no-man’s land to hug me, the length of his body pressed against mine. He was so warm and glorious, his skin so silky. Bea would have a cardiac arrest and I couldn’t guarantee Fortescue had run out of spears.
“It’s not just happening to you, Bear.”
I gazed over at him, a fear more intense than any I’d experienced so far creeping up my spine. Smithy did not belong in this mess. He stretched out fingertips and lightly brushed the tears from my cheeks. His words came out in a torrent.
“I wanted so much to tell you at dinner, but I didn’t want to scare you off. I don’t want to lose you again, Bear. These two years, I’ve missed you more than words can say. When you left, I did everything I could to contact you straight away. But Bea wasn’t so obliging. She said you needed time on your own, almost as if they isolated you on purpose. I thought it was my fault and you didn’t want to speak to me. I couldn’t blame you after how things ended.”
Relief and an infinitely stronger emotion swelled my heart. It was a struggle not to melt into Smithy’s comforting embrace and forget everything else, but I needed answers that couldn’t wait any longer. I braced myself up on an elbow.
“Tell me everything!”
He took a deep breath, talking fast as though trying to purge a toxic burden. “Yesterday, after I’d dealt with Brianna, I wanted to come and find you, but you were so angry after the pool incident I thought I’d let you cool down for a bit.” He grimaced at the memory.
“To kill time, I went to the gym and then for a run to clear my head. It’s weird, but I felt wired all morning, sort of like I could sense danger coming. I initially put my jitters down to your almost drowning. I did the black diamond run, knowing it would take all my concentration.” Black diamond was radical, lots of rooftops and hardcore actions that demanded unremitting skill. “You know the cellar?”
It was the only obstacle I refused to negotiate on a parkour course. A sheer drop down the facade of a three-storey building using a drainpipe to slow velocity, onto a narrow ledge of brick that wrapped its girth, followed by a somersault down another three storeys into a skinny cellar alcove, where momentum forced an immediate run up and over the lip of the alleyway. There was no room for error.
“I hate that part.”
He nodded ruefully. “For some reason, I passed out in the middle of the first leap. Took a six-floor tumble into the cellar. I woke up who knows how long afterwards, praising good luck I hadn’t broken my neck. Anyway, while I was out of it, I went somewhere else. A swampy place, hot as hell with insects the size of crows.”
“Crows,” I shivered. My shoulder improved rapidly, but the recall of our flight from those birds stayed vivid and the mental scars would take much longer to heal.
“Sorry.” Smithy leaned over to cup my face between his hands, brushing a stray hair behind my ear with his thumb. “I shouldn’t have mentioned crows.” He pressed reassuring lips against my cheek.
I yearned to exaggerate the weakling angle, so intense was the pleasure, but he needed his mouth to answer my questions. I filed this approach for future reference.
“It’s okay,” I said reluctantly. “Go on.”
He released me and lay back on his side, punching his pillow until achieving the right firmness. “The thing is, the blackout was not so much a dream as really being there. I felt the heat. Heard the crickets calling. I could smell decaying vegetation.” A troubled frown creased his brow.
It was not a look I was used to seeing on Smithy. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You mean aside from the obvious?” I raised my eyebrows impatiently. “I don’t want to go through it again. But you have to see it,” he said softly.
Before I could query what he meant, Smithy started to describe the scene and my wits rebelled. There were too many common threads. The details were too exact a match to be coincidental. Any hint of rationality spun away when I tried to account for our shared perceptions.
And I couldn’t shake the idea, no matter how ridiculous, that what we saw had actually transpired. And as he relayed it – Smithy’s voice transported me there, just like the touch of the bloody knife blade that had sent me from the warehouse kitchen to Raphaela’s office during my last lesson with Aunt Bea.
In his vision, there had been a statuesque black woman in her early twenties with cropped white hair, pacing edgily at the main entrance to a grand plantation mansion. Billie. I was fairly certain I knew the identity of the house’s owner – fragile, mahogany-haired Raphaela. I could feel Smith with me the whole time, as if we were actors on the same stage.
An impenetrable wall of ancient, moss-draped trees encircled the perimeter of her large property, the forest running to wetlands that stretched as far as the eye could see at the back of the residence. From a briefly glimpsed overhead perspective, there were only two points of access. Rear to the building by boat at the solid wooden wharf or entry along a pitted driveway that disappeared through dense bush for quite a distance. Eventually, the road emerged and passed through a fortified gate, the single breach in a thick wall ringing her boundary. Dissecting a wide expanse of cleared grass, her driveway ended in a turning circle at the front steps.
It was late afternoon, the thin light slanting down in green-tinged rays through a canopy of leaves. The woman stalked up and down the length of the veranda along the house’s front, clearly expecting company. The reception would not be hospitable. She wore combat fatigues and a singlet, armed to the teeth with varied guns and knives. A vicious scimitar, as tall she was, with long blades jutting either end at opposite angles was propped against the stairs.
She jumped to the lawn, holding a small box dotted by a series of switches. Arrayed behind her on the porch stretched an armoury of startling variety. Flamethrowers, automatic machine guns, grenades and more. There were also throwing stars that glistened with a coating of flammable oil. This information swirled my brain with unalterable certainty.
Billie was a formidable opponent, incredibly muscled, her bearing one of military efficiency, coiled to unleash deadly force at will. Her skin shone with sweat in the humidity. The sun finally slunk below the horizon and the woman lit several hurricane lamps on the porch. They barely cast a glow beyond the zone of her patrol; the rest formed a solid curtain of blackness.
Bugs teemed the meagre illumination in grating chorus. Abruptly, their racket ceased, morphing to an eerie rustle as thousands of dead insects snowed from the sky like volcanic ash, carpeting the corona around the lanterns. Whatever was coming sucked the life from all before it. The woman spun towards the road, straining to see and hear. She knew what to expect and she was prepared.
The stillness erupted – a tumult of tightly packed bodies marching through the forest towards her. Hidden by the murk, they jeered and grunted, the sounds unlike any animal known on earth. She waited. The cacophony increased as her enemies closed in. Still she waited. Branches snapped and cracked like gunshot under a battalion of stomping feet. How could one fend off a multitude?
Billie waited and waited, until it seemed as if her enemies were on top of her. Then she kissed the tiny crucifix about her neck, and let loose with her surprise. She flicked several switches on the box in her hands. The crescent-shaped lawn lit up under dozens of floodlights hung from the trees, revealing drifts of insect shells, mummified wildlife and shrivelling grass. The sprinklers spurted awake to douse the huge black-skinned demons forming a blockade five-deep beyond the trees. The distinctive petroleum odour of napalm spread on the air.
These were not the emaciated specimens of my nightmare – their single purpose was to fight. Half a body taller than the tallest man, their hides were plated by knobbly, armoured skin, horned skulls combined with lethal tusks thrusting from bottom jaws. Long, thickly roped arms tipped by jagged meat-ripping talons ploughed the ground when they moved. They were the ugliest, most dangerous-looking things I’d ever seen. Those at the front stared greedily with red eyes at the lone soldier and opened fang-lined maws to roar in ear-shatterin
g unison, flinging drool far and wide.
The woman wore a flamethrower belted over her shoulder. She deftly swung it around and ejected a stream of fire. The creatures contorted and crackled in the conflagration, their battle screams cut short in a stench of charred flesh. Foliage ignited, adding to the blaze, but for every ghastly opponent she crisped, another took its place.
Defiant snarls mingled with the squeals of the burning. Once the flamethrower was spent she tossed it aside. Billie triggered explosives buried about the clearing from her electronic box, each blast a deafening shower of soil and torn flesh. The numerous demon corpses vanished where they fell, cratered land and piles of grey dust the only residue of their demise.
It was obvious from the beginning the gladiator would not win. Her enemies were simply too many. She lobbed grenades, and when none remained, turned to the guns, emptied magazines littering the ground. I realised with dread that Billie’s brave efforts were little more than a stalling tactic across the long night. This was a deliberate sacrifice aimed at buying Raphaela the time she needed to prepare for the coming of the Crone.
The battle finished with hand-to-hand combat. Billie’s spinning blades scythed into the horde like threshers through wheat. She was a phenomenal fighter; mixed