shock of it dulled her ears, and she ignored the faint rustle as the hanging hand clenched and relaxed again.
Chapter Twenty
The teal arrowed in from green marshlands and across the pasture, wings blurred by its speed. High above, a shadow paused and dropped like an avenging angel. Fast as the duck flew, the falcon dove faster. The teal sensed death reaching out with icy fingers, and it dodged frantically for the trees and safety.
The Summer Country Page 21