62
I hear the hiss of an arrow and the clang of an arrow tip striking Kovac’s Cheetah leg. Another hiss and the terrible thunk of an arrow plunging deep in the back of his thigh above the prosthetic. More terrible sounds of impact as arrows strike his shoulders.
Kovac pitches forward, reaching wildly, and I catch him in my arms. But he is a ton of bricks, especially when set in sudden motion, and the two of us crash to the forest floor in a thicket of boxwoods.
“Stay down,” he urges through clenched teeth.
“You stay down. Don’t leap up and dance the rumba when the poison sends you into happy hour.”
“I only want to dance with you,” he says with a groan.
I watch with a thudding heart as Kovac cants onto his side, and a desperate thought strikes me. Will the sadistic one-two punch of the demon drugs conspire to relieve his phantom limb syndrome? Temporarily, maybe? Could he turn the opiate-stimulant mix to his advantage?
I examine the arrow thrusting out of his thigh, the thicket in his shoulders. I swallow the bile rising in my throat. “You want me to, ah, try to pull them out?”
“No,” Kovac breathes. “Remember the boy? Tips tear a nasty exit wound. Blood loss worse than the arrows, at least at first.” He spasms, then steadies himself. He touches my cheek. “Do not pull them out, Abby. I don’t want to bleed to death.”
“Whatever you say.” I part the boxwoods and peer in the direction of the arrows. What a surprise. Alastor straddles his chimera on the other side of the gully, smirking and pulling another arrow from his quiver.
His glittering black eyes lock with mine. His power pins me in the underbrush, hypnotizing me. His silky baritone rumbles out of my tattoo, chanting incantations of madness. You will gladly let me love you. You will gladly let me kill you.
No! I press my hand of power to my Eye and my Cross, summoning humanity’s most powerful magic–light and reason. I add a healthy dose of rage to the spell. “Whatever did I see in a monster like you?”
“Stubborn little woman,” he calls out. “I would have cherished you as my Queen of the High Harvest.”
“For one night. Then you’d steal my power, my life, and my soul.”
“One night with Prince Alastor is worth your power, your life, and your soul.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, sir.”
“Abby, stop.” Kovac seizes my shoulder and pulls me down into the boxwoods. I’ve sat up, exposing us as a target. “He’s baiting you. We’ve got to go.”
My heart thuds. “Go how?”
“Crawl. Stay down.”
“Can you crawl on those knees?”
“I can do just about anything when your life and mine depend on it.”
We start crawling, and I hear hoof-clops pounding right behind us. I glance back and glimpse Alastor’s chimera leaping across the gully. Alastor rakes his golden spurs across the dead beast’s flanks, ripping off strips of dead flesh.
I yank Kovac to his feet. “No time for crawling!”
We run, we run, weaving this way, weaving that. We pause, breathless, behind the pillar of a tree trunk thick with slimy gray moss.
Where is Alastor?
Now behind us, now in front of us. Now to the left, now to the right. Dizzying glimpses of Alastor’s smirking face appear and disappear.
Then I can’t see him at all. But I can see through the canopy. And there they are, the star and the obelisk. Much closer.
Alastor calls my name, unexpectedly to the left, and I glimpse the chimera galloping toward me. The demon nocks an arrow, drawing his bowstring taut.
I hear the twang, the deadly hiss. I twist away to the right, but I’m too late. Too late! An arrow plunges deep in the muscular calf of my right leg, and pain pierces me, sharper and crueler than any pain I’ve ever felt.
A scream surges out of my throat.
“Abby, hush!” Kovac seizes my shoulders and shakes me, uttering other words. But the power of his voice magic is distant and indistinct, his words muffled. He pulls me down into the underbrush again, and we lie together on our sides, close, clinging, face to face. He wraps his arms around me and pulls me tightly into the protection of his power.
I press my palms against his chest, not daring to reach around his shoulders. I’m shivering from the shock. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Listen to me,” Kovac whispers in my ear. “Maybe the poisons will work for you.”
“What?”
“One anesthetizes, the other stimulates. That’s what he wants. For you to feel that you’ve got power, given to you by him and his poisons.”
“I had the same thought about you, Jack, and your phantom. . . .syndrome.” I can’t bring myself to say it. “Is the opiate relieving your pain?”
He shakes his head, his mouth a grim line. “Feels like my syndrome is blocking both the poisons. There’s the usual pain. And then some.”
“Where’s a good poison when you need one?” I shake my head hard, hoping to clear my thoughts. The sight of the shaft bobbing in my flesh, blood trickling down my shin sends another wave of nausea shuddering through me. “Don’t pull the arrow out?”
“Do not.”
Preternatural stillness falls over the woods. No sight, no sound of Alastor.
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.” Kovac presses his cool, smooth hand on my forehead and cheeks the way Mama used to do, checking me for a fever when I was a child. “You’re going to be all right.”
The sensation of Kovac’s caring, the evocation of my mother’s caring long ago, touch me so deeply, I could weep. But an insidious ecstasy opens up in me like a poisonous flower blooming in fast-motion photography, its seductive petals pulling apart with freakish swiftness.
The poison in the arrow tips fuels the fumes’ intoxication, and both poisons mingle with the alien power throbbing in my tattoo. The three malignant magics fire a cannon-shot of dizzying enchantment.
Do I want to jump and shout? Sing and dance? Run to Alastor and give myself to him, body, invisible body, and soul?
I want to do all those things and more.
Instead I cleave to Kovac, absorbing his human magic. He holds me in his arms powerfully, a protective circle of heat. In a moment, my unnaturally racing pulse calms down.
“Feel better?” he whispers. His lips brush my cheek.
“Yes. Much better.”
“Let’s try one more run for it. You up for it?”
“I’m up for anything. What’s a little demon arrow?”
We struggle to our feet and stand, wary and watchful. Kovac slings his arm around my shoulders, I grasp his waist, and we set off again, darting through the woods, turning this way and that, pausing, panting, listening. The canopy closes thickly above us and I can’t see star or obelisk through the hissing leaves.
I abruptly stop, drawing Kovac to a stop. “I can’t find the right way, Jack. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Let’s just move forward.”
“We’ve turned around too many times. We could be heading in the wrong direction.”
“Trust your intuition.”
I look at him. “Really?”
“I trust you, my lady magician. Trust yourself.”
I touch my throat with my hand of power, and my chakram glows with a faint blue beam, barely lighting up the woods. Thicket and underbrush give way ahead to a brooding darkness. An emptiness more vast and impenetrable than the nocturnal murk around us.
I can’t tell what it is, this vast darkness.
********
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