Authors: Melissa Marr
Jack nodded. “And the monks?”
“At least three of them were here. Not with Ajani, but I doubt that it is coincidence that the monks are here when he is. I would go with you, but”—the bloedzuiger eased closer to the shadows of the building—“I doubt you want to wait until sunfall.”
“You’ve already done more than enough.” Jack tipped his head in a bow of sorts and then rejoined the others, who were watching the street.
“Well?” Katherine asked.
“Keep alert. Monks
and
Ajani.”
“Monks?” Chloe asked.
“Yes. They’re demon summoners, not always the best shots, but great with spells.” Katherine’s words were dispassionate, but Jack was sure that everyone there, aside from Chloe, knew that she was looking for a few kills. She was surly on the best of days when magic users were involved, but she was worse when one of their own had died because of them.
“Demons, monks, and . . . what’s an Ajani?” Chloe looked from Jack to Katherine and back.
Jack knew he’d have to explain, but he wasn’t ready to do so. He had the brief urge to send Chloe and Katherine back to camp. If he thought his sister would go—or would’ve stayed—he would’ve done just that. “Ajani’s just a man. A person just like us.”
“We’re
nothing
like that cocksucker,” Katherine snarled. “None of us are.”
“Right. A bad man. Got it.” The expression on Chloe’s face was as resolute as Katherine’s was. Both women had guns at the ready, and Jack realized that there was no way either one of them would’ve listened to his order that they stay hidden away somewhere safe. He struggled sometimes with the notion that many women weren’t as willing to be tucked away safely as he’d like. Apparently, they weren’t even cooperative about staying out of trouble in the world he’d known back home so many years ago.
Hector tossed one of his knives in the air like a juggler as he walked. Francis looked more relaxed, but Jack had long suspected that he’d had more exposure to mind-altering substances than the rest of the team combined. Jack was confident of their combined abilities. Hector was skilled enough to fight in his sleep; Edgar was steadfast with or without Verrot; and Melody took an unnerving amount of glee in a kill.
“Let’s hunt, then,” Melody said.
And Jack didn’t have the heart to try to correct her. He’d like to say it was anything other than a hunt, that they weren’t out for blood, but he tried not to lie any more than was necessary. They wanted the monks dead both because of the threat they represented and because of Mary’s death. As for Ajani . . . Jack had wanted his head on a pike for years. Attempts at goodwill had only forestalled the inevitable, and if Ajani really was behind Mary’s death, the time for patience was past. There
had
to be a way to kill him, and they were going to find it.
G
allows wasn’t like anything Chloe could’ve imagined. After walking through a desert where the cacti were somewhere between familiar and slightly off, she expected the town to be the same. The town, however, was a shade beyond unexpected. Squat buildings that looked like they were made of mud and stick stood next to taller, narrow buildings that were made of brick. There was little wood, and even less metal.
At the outskirts of town, the roads weren’t much more than pathways where the sand and dirt were tamped down by too many feet, but as they walked farther into the town, the paths were covered by a red grass of some sort. It looked a bit like the grasses that grew at the edge of a marsh at home, long thin strips with pointed tips, but in a shade of red that was reminiscent of cardinals. The splash of color would look odd in the desert, but with the pinkish brick of the buildings, the effect was almost garish. The layers upon layers of plants seemed to keep the fine dust of sand from being quite as pervasive, but decreasing the grit in one area was nowhere near enough to make a difference. Chloe’s whole body was coated by a layer of sand, and when she swallowed, she could taste a slight salty flavor from the minerals in the sand that drifted through the breeze.
Her companions looked like they could blend in here. Jack and Kitty were both in battered trousers, nondescript shirts, and worn jackets. Hector and Francis looked much the same. It was only Edgar, with his stiff black shirt and black trousers, and Melody, who stood out a bit. Melody was the most unusual of the group. She had on what would look more fitting on a PTA mother or cubicle worker: a knee-length, sand-colored skirt and a powder-blue blouse with a white stone necklace that was reminiscent of pearls. Her hair was combed into some sort of almost formal-looking twist, and she appeared to have located some sort of pale blue eye shadow. In all, she looked almost sweet, if not for the holster on her hips and the fact that she was walking down the street with a shotgun in her hands humming a happy little song. Back at home, Melody could’ve been the office manager from hell; here, she appeared to be a woman clinging to whatever era she’d once known while still adapting to the weird world that was the Wasteland.
“Monk. Left. Got him.” Melody fired almost simultaneously with her words. The blast of the shotgun seemed uncommonly loud in the quiet of the streets.
Chloe stared at the shotgun-toting woman for a moment and then at the dead monk in the street. She’d seen dead cyns earlier, but this was a person
.
The memory of the last dead man she’d seen threatened to surface, but she shoved it away and concentrated on the
now
.
“A little more warning, Melly.” Hector shook his head.
“He saw us.” Melody shrugged as she spoke, but she had a slightly mad look in her eyes. Chloe wasn’t sure if it was from the Verrot or if it was Melody’s natural response to guns, but she wasn’t too inclined to ask. No one other than Hector openly criticized Melody, although Francis gave her a wary look.
If the monk had accomplices, they weren’t anywhere in sight. Hector walked over and squatted beside the remains. He looked back at Jack, shook his head once to convey that the monk was dead, and then began searching the corpse.
That, more than the shooting, made Chloe look away. Shooting a known enemy before he could attack you made sense to her, but corpse robbing was on her list of unacceptable acts.
Francis noticed her reaction and stepped up beside her. He said quietly, “Hector’s checking for clues. Jack doesn’t stand for theft.”
Chloe smiled at Francis in gratitude. He, meanwhile, seemed to be on babysit-Chloe detail. She couldn’t really blame him. She wasn’t sure what to do to help, and the rest of them seemed to have slipped into the kind of group behavior that spoke of habit.
She didn’t know enough about any of them to have a real way to gauge their characters, but she instinctively trusted both Kitty and Francis. Hector and Melody made her uneasy, and the jury was still out on Jack and Edgar. Even if she didn’t trust them, though, it wasn’t like she had a list of other options. She’d woken up in a strange world with nothing but the clothes she’d been wearing. She had no skills she knew of so far that were marketable—other than being a fair shot. A degree in sociology, a hodgepodge of menial jobs, and knowledge of book and television trivia weren’t much of a résumé here from what she could see. Hell, she wasn’t even sure the locals needed résumés. So far, she’d only seen bloedzuigers, cynanthropes, and a dead monk. None of that predisposed her to thinking there were a whole lot of golden opportunities on her horizon if she left the group who’d found her in the desert.
Hector and Melody were talking in low tones beside the corpse. Jack, Kitty, and Edgar were scanning the area. They all looked like they were hyperalert, either because of the Verrot or the situation—or most likely both.
A few of the locals who were out of doors gave the group a wide berth, but no one seemed to be particularly alarmed by them—or by the corpse now bleeding on the red reeds on the street. Maybe death in the streets of Gallows wasn’t all that unusual, or maybe the Arrivals weren’t the only ones who had issues with demon-summoning monks. Chloe wasn’t sure. What she did take comfort in, however, was the way the group was regarded. The local people—who looked mostly or entirely human in several cases—didn’t look at them like they were villainous. A number of the Wastelanders were all looking in the same direction, though, and it wasn’t at them. Chloe followed their gazes to see a pale blue mass about eye level, but at some distance away.
“Hey, Francis, what’s that?” She pointed.
He glanced in the direction she’d pointed and called out, “Blight.”
The mass was getting closer, and as it did, Chloe realized that it was a swarm of tiny pale blue insects winging their way. They were so close together that as they’d flown they’d given the illusion of a larger solid object. She’d think the insects were a beautiful surprise, except for the fact that the few Wastelanders in the street rushed indoors en masse. Doors slammed. Shutters were yanked closed.
“So . . . not good?” she asked.
“Not for natives,” Francis replied. “We’re mostly safe, though.”
Mostly
wasn’t particularly comforting, but the rest of the group didn’t look too alarmed. Kitty frowned, and Melody lifted her shotgun again. She cracked the barrel and slid in two shells, although Chloe thought that using a shotgun against bugs seemed a bit like overkill.
“Do they sting? Bite? What?”
“Stay behind me, and get moving,” Francis answered.
A man stumbled out of a narrow lane between two taller buildings, and the swarm surged toward him. As their group backed away, Chloe found that she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the sight of these delicate, winged things covering the man so completely that he was soon a whirring blur of soft blue. Instead of the scream she expected, she heard manic laughter.
“Come on.” Jack had her arm and was pulling her toward a door. He pounded on it with a fist and called, “Let a few of us in, or no one will tend to the swarm.”
A few moments passed before the door opened, and Jack pushed her into a tiny shop. A quick look at the shelves revealed that it was a fabric store or possibly a tailor’s shop. Kitty, Edgar, and Hector came inside too. Francis, apparently, was still outside with Melody.
“Stay in here.” Jack looked at his sister as he said this, and then at Edgar, who nodded once in assent.
“This will work better than yours.” Kitty held out a long-barreled gun, not quite a shotgun but longer than any pistol Chloe had ever seen before arriving in the Wasteland.
“Thanks.” Jack took it and pulled open the door to leave. As he did so, at least a dozen of the winged things rushed inside the shop and separated, flitting around the shop in a chaotic pattern as if the bright colors of the fabrics were confusing to them.
He shoved the door closed again, not latched but closed enough that no more insects could slip inside the building.
The very tall woman Chloe assumed was the proprietress and the four other people inside all let out sounds of distress and scurried around in a chaos as frenetic as the insects’. Chloe wasn’t sure if they were seeking weapons or shelter or both.
“Go,” Kitty ordered her brother. “We’ve got these.”
Jack nodded, yanked the door open, and hurriedly left.
A couple more insects flew inside.
The Wastelanders were now scrambling to unfurl swaths of fabric. They tugged down bolts of cloth in their panic. One woman had the presence of mind to help another, and together they draped a patterned, heavy fabric over themselves and dropped to the floor. A squat man crawled under a display after yanking the bolts out and tossing them aside.
Hector threw one of his knives at an insect that had touched down atop a bundle of bright pink cloth, killing it neatly. As Edgar walked to the back of the shop, he plucked the knife out and tossed it back to Hector. At almost the same time, Edgar swatted a bug out of the air with the barrel of his gun and then promptly squashed it with his boot. It was the most peculiar use of a gun that Chloe had ever seen.
Kitty and Hector moved so they were on either side of Chloe in opposite corners. Both had knives drawn. Neither looked at her, but Hector instructed, “They won’t kill us, but they sting like nothing you’ve ever felt at home.”
“And make you insensible,” Kitty added.
“Great.” Chloe looked around for a weapon. Spying a shovel that looked like it was used for scooping ash from the currently unlit fireplace, she snatched it and held it like a baseball bat. She might not be able to hit an insect with a gun barrel, but she could hit one with a shovel.
As she watched for insects, she asked, “Why are the Wastelanders hiding if the Blight isn’t fatal?”
“The Stinging Blight can be fatal for
us,
” replied one of the two women under the patterned fabric.
“Or cause madness,” added another fabric-covered Wastelander.
“She’s never seen the Blight. New to the desert,” Kitty said.
Chloe wasn’t sure why Kitty was implying that she wasn’t new to the whole Wasteland, but she wasn’t going to ask here and now. She stared around the shop. Hector nailed another insect. Edgar and Kitty had both thrown knives, and he’d already retrieved her knife and thrown it back to her. Chloe was starting to feel like she was of no use when an insect flew toward Kitty. It was directly in front of her, and she’d already launched both of her knives.
“Kit!” Edgar had lifted his knife but couldn’t throw it without hitting her too.
Chloe stretched to the left and thwacked the insect with her shovel, hitting it in a downward motion and then stomping on it. The movement felt a little like a cross between volleyball and baseball.
“Thank you,” Kitty said as she went forward to grab her knives.
They found a sort of rhythm after that. Chloe got the ones they couldn’t kill with knives—those that were too close to the bystanders under their cloth shelters or too close to the Arrivals.
Finally, Hector announced, “There’s only one left.”
“You counted?” Kitty leaned against the wall, knife held idly in her hand.
He tossed one of his knives up like he was juggling a ball not a weapon. He caught the knife before answering, “Of course.”