But for all that, she could not help staring at the man who stood ten feet away, his face and body hidden by deep shadows, the katana held in his powerful hands.
She stared in uncomprehending shock.
The last thing she said before blood loss and damage dragged her down into the darkness was, “Tom . . . ?”
49
“Y’ALL READY?” ASKED RIOT. SHE WAS CROUCHED BEHIND CHONG, HER fingers lightly touching the barbed head of the arrow.
“No,” he said through clenched teeth. Then a moment later he croaked, “Go ahead.”
“Take hold of that other end, and don’t you let it turn. Otherwise we’ll be doing nothing but reaming the hole.”
“Well,” he said as conversationally as he could, “we wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“Here,” she said, handing him a thick piece of leather strapping she’d cut from her belt, “take this. Put it between your teeth.”
“I don’t need that.”
“Yeah,” she said, “you do.”
Chong took it with great trepidation and placed it between his strong white teeth. Then he reached down and wrapped his fingers around the shaft just below the dark feathers. “O-okay.”
Riot took a deep breath; so did Chong.
“Here goes.”
She gripped the end that protruded from his back, closing her left fist around it; then pinched the flat of the barb between thumb and fingers and . . . turned.
The whole arrow turned. Blood suddenly welled from both sides of the wound, darkening the strips of Chong’s shirt that Riot had used to pack the wound.
The pain was . . . exquisite. It was pain on a level Chong had never imagined before, and in the last month he had been beaten, kicked, stomped, and punched by full-grown bounty hunters. Memories of that other pain lined the shelves in his mind. This pain was on a much higher shelf. It was worse than when he’d gotten shot by the arrow in the first place. When the arrow hit him, the shock of it blunted his nerve endings and slammed his mind and body into a weird kind of traumatic numbness.
That was then, this was now.
He could feel every single nerve ending as the arrow turned despite their grips.
As it turned out, he did indeed need that leather strap. Instead of throwing his mouth wide to scream, he bit down on the pain, and the scream echoed around within his body. He could feel his scream burning through him.
Riot straightened and craned her neck to see how he was holding the arrow.
“Dang it, son, don’t grab the shaft, grab the feathers. You need friction to hold it steady. Hold it tight.” She chuckled and added, “Pretend you’re holding the Lost Girl’s hand.”
Several biting remarks occurred to Chong, but he did not have the breath to speak them. Instead he shifted his hand position, clamped down harder on the leather strap, and waited for her to try again.
She gritted her teeth and channeled her strength into her fingers.
The arrowhead did not turn. The whole shaft shifted inside the tunnel of flesh. The pain was every bit as bad. Chong screamed a muffled scream of torment, sucking in the sound, feeling tears and sweat burst from him. Feeling the heat of fresh blood on his stomach and back.
“It’s stuck like a boot in mud,” growled Riot needlessly. She tried again. And again.
Chong could feel nausea washing around in his stomach, but he did not dare give in to it. If he started vomiting now, it would make everything worse.
“Y’all want me to stop?” asked Riot.
Chong did. He really did. He wanted to tell her that. Maybe beg for her to stop. Stopping was the only sane choice.
“N-no . . . ,” he wheezed, forcing the word past the leather strap.
Riot leaned over and looked at him for a moment, studying his eyes. There was a strange expression on her face that Chong could not interpret. She gave him the smallest of smiles and a tiny nod, then bent back to her work.
Riot tried again. And again. Over and over, and each time it was worse than the time before. Chong wept unashamedly.
Then . . .
“It’s turning!”
Suddenly the pain and the awkward, terrible shifting of the arrow in his body changed. The arrow became almost still except for a faint tremor as the arrowhead turned and turned on its threads.
“Got ’er done!” cried Riot.
Chong closed his eyes and collapsed back, soaked with sweat and exhausted. The arrowhead was one step.
It was the easy step.
There were two more.
Riot got up and ran to the fire. She wrapped a piece of cloth around the knife and removed it from the fire. Three inches of the blade glowed yellow-white. She hurried back to Chong and knelt in front of him.
“Okay,” she said, and Chong could see that she, too, was sweating heavily, “here’s the fun part. I got to pull this puppy out and then cauterize the wounds. Both sides. You’re bleeding, so we got to do it right quick. You ready?”
“Stop asking me that,” he mumbled around the leather strap. “Just do it!”
Riot did something else first.
She quickly bent forward and kissed Chong on the tip of his nose.
“For luck,” she said.
Then she took the arrow in her left hand, took a breath, and pulled.
It came out with a dreadful sucking sound that Chong knew he would never forget. Blood welled hot and red from the wound.
“Bite down,” she ordered, and then she moved in with the white-hot blade.
The pain went off the scale, but still Chong held on. He screamed into the strap and bit the leather so hard he tasted blood in his mouth, but he held on.
And then he caught the smell of his own burning flesh.
That was when he passed out.
50
BENNY CAME DOWN THE HILL AND WATCHED NIX CLIMB. THEN, WITH A sigh and a certain knowledge that this was a bad idea, he took hold of one of the rents in the plastic and began climbing too.
The plastic was strong, and though it swayed with their weight, the climb was easy, and there were enough holes to provide easy purchase for hands and feet. Nix scrambled up ahead of him, nimble as a monkey.
“Slow down,” Benny warned.
“Catch up,” she fired back, and gave him a second’s worth of a smile.
Almost like the old Nix.
Benny scrambled up after her, and they reached the open hatch shoulder-to-shoulder. Very carefully, as if they were peering in through the window of an old abandoned house from which ghosts might peer back, they raised their heads above the deck and looked inside.
There was a lot of debris. Broken fittings and equipment from the plane that must have torn loose during the crash, pieces of shattered pine branches, and last fall’s dried leaves. And bones. Lots of bones. Leg and arm bones, the slender curves of ribs, and part of a skull.
Benny heard Nix’s sharp intake of breath.
“No,” he said in a hushed voice, “I think it’s a monkey.”
“Are you sure?”
Benny climbed the rest of the way up and crouched inside the hatch. He lifted the skull fragment and examined it. “Monkey,” he said with relief, as much to himself as to her.
“Any, um, people bones?”
“No.”
But as Nix climbed in she froze. Benny followed the line of her gaze and saw that there were more bundles of dried flowers and incense bowls. And another sign, the writing small and feminine, painted in red on white wood.
THIS SHRINE SPEAKS TO THE FOLLY OF THE WORLD THAT WAS.
EVEN THEIR STEEL ANGELS FELL FROM GRACE.
TO DISTURB THIS PLACE IS TO INVITE DAMNATION.
They were both quiet for a moment.
Finally Benny said, “Well, that’s comforting.”
Nix said nothing.
They looked around. The hatch opened into a narrow compartment that seemed to divide the airplane into two parts: the cockpit to their left and a huge cargo bay to their right.
Both doors were closed, and there were painted warnings on each, and white wax had been poured over the door handles. Red ribbon had been pressed into the wax.
Nix used her palm to wipe away a film of grime that obscured the message on the cockpit door. It was a single word:
LIES
“That’s interesting,” she said. “Let’s see what’s on the other door.”
She crossed to the cargo bay door and tore away some creeper vines. Again the message was a single word.
DEATH
“Charming,” observed Benny. “Take your pick.”
Nix crossed back to the cockpit door. “This one first.”
“Sure.” Benny bent and examined the seal and found it untouched. “Looks like nobody has been here. Open these doors and that wax will crack right off.”
Nix touched the door to the cockpit. “Open it.”
“You sure this is such a smart idea?”
She made a disgusted sound. “Don’t be such a girl.”
Benny bit back four or five vile and wildly inappropriate comments and reached for the door. The wax seal was thick, and he had to use both hands to turn the metal handle; then with a crack the wax broke apart and the lock clicked open.
Nix, for all her bravado, pushed Benny’s shoulder. “You first.”
51
SAINT JOHN CAME SLOWLY OUT OF THE FOREST AND STOOD AT THE EDGE of the plateau. The crashed steel angel lay where it had died two years ago. The gray wanderers who had been the crew of the plane still hung from their posts.
Everything was as it should be.
He bent and studied the ground, but there was no easy story to read. The top shelf of the plateau was mostly flat rock, baked hard by the sun and unable to take a footprint. The tracks of the two teenagers had petered out a quarter mile back, and now Saint John was unsure if he had come the right way.
He looked up at the open hatch. Had they gone up into the thing?
He smiled and shook his head, dismissing that level of heresy in children so young. They would not remember airplanes anyway—they’d grown up in a world without such machines. Or . . . mostly without them.
He walked to the base of the plastic sheeting and gave it an experimental tug.
It was solid enough, and he debated climbing up, but he dismissed the idea. There was nowhere to go in there, no reason to try. If the children had been real flesh and bone, then they would surely die up there. If they were, as Saint John suspected, merely spiritual beings pretending to be human teenagers, then they would have no need to enter the shrine.
What would be the upshot if he were to go up and look for himself?
Apart from the direct insult to Mother Rose, whose shrine this was, it would surely be viewed as a lack of faith on his part.
These children had tried to tempt him into an act of transgression. A sin. He smiled.
It was a clever trap, but his faith was stronger than his curiosity. His faith was his armor and his sword.
A sound distracted him—the roar as a quad motor started—and he walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down to see which of his reapers was down there.
Saint John froze, his breath catching in his throat.
What he saw was not any of his people.
Instead he saw a big man buckling a girl—another teenager—onto the back of an idling quad. The girl was a complete stranger.
The man, however, was not.
Nor was the monstrous mastiff who stood wide-legged beside the machine, its body clad in chain mail and spikes.
Oh, he certainly knew this man.
This sinner.
This kind of heretic.
He mouthed the man’s name. “Joe.”
Saint John’s hand strayed to the handle of his favorite knife, hidden as it was beneath the folds of his shirt.
And then he understood.
The two teenagers he had followed had manifested on earth only partly to test his faith, and he had passed that test here at the Shrine of the Fallen. But they had a higher purpose, and one that was of great importance to the reapers and their cause.
Saint John now knew where Joe was.
Joe, however, did not know that Saint John of the Knife, the man he had tried to kill so many times, crouched on the edge of a cliff not a hundred feet above where he stood.
Joe knew the secrets of Sanctuary. If those secrets could be wrested from him, then they could be used to destroy Sanctuary. And oh how it needed to be destroyed. Not just for the evil that it represented, but also because of the temptation it offered to the corrupt.
Like Mother Rose.
Saint John knew full well that if his dear Mother Rose were to reach Sanctuary first—reach it and take it—then she would become a great and terrible threat. To him, to the will of God. She would become the dark queen of this world, and if Saint John could not prevent that, then God would turn his back on him and close the pathway to darkness forever.
The key to all of it was the ranger named Joe.
Joe would soon beg to reveal the secrets of Sanctuary. The sinner would tell Saint John everything and anything he wanted to know.
And Saint John would not mind at all if Joe had to scream his answers.
52
LILAH WOKE WITH A START AND IMMEDIATELY GRABBED FOR HER GUN, DREW it, raised it, and pointed it, all in a fraction of a second.
“No,” said the man who sat across from her.
Beside him a monster of a dog growled a deep-chested warning.
“Who are you?”
Before the man could answer, a wave of nausea struck Lilah, and she turned away to throw up.
There was a small pit in the ground already there in case she needed to throw up. Lilah quickly bent over it. The retching and spasming hurt. A lot.
But strangely, not as much as she’d expected it to.
She clutched the pistol, still pointing it in the general direction of the stranger. When her stomach had nothing left, she sagged back and gasped.
“There’s a canteen with clean water and a cloth to wipe your face,” said the man.