“Unless they’re invisible.” Temi shone the sword around, the light pushing back shadows, probing the nooks of the rock.
I had been sweeping my hands across the rock, but her words made me pause. I didn’t want to accidentally stab myself, especially if this ammunition was poisonous somehow. Surely that kid hadn’t died simply from a tiny puncture wound. I shifted to searching with my eyes only. Invisibility was a stretch, but they might be camouflaged, designed to blend in like the lizards in the area.
“Here,” Temi said, crouching over an area I had already checked.
A slender reddish brown thorn the length of my pinkie finger lay on the ground, its tip turned after striking the rock wall. Now that she had pointed it out, I had no trouble seeing it. “Weird. I swear I looked there.”
“I thought I had too. In fact, I was looking right in this area, and it just seemed to appear out of nowhere.” She reached down.
“Don’t touch it.”
Her hand froze.
“This might be what killed that kid.”
“Ah.” She withdrew her hand. “In other words, we found exactly what we came out here looking for?”
“I came out here looking for coffee tins; Simon and Alek are looking for the creature.” I winced, hoping that the fact that it was no longer here didn’t mean that it had gone over to attack them.
“Well, you found that too.”
“I guess that’s true. Why can’t I feel like this has been a good day?” Because we were hiding in a cave and afraid to leave.
“You’re a pessimistic person by nature?”
“Must be.” I delved into one of my vest pockets and withdrew a pair of tweezers and a sandwich baggie.
“You carry tweezers in your pockets?” Temi asked as I plucked up the thorn and deposited it in the bag.
“That’s not weird. Lots of women carry tweezers.” I decided not to show her the toothbrush I carried around for cleaning off artifacts and dusting dirt out of crevices.
“For grooming their eyebrows, not collecting specimens off cave floors.”
“What are you saying? That my eyebrows don’t look properly manicured?” I double-bagged the thorn and wished I had a glass vial, something it wouldn’t accidentally poke through. Maybe thorn was the wrong word. It reminded me more of a bee stinger. A very large bee stinger. But there wasn’t anything in the natural world that could launch a stinger fifty feet, not that I had ever heard of. Not that we were dealing with the natural world here.
“They’re fine.” Temi crouched at the lip of the cave. “I wish I could sense the jibtab. It doesn’t seem fair that they can sense me, and I can’t sense them.”
“Monsters rarely play fair, I hear. We could go back out on the ledge and look around a little more. If we hear the buzz again, we ought to have time to climb back up here.”
“As long as the rest of the ladder doesn’t break.”
“There is that.”
Despite her concern, Temi faced inward and climbed down the ladder. She had never been one for inaction. By the time I also climbed down, she had walked around the bend out of sight. I grabbed my backpack, which clanked with its new contents, and tucked the thorn into an outer pocket. I wanted more than a layer of clothing and a thin plastic baggie between that projectile and me.
When I rounded the bend, Temi was standing at the other end of the ledge, frowning back at me.
“What?” I asked, not seeing anything.
But then it dawned on me. I should have seen something. The ropes we had rappelled down. They were gone.
Chapter 5
I leaned back, testing the whip with my weight. The tree branch I had wrapped creaked ominously.
“Better try another one,” Temi said. “I’m heavier than you.”
As if it was so easy to unfasten a whip that was wound three times around a limb. We were standing at the end of the ledge, trying to find a way over to a tall straight pine tree that grew up higher than us. Its tip reached higher than the top of the cliff. Temi had volunteered the notion that it might be easier to climb up the branch-laden trunk than trying to scale the vertical rocks. I wasn’t that certain.
I shook my wrist, trying to work the whip loose. It took several tries before it unraveled, falling slack.
“Or we could try climbing down.” Temi pointed at the ridges in the vertical wall. “There might be enough handholds.”
“You’ve been hanging out with those elves too long. Besides I’d rather go up than down. Climbing up is easier, and I’m not sure there’s a way out of that canyon, regardless.” I tapped the GPS unit fastened to my vest. I had already checked for potential alternate routes, and at the least, we would have a long way to walk to get back to the others.
“There would be more cover down there if our attacker comes back. And there might be somewhere else where we can climb up.”
A couple of weeks ago, Temi would have gone along with what I suggested, since this was more my milieu than hers. It was hard to believe her training could have changed her that much in a week, but she was definitely thinking more of tactical issues now.
“There might be, there might not.” I cracked the whip again, aiming for a lower and thicker branch, one just above us. “Let’s see if we can get to the tree, and we can decide from there. I would like to take a peek up there to see if I could spot the thorn thrower. Not to mention whoever took our stuff. If the ropes were still up there, and had simply been wound up and put out of sight, I wanted to get them back too. We weren’t rich enough that I could afford to go shopping for climbing gear every week.
“All right.”
The whip had caught, and this time the branch remained strong and solid when I tugged against it. “You want to go first?” I asked. “Now that you’re all trained and fixed up?” I waved to her knee.
“I will if you want.”
I hadn’t expected her to volunteer, but she tucked her sword into the scabbard on her back and held out her hand. Shrugging, I dropped the whip handle into it.
She tested the anchor herself before creeping to the edge. “I’ve been told momentum is best in these situations,” she said, giving me a weird look.
“What kind of momentum?”
I thought she would sit on the edge and wiggle over, getting as close as possible before swinging toward the tree, but she surprised me by jumping off. She swung down and out, the whip pulling her toward the trunk. Pine needles swatted her, but she avoided the branches and landed with both feet on the tree, her knees bending to absorb the impact.
“Never mind,” I said. “I see.”
Temi climbed to the top, not gracefully exactly—I had been the more likely one to scramble around in trees and caves when we had been kids—but efficiently. It probably wouldn’t take much practice before she was making me look like a klutz out there. I wasn’t envious. Really.
When she reached the branch, she loosened the whip, rolled it up, and tossed it in my direction. I had visions of it hitting the ledge below me or getting caught on something, but she had an accurate throw. It almost landed in my hands.
As soon as she climbed up out of the way, I repeated the whip snap. This time it missed the branch, only knocking a few needles free. It took a couple more tries to hook my target again. I tested it and was tempted to act out my earlier notion of sitting on the ledge, sliding off, and letting gravity take me to the tree, but some bravado or unwillingness to be shown up gripped me. I jumped off the ledge as Temi had done, swinging toward the trunk.
Rock and clumps of green needles blurred past. A branch scraped through my hair, and I ducked. Thanks to the distraction, I wasn’t ready when the trunk came up. I got one foot on it, but the other missed, and I almost ended up straddling the thing. That would have hurt. As it was, taking the impact on one leg jarred me all the way up my spine to my teeth. I held back a groan, hoping Temi hadn’t seen the awkward landing from her perch. There were a few needle-filled branches between us.
“I’m go
ing to wrap this whip around the neck of whoever took our ropes,” I growled, bringing the other foot to the trunk and shaking the jarred leg before starting up.
“What if it was Simon?”
“It wasn’t.” We had called up a couple of times, hoping for an answer, but only the wind whistling through the canyon had responded. “He’ll make fun of your climbing skills, but he wouldn’t mess with your head like this.”
“My skills?” The branches shivered, dropping needles as Temi climbed higher.
“Well, no, he would think your skills were lovely. But he’d mock mine.” I reached my whip, unfastened it, and looped it on my belt again.
The branches thinned as we climbed higher, and I started to second-guess my decision to go up. Wind batted at us, and the whole trunk swayed back and forth. The rock wall seemed farther away than it had from below too. We would have to creep out on one of those narrow branches to have a shot at jumping and reaching the top of the cliff.
“I’m going to try to get over,” Temi said. “I don’t see anything up here though.”
“No monster? No ropes?”
“Neither.”
“Damn. What kind of person steals another person’s climbing gear?”
It was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t expect an answer. But after a pause, Temi said, “An elf person, perhaps.”
“You know something I don’t?” I hadn’t seen any evidence that someone was following us, not since we left Prescott, but that didn’t mean much.
“On my last night of training, someone tried to kill me. Jakatra too. They sent animals after us, then started a forest fire.”
“Any idea why?”
Temi hesitated again before saying, “Humans aren’t welcome there.”
“You think this person—elf—is trying to finish what he started?”
“The impression I got from Jakatra… none of them was ever that straightforward with me, but he said to research the sword. That makes me think someone else might want it. Or want for me not to have it.”
“Ah.”
I prodded at a dry clump of sap on the side of the trunk, wondering why someone who had tried to kill her would simply be messing with us now. Why not shoot or do something more damaging? The elves had technology or magic that we didn’t have, so a human-slaying weapon shouldn’t be out of the picture. Maybe the jibtab had run the person off, and grabbing the ropes had been all he could manage. After all, the last monster hadn’t had any problem with attacking Jakatra and Eleriss. It seemed to want everybody dead equally.
“Here goes,” Temi said.
Before I could warn her to be careful, the trunk swayed violently. I had been holding it and a branch, and I gasped, turning that hold into a bear hug. My knees came around it too. Dry needles rained upon my shoulders, and a pinecone clunked me on the head.
“Thanks,” I muttered, before thinking to look for Temi.
Through the needles and branches, I glimpsed her back. She had made it and was crouching on the edge of the cliff, looking in all directions.
“Anything up there?” I called softly, needing a moment before I was ready to unwrap my limbs from their death grip on the tree.
“Nothing.”
I couldn’t tell if she was relieved or not. I was.
“It’s safe,” she added, looking down at me.
Meaning I was supposed to find a way to duplicate her feat of leaping prowess. Reminding myself that going up had been my idea, I started climbing again. I made the mistake of glancing down at one point, the hard, cactus-covered rocks and dirt nearly seventy feet below me, and I had to take a moment to catch my breath—and courage.
“Almost there,” I called, lest Temi think I was dawdling. A thin branch snapped as soon as I hung my weight on it. I caught myself on the trunk again, but decided to stop there. There was no way I would be able to jump off these branches if they were breaking under a portion of my weight. “Which branch did you crawl out on?”
“I didn’t. I went up a little higher than the cliff and jumped from the trunk.”
That sounded very logical… and very difficult to do. I grimaced but crawled higher, seeing few alternatives. At least the cliff was closer than the ledge had been. I wished I could use my whip for extra security, but I didn’t see any handy nodules sticking up out of the cliff, nor were there any trees or shrubs growing out of the rock.
“Okay, I’m coming.” Maybe if I said it, that would make it true. I took a moment to pat myself down and tuck in anything that might catch on a branch—having that whip be the instrument that sent me plummeting to my death would not be poetic at all.
Temi faced me, an arm extended, and gave me an encouraging nod. I cut a branch away so it wouldn’t impede me, then shifted my weight the best I could, trying to get both feet on the trunk. It reminded me of being on the side of the wall in a swimming pool and pushing off.
“As easy as a flip-turn,” I muttered. One, two… three.
I pushed off with my legs with all of my strength. My “wall” moved, knocked backward with my shove, and it threw off my jump. Terror filled me, as I realized I wasn’t going to get nearly the distance I had imagined. I flailed in the air, as if that could somehow propel me farther.
Something clasped my arm an instant before I landed, almost tumbling forward, thanks to my awkward momentum. Temi kept me upright, giving me a wry smile.
“You looked like you were trying to jump over a skyscraper.”
I glanced at the edge of the cliff, four or five feet away and felt sheepish. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t close.”
“Understandable.”
After patting myself down and making sure I hadn’t lost anything—not that I would go back down to retrieve my tweezers or toothbrush if they turned up missing—I jogged over to the spot where we had originally descended. Unfortunately, the ropes weren’t twined up and hidden in a crevice anywhere. The anchors we had hammered into cracks remained, but that was it. There wasn’t enough dirt on the rock to hold footprints, if anyone had walked out there to start with. Maybe the jibtab had taken our ropes before it attacked. Scary to think of a monster with that kind of intelligence, but the last one hadn’t been stupid. It had been luck more than smarts that had allowed us to best it in the end.
“We should go.” The buzz hadn’t returned, but Temi’s eyes were skyward.
“Good idea.”
We jogged away from the canyon at a much faster pace than we had used that morning. I pulled out my phone to check the reception, though I would wait until we reached the trees to call Simon.
Temi pointed in that direction. Leaves moved, and my breath caught. Had we been right before? Was the creature lying in wait for us?
But the figure that burst out of the trees was running, not flying. Simon waved, his phone in his hand. I threw a thankful look heavenward. He wasn’t wearing the look of utter terror of a man who had just been shot at by deadly thorns.
A moment later, Alek jogged out of the trees farther down. We had found jeans, a couple of T-shirts, and a sweater for him, the jeans on the tight side—something Simon had pointed out while rolling his eyes—but it was hard to be picky when one had a twenty-dollar clothing budget. Simon had magnanimously paid for a package of underwear. Alek had tied his hair back, and he might have passed for a normal twenty-first century human, but he did still have his sword scabbard, complete with sword. I guess I couldn’t find that all that odd when I was running around with a whip.
“Where have you been?” Simon asked.
“Let’s get into the trees.” Temi pointed toward the forest and glanced toward the sky behind us. “Just in case.”
Alek gave her a sharp look. Had they encountered the creature too?
“We climbed down and found some stuff,” I said as we ran for the cover of the forest, my pot-filled pack clanking with each step. “But someone or something took our ropes while we were down in a cave.”
“Took or cut?” Simon asked.
“Took. There was some buzzing creature that attacked us too. Did you hear or see it? We didn’t get a look at it.”
“I didn’t,” Simon said. “But I was in the van working. Mr. Sexypants heard something though. He was the one agitating that we go look for you, and since you weren’t answering your phone…” He glowered at me.
“We didn’t have any reception in the cave. And I assume you’re referring to the hot underwear you picked out for him and not anything else.” Was he really feeling jealous of Alek right now? What, was he afraid he had competition for the woman he’d never had a chance with anyway? I hadn’t caught Temi ogling Alek, but I hadn’t been watching, either. The last I had seen, she had been giving her dreamy looks to Jakatra, though that had been before his hat had come off and the ears had come out. Not that any of this mattered now…
Alek touched his ear, pointed to the sky, and did a fair impression of the buzzing sound.
“You heard it,” I said.
He nodded.
“Did you see it?” I switched to Greek; Simon hadn’t brought his pack, so he probably didn’t have the tablet, though he was carrying something that looked suspiciously like a homemade grenade. Well, I had been wondering how we could strike at something in the air. When Alek didn’t answer, I touched my eye and pointed to the sky. So fun to be reduced to Charades to communicate.
Alek hesitated, then shook his head. Maybe he, like us, had seen the shadow but hadn’t glimpsed the rest of it. He held up a hand, something squeezed between his fingers. One of the thorns.
“Oh, you shouldn’t be touching it.” I grimaced. Whatever poison was on the tips, it was slow-acting. According to the news report, nobody knew exactly when the kid had received his puncture wound and how long he had been lying out there unconscious before being found, but it had taken another twelve hours for him to die after he had been delivered to the hospital. “One didn’t hit you, did it?” I looked into his eyes, willing him to understand me, and feeling more concern than I would have expected over the question. For him to have survived so much and to have been frozen for two thousand odd years only to die within his first couple of weeks in this new world… That was even less poetic than the idea of my whip getting me killed.