The Sanctuary (53 page)

“We don’t have much choice. I’m not going to get the rest of them with the handful of bullets this piece of junk has left in it. And without them, we’re dead anyway. The fire’s going to give out sometime. They’ll just wear us out, it’s what they do. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not too keen on ending up as wolf feed.”

“What do you want to do?” Mia
asked,
her mouth dry with fear.

“Grab two big fire sticks. The biggest you can carry. We’ll head out there, back to back. Take it one step at a time, keep them at bay. If I need to, I’ll use the bullets I have left. If we can get to one of the guns, I think I can take them out. What do you say?”

“Can you make it there?”

Corben wiped the beads of sweat streaming down his face. “Never felt better.” He grinned. “Shall we?”

Mia met his gaze. No matter what he’d done or what his intentions had been, he’d still saved her life more than once, and maybe, just maybe, he was going to do it again.
Which had to count for something.

“Come on,” he blurted, coughing up some blood. “While we’re young,” he
added,
a sardonic glint in his eyes.

Mia bent to the foot of the bonfire and pulled out two large, flaming logs.

She nodded at Corben.

“Lead the way, but stay close,” he told her.

With her back against him, they crab-walked, sideways, inching away from the fire, heading into dark waters, swinging the torches back and forth, surrounding themselves with a ring of protective fire.
Step by step, they edged closer and closer to the spot where one of the villagers had fallen, the image of the man’s dead body getting torn apart by the wolves clawing at their debilitated minds. All around them, the creatures snapped and snarled, lunging and pulling back, running around, their glowing eyes locked on their prey.

In the dim firelight, Corben spotted the shredded carcass of the villager, and, not far from it, the glint of the AK-47’s barrel.

“That way,” he grunted to Mia, adjusting their trajectory, angling towards the weapon of their salvation.

He felt his legs about to give out, but willed them to stay with him a bit longer, and with a Herculean effort, he managed to edge them over to the fallen machine gun.

“Keep them off me while I check it,” he managed, as he reached down and picked up the gun. It felt as if it weighed a ton in his hands. He grunted and winced as he lifted it up, then steadied himself and clicked out its magazine, pushing against the top cartridge with his fingers, checking its load.

“Well?” Mia asked, desperation ringing in her voice.

“We’re good to go,” he shot back, barely able to stand now. He set the selector to semiauto and half-turned to be able to see her face. She was looking at him, her eyes ratcheted wide with nervous anticipation.

“Take this,” he told her, handing her the rifle. “I’ll take down as many as I can, but if they get me, you’ll have to finish them off with this. The safety’s off. Just aim and squeeze, okay?”

She managed a smile. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something, but he knew now was not the time. She knew it too.

The creatures were now in
a frenzy
, sensing the final confrontation and the imminent kill. One of them bunched up its hind legs and pounced at Corben. He squeezed the trigger, and the wolf jerked in midair and fell dead just as the others swarmed in for the kill.

Corben loosed off more rounds, swinging the gun left and right, spitting death at them. His body was running on pure momentum now, each shot resonating across him, pushing him backwards against Mia, his fingers stuck in a death clutch on the gun’s handle and magazine. One after another, the wolves fell, stopped in midair as if hit by an invisible sledgehammer or slamming against a nonexistent glass barrier, toppling on top of each other, littering the ground with fur and bone and blood.

With two remaining wolves snapping at his feet, the firing pin slammed against the empty chamber in a loud clunk. One of the wolves leapt up at him. He spun the wooden stock of the Kalashnikov upwards and batted it off him. It righted itself almost immediately, as if he had swatted it with nothing more than a rolled-up newspaper. Before it could come around for another frontal attack, he’d flicked the machine gun in his hands, gripping it now from its barrel, like an ax, and brought it down heavily on the creature, pounding it once, twice, desperate yelps slicing the still air.

“Jim,” he heard Mia yell, but before he could turn, he was hit from behind by the last surviving wolf. He felt its teeth digging into his neck, its claws carving into his back, and the first wolf recovered, spun on itself, and joined in. The carbine fell from his hands and he saw the earth rise up to meet him as he plummeted to the ground. The pain was surreal, his body getting ripped to pieces from all quarters, but he was already numb to it all, his neurons long exhausted and no longer able to transmit any sensations to his depleted brain. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a gunshot, then another, and another still, and the movement on him stopped, the mauling ceased, and the teeth and claws that had buried themselves in his body froze in place.

He rolled onto his back and felt the light leaving his body. He saw Mia’s vague form grunting as she yanked at the beasts that had been tearing at him, pulling them off him, and then he saw her face looming down at him, studying him with a combination of horror and sadness, tears from her eyes dripping down onto his lips, their salty taste resuscitating the dead cells they were landing on, her soft fingers moving across his face and clearing something off his forehead, her lips moving and saying something he couldn’t quite fathom, a mesmerizing halo of distant stars shimmering around her heavenly face, and he decided it would be a good way to die, better than any he had ever imagined for himself or thought he deserved. He might have managed a smile, but he wasn’t sure of it, as he drank in a final warming sip of the glorious elixir before him before it faded to black and all feeling deserted his pillaged body.

M
ia just sat by Corben’s body for a long while, not moving. Her skin resonated with a shivering that wouldn’t stop, and her eyes stared out into the darkness, avoiding the mounds of dead bodies, man and beast, that littered the ground around her.

Eventually, noticing that the brand she was still clutching was dying out, she rose to her feet and trudged over to the bonfire. She didn’t even bother looking around for more wolves, too weary and bone-tired and drained to care.

Nothing came at her.

With numb hands, she fed the fire again,
then
shrank down, her back to the tree Corben had been leaning against, and cupped her face with her hands.

Dawn was far off. She’d lost all notion of time, but she knew she had a long night ahead of her. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was going to stay there, riveted to that spot, until someone—or something—came and plucked her off it.

A lone, distant howl broke the stillness.

It wasn’t answered.

The creature sounded mournful, as if lamenting the great loss of life, the monsoon of death that had drenched the parched soil of the mountain.

And then she saw them.

Distant lights, flickering in and out from behind trees, a slow convoy snaking its way towards her.

She strained to get a clearer picture of who, or what, they were, but they were far off. They would disappear behind a ridge,
then
reappear a few minutes later, slightly closer. Gradually, they made their way to her, traveling in silence, a muted procession. When they finally came into view, she saw that there were several of them, on horseback, half a dozen or more perhaps, holding up flaming torches and oil lanterns.

She didn’t recognize any of them. She didn’t think they were from Nerva Zhori—she’d met a lot of the villagers in the commotion after the helicopter had exploded—then she saw the familiar face of the mokhtar as he climbed off his horse and approached her with a weary smile and a blanket.

He draped it over and led her to a waiting horse, the others watching her every move in respectful, if intrigued, silence.

T
he fireplace crackled in the small but comfortable room as Thérésia stared out the window. A light dusting of snow was falling on the trees outside, the flakes twinkling in the suffused moonlight as they glided to a gentle rest.

She knew he wouldn’t be coming back.

She’d known it at the quayside in
Lisbon
, almost two decades earlier.

Had it been that long ago?

Her face relaxed into a bittersweet smile at the memories floating through her mind.

Thérésia hadn’t wanted Sebastian to leave, but she knew he had to. Those years in Lisbon had been the happiest, the most fulfilling of her long life—living with him, traveling in his company, learning with him, and, of course, raising their young son together. She had never wanted it to end, she desperately wanted him to stay or take her and Miguel with him, but she realized it wasn’t possible. He had to follow his destiny, and she had to keep their son safe.

His leaving
her,
and her move across the ocean, had—as he’d promised—brought her peace. No one had bothered her or Miguel—Michael now—since they’d settled in
Philadelphia
. The City of
Brotherly Love
had lived up to its name. The last few years had been turbulent—revolutions usually are—but, mercifully, she and Michael had survived the turmoil and with the Treaty of Paris now signed, it looked as if the worst was well behind them.

How long she would live to enjoy the peace, though, was a question now haranguing her. The small, hard lumps that had appeared under her arms and in her left breast were troubling her. She had prided herself on her independence and her fitness throughout the troubled times of the conflict and was certainly as fit as a sixty-year-old widow—that small lie had readily been accepted upon her arrival in the
new city
—could be. But since discovering the lumps, she felt
a tiredness
in her bones when she woke up every morning, a shortness of breath, a heaviness in her head that accosted her in worrying waves. She knew that the blood that had, in the last week, appeared when she coughed was a bad augur.

She didn’t have much time left.

She wondered how Sebastian was keeping. She imagined he was drinking the distillation again and smiled inwardly at the thought that he would be little changed from how she remembered him. She caught a glimpse of her own, wrinkled face reflected back at her in the thin glass of the window and willed him to success. What a wonderful gift it would be.
A most worthy of quests…even if it did cost her the love of her life and cost Michael his father.

She saw her son appear at the gate and make his way into the house. He had grown into a fine young man and had performed admirably during the troubles, working alongside his mother at liaising with the French envoys
who
were assisting the revolutionary effort against the British. His diplomatic and organizational talents were evident, and throughout the conflict she had imagined great things in his future, in his adopted homeland. But with each passing day, he also reminded her more and more of Sebastian. She could see it in his eyes, in his stance, even in small things such as the way he held a quill. And as the boy grew into the man, she knew she couldn’t ignore his unique provenance.

She also couldn’t ignore his father’s legacy.

She had promised Sebastian she would never tell the boy what had led his father to leave them. Sebastian had made her promise it to him, and, at the time, she saw the sense in it. He wanted his son to have a normal life. He didn’t want him to have his life ambushed by an oath he had himself made. It was his burden to bear, not his son’s.

It was a promise she could no longer keep.

She owed it to Sebastian.
To his memory and to his legacy.
If he was going to die away from her, alone, in a foreign land, she had to try to ensure that his death wouldn’t be in vain.

Deep down, she knew he would have wanted her to.

“Mother?”

She heard Michael take off his boots and make his way to join her in the sitting room. She turned to him, the pain in her limbs receding at the sight of his radiant face. She saw the quizzical expression on his face at the sight of her and saw his eyes drop lower to the ancient, leatherbound book with the strange circular symbol tooled into its cover that she held to her chest.

“I have something to tell you,” she told him as she invited him to join her.

M
ia stirred in the narrow bed. Beams of dusty sunlight bathed the room around her. Still weary and foggy-brained, she pushed herself up to her elbows and looked around. Plain, hand-finished walls, simple oak furniture, and lace curtains greeted her in hushed silence.