Elf Saga: Bloodlines (Part 1: Curse of the Jaguar) (4 page)

Ten whole minutes? Poor baby!

“And in the end, they said that when I wanted
to fly again, I would have to go down there and get the ship out
myself,” Rajani says. “And the funny thing is, in all this time,
I’ve never really wanted to fly, so I never bothered to go get it.
I mean, I’ve visited a bunch of countries with my moms, and I just
really like being here, so I figured, why bother? You know?”

I narrow my eyes at her. “So where is your
ship now, exactly?”

“The, uh, ravine.” She bites her lip again.
“I kind of crashed it in the worst possible place. A few feet to
the left and it would be in a field, but instead, it’s basically in
a big black chasm, underground, in the dark, where there’s probably
a whole nest of dragons and kareens, and other scary things.”

“Of course it is.” I sit and stare at the
wall for a minute. “Why is nothing ever easy?”

“Lots of things are easy, silly.” She starts
counting on her fingers. “Sleeping, eating, singing, dancing,
hugging, kissing, masturbating…”

“Buh buh buh!” I cut her off. “Boundaries.
Don’t you have a filter between your brain and your mouth?”

“Sorry.” She grins and blushes. “I guess
not.”

I stare at her for a moment. Well, I’ve come
this far, haven’t I? “Okay. How far is it to this ravine?”

She nods to the west wall. “It’s about a ten
minute walk that way.”

I nod at her. “Well, Rajani, what say you and
I go get that ship of yours?”

She bites her lip. “When? Right now? But what
about the dragons?”

I flex my hands. Whatever her little faerie
friends did to me, I feel great. Solid, strong. If I’m going to do
something stupid, now would be the time. “I can handle a few cave
dragons. Come on.”

Fifteen minutes later we’re standing on a
windswept slope of a lovely green, grassy hillside and gazing down
into a big black scar in the ground. It looks like the world was
just ripped open by some angry giant, and then left that way, all
exposed rock and earth and roots. The sunlight only goes down part
way before the angle of the shadows swallows up the bottom.

“Spiffy.” I start down into the ravine,
finding good footholds everywhere, some of hard stone, some of
springy roots. “Seems safe enough. Come on, Raj.”

“Uhm. Okay.” She takes two steps down, slips,
and falls squarely on my back, where she hangs like a clumsy
toddler. “Oof! Sorry! Uh, heads up?”

“Yeah, got it. Just hang on to me. I’ll do
the climbing.” The added weight isn’t too bad.

“Are you sure?” She locks her arms around my
throat, choking me slightly.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I gasp. And down we go. At
first it’s easy. Then we get down into the shadows and I can barely
see what I’m doing, and it gets harder. But Rajani strikes up a
light, and that makes it easy again. I notice that the light is one
of those amber rods I saw back in the house. That’s handy. At least
she can’t set my hair on fire with that.

“So, I don’t want to sound all negative or
anything,” she whispers in my ear. “But what happens if we can’t
get the ship out?”

“We’ll get it out,” I grunt as I continue to
lower us down into the darkness. “My story isn’t going to come to a
grinding halt in the ass-crack of the world.”

She giggles. “I certainly hope not. But you
know, Gen, some stories don’t make it to the big finish. Tons of
them. You know, life just sucks like that sometimes.”

“Well, my life sucks plenty, but it’s not
stopping here.”

“How do you know?”

I grimace, knowing that I’m about to quote my
mother. “Because I say so.”

We reach the bottom of the ravine and Rajani
releases her death-grip on my windpipe and hops down. The light of
her amber rod is just bright enough to let us see the dense tangles
of the roots sticking out all around us like pale, dead snakes, and
the light gleams on the dark carapaces of the beetles and
centipedes swarming over the earthen walls.

“Ew!” Rajani shudders. A lone faerie peeks
out of her hair, and then ducks back inside again.

I grin. “Come on, Raj. I’ll protect you from
the big bad bugs.”

“Promise?”

I lead the way down the narrow, dark path as
it winds between the rocky walls. The sky looks like a pale blue
scar overhead, and I wonder how fast I could I climb back up there
with Rajani on my back if anything went wrong down here.

Probably not fast enough.

“So, have you ever killed a dragon?” I
ask.

“Oh gosh no! I’ve never killed anything!
Unless you count that cheesecake Big Mom made for my birthday last
year, which was delicious, and I just demolished it, all by myself.
Oh my gosh, so good!”

“Uhm. Okay.” I frown. “But you did say there
are dragons down here, right?”

“Maybe. Who knows? No one ever goes down
here,” she says. “Do you smell mushrooms? I smell mushrooms!”

“Focus, Raj.” I sweep some roots out of my
face. “Dad told me once that you guys can use your faeries to
fight, so tell me how that works, in case we run into trouble.”

“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask Big Mom,
she’s the big bad Feyeri warrior,” Rajani says. “She’s all hardcore
with making trees grow out of monsters’ eye sockets and yucky stuff
like that. I have no idea how she does it. Gives me the heebie
jeebies.”

I stop. “So how do you fight?”

“Oh, I never fight with anyone. Who would I
fight? What would I fight about? Ganache? Baklava? That’s crazy
talk!”

I sigh and start walking again. “Okay. Rajani
lives in a non-violent, dessert-centric fantasy world. Check.”

“Hey now, Miss Frowny-Pants, I live in the
real world. I study hard, and I work hard, and I heal people with
faerie magic. That’s all very real. Nothing fantastic about
that.”

“Uh huh.” I push through a tangle of dead
brambles, snapping twigs loudly as they snag on my deerskins and
hair. I stumble free on the far side a step ahead of Rajani, and I
freeze. “Oh shit.”

“What?” Rajani bumps into me from behind,
almost knocking me forward. She touches my arm to look around me
and then finally sees what I see. “Oh shit.”

There’s a pile of… things in front of us. At
first glance they look like a dozen fat, white babies all sleeping
in a heap, but then I see one of their faces and it’s definitely
not a baby. The face is crushed flat, and it’s almost perfectly
circular. The mouth is a thin scar below two slitted nostrils, and
when the lips part I see thin, needle-like teeth.

“Kareens,” Rajani whispers. “Bad. Very bad.
Need to go now. Time to run away, very quickly and quietly.”

“No.” I grab her wrist and hold her still. “I
can handle this. What, uh, what are they and what do they do?”

“Kareens drive people insane with nightmares,
and then when you’re totally crazy and helpless, the kareens come
and eat you.” Rajani shivers. “Alive.”

“Sick freaks,” I mutter. “How many faeries do
you have with you?”

“Two. Wait.” She pats her thick green hair.
“No, three.”

“Well, faeries can make things grow, so can
you grow some vines to tie up these kareens before they start
noshing on our toes?”

“I can try.” Rajani teases the three faeries
out of her hair and whispers to them, gesturing at the sleeping
kareens, and then the little green sprites dash out into the air,
whirring on their delicate wings, and they start to work their
magic.

The vines grow quickly, slithering up out of
the earth in a dozen different spots all at the same time, snaking
up and over the pile of kareens, winding together and weaving a
crooked green net over the little monsters.

I nod my encouragement silently, not daring
to make a sound.

And then Rajani sneezes.

A big, wet, loud sneeze.

“Oh gross!” She looks with horror at the hand
she sneezed into.

“Get back!” I whip out my hatchet as the
kareens’ black eyes snap open and the pale beasties jerk upright,
straining against the vines winding around their legs and necks.
They hiss at us, their little clawed arms pawing at the air, trying
to reach us.

“What do we do? Whatdowedo?!” Rajani yanks on
my arm.

I yank my arm free. “We’re okay, calm down.
The net’s holding, see?”

The net vanishes, and then the entire ravine
vanishes. Everything is just gone. Rajani, the walls, the faeries,
the kareens, all gone. Everything is black and silent.

I freeze, looking around carefully,
listening.

Nothing.

Oh shit. The kareens got me. It’s nightmare
time.

Out in the darkness I hear a soft shuffling
sound, like old shoes dragging through the grass, slowly coming
closer. It’s behind me and in front of me. It’s all around me.

My hatchet is gone.

I raise my fists and notice that the jaguar
spots on my hands are gone.

I blink.

Why the hell are my spots gone?

The four creatures that shuffle out of the
darkness are not kareens, or dragons, or any big scaly thing with
claws or fangs. They’re me. They’re all me. Copies of me.

One is limping forward, most of the flesh
torn from her body, leaving her little more than a bloody skeleton
shambling blindly onward. But half of her face is still there. Half
of my face.

One is crawling on her belly, dragging
herself forward on her arms. Her legs are missing, and her torso is
a gray mangled chunk of shredded meat and skin. Rotten.
Decayed.

One is walking with her head tilted back,
staring up at the black sky. Her arms and legs are bulging with
muscles so huge that her skin is beginning to split open. Her neck
is thicker than her skull. And I can see a huge round lump
throbbing violently against her breastbone. Her heart. It’s
pounding so hard that it looks like it might erupt from her chest
at any moment.

The last one is hunched over at the waist so
I can’t see her face. Her bare skin is covered in huge pustules
bigger than my fists, monstrous blood blisters all red and purple,
ringed in sickly white and yellow. And the top half of her head is
just gone, like her brain swelled up and exploded her skull from
the inside.

I want to vomit.

I try to run but my feet won’t move. They’re
welded to the ground.

“Stop! Stay back! Get away from me!”

They don’t listen. Naturally.

They just keep shuffling closer. The
skeleton, the rotter, the muscles, and the pustules.

“Seriously, get back! I will beat you freaks
bloody if you so much as touch me!”

I keep yelling. They keep coming.

When they get so close that I can smell the
decay and blood, when I can feel the heat coming off their skin, I
start throwing punches, trying to shove them away. I can shove
anyone away. Hell, I can throw a man fifty feet.

But I can’t move these creatures.

My fists thump gently on their skin, and they
don’t even feel it. My arms are thin, fragile, useless. I barely
have the strength to lash out, and when I do, there’s no power in
my strikes. I’m flailing like a bundle of wilted flowers.

I scream as the four of them slowly collide
against me and each other, enclosing me in this tiny cell of
overripe and dying flesh, pressing tight and hot all around me,
suffocating me.

I screw my eyes shut, still trying to shove
them away with my weak, useless hands, but I can’t.

I can’t stop them.

I can’t fight them.

I can’t do anything.

So I stop trying to fight. I ignore the
horrible sensations on my skin, I stop trying to breathe, and I run
away in my mind. I run all the way across the damn ocean, all the
way back home, and fall into Dad’s arms.

Dad.

Crying by a fresh grave.

Crying next to a girl, a sad-faced girl from
out west with a bulging belly.

NO!

I lunge forward and slip free of my four
twisted doppelgangers. My feet break away from the ground and I
start to move, to walk, to run! I run into the darkness, away and
away and away from the half-dead freaks wearing my face. I squeeze
my eyes shut and run until my legs ache and my skin shivers and my
body feels like it’s on fire…

I smash face-first into a wall of rock and
almost fall down. Rajani is lying on the ground behind me, tears
streaming down her face, quiet whimpers escaping her lips in the
dim light of her glowing amber rod, as her three faeries huddle in
her hair.

I turn and see the kareens gnawing madly at
the net of vines, straining to break free.

“Get out of her head!” I bring my boot down
on the skull of the closest kareen. And then the next, and the
next. I kick them against the rocks, and yank them up by the
tangled vines before smashing them back down again. Within half a
minute, they’re all dead.

“Rajani!” I shake the green-haired girl, and
her eyes flutter open. “You okay, kid?”

She manages a weak smile. “Who are you
calling a kid, honey?”

I help her up and after a moment she seems
okay to stand on her own. She looks around at the kareens
splattered against the walls of the ravine. “And this is why I
don’t fight.” She turns and throws up.

I grin and wait.

After she recovers, straightens up, smoothes
back her hair, and arranges her dress, she asks, “So, I assume you
were trapped in some terrible nightmare too?”

I start walking, picking my way past the
remains of the kareens and continuing down the dark, narrow path.
“Yeah, you could say that.”

“How did you get free? I’ve never heard of
anyone getting free of a kareen nightmare by themselves.”

I shrug. I don’t really know myself. “I
almost didn’t. But… I found a way, I guess.”

Thankfully, she doesn’t ask about my
nightmare, and I try to forget it ever happened. The bloody, bony,
rotting, blistered faces are still hovering in the dark corners of
my mind, and there isn’t much in this ravine to distract me, so I
change the subject. “So… what’s it like having two moms?”