Monsters (Ashes Trilogy 3)

And then a hand spidered onto her shoulder.

That touch snapped her back as crisp and sharp as a slap. Shrieking, Alex flinched. Her left leg shot off slick metal, like a cartoon character skating on a banana. Her full weight dropped onto her battered right ankle. She screamed again, this time with pain. Her vision purpled. Off-balance, she scrambled for purchase, fingernails frantically scratching stone. Just as she was about to peel away, the hand on her shoulder grabbed a fistful of her parka and yanked her back. She righted, blundering onto the precarious ledge of that Uzi.

“No,” she gasped, horrified, her heart a hard knot in her chest— because now the pieces fell into place. Everything fit: the slip-slides of her mind; the monster, so suddenly awakened; that sensation of a crowd and swarming shadows above her head.

And there’s the smell. She hadn’t noticed before; been a little busy trying to save her ass, thanks. But now, it was close: rot and roadkill.

And shadows. Cool mist. A darkness more profound than a starless sky.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Wolf.”

A bolt of bright yellow light sprang from the dark. Nearly blinded by the glare, Alex squinted and would have put a hand up if she hadn’t needed both to hang on. Belatedly, she realized that the light must be for her. The Changed saw very well in the dark. She saw Wolf, his legs braced against rock, dangling from some kind of crude rope harness looped around both thighs.

Sniffed me out, just like I caught his scent earlier this morning. Came to get me. Had he tracked them all along? Possibly. The Changed followed a route, kept to a pattern. So maybe Wolf had bided his time, waiting to see if she was still alive, then planned a way to get her out. Before the Zap, when Wolf was Simon Yeager and not a monster, maybe he and his friends had done a lot of rock climbing, exploring all the ins and outs of the Rule mine.

Then she remembered: Tom. Her heart stuttered. Tom had been up there. He’d called to her, and then she’d heard shots. “Did you kill him?” She was so afraid for Tom she thought her chest would break. Was Tom lying dead in the snow because of her? “If you killed him, if you hurt him . . .”

Wolf said nothing. He couldn’t. But now that he was so close, she smelled something else in all that mist and shadow: a scent sweet and . . . gentle, a light perfume of lilacs and honeysuckle. Her dad’s face suddenly flickered in a quick flashbulb of memory: Jump to me, sweetheart.

“Safe.” The word slipped off her tongue. For an instant, where she il sa j . bick was, what was happening, ceased to matter. It was as if she and Wolf had slipped into a private, silent, well-lit room built only for them. And not only safe . . . “Home,” she whispered. “Family?”

The scent deepened. His face smoothed, and for a second, there was the ghost of Chris—the lips she had kissed, the angles and planes of a face her fingers knew—and she felt her monster suddenly reach; was aware of an ache and a fiery burn that was need and desire flowing like lava through her veins.

The monster knows Wolf. This was new, as was the hard throb in her neck and the claw of something so close to raw, red yearning that she felt the rake of it across her chest. What the hell was going on? The times her mind had sidestepped from her to end up behind the eyes of the Changed—Spider, Leopard, Wolf—had been few, and mainly in response to their intense emotion, not hers. Long ago, Kincaid wondered if her tumor was reorganizing, the monster becoming something separate and distinct from her. God, and now it has. The monster wants Wolf.

“No, I’m in control,” she ground out, no longer sure whether she spoke to the monster or Wolf. She clung to the rock. “I’m Alex. I’m not a mon—”

CRACK!

A yelp bulleted from her mouth. The sound, somewhere to her left, had been enormous. At first, Alex thought she saw more water, a wide stream running a jagged dark course over stone. But then there were more snaps and cracks, the crisp sounds like thick ice over a deep lake in the dead of winter, because ice is restless, never still, always in flux, the stress building and building to the breaking point. Before her eyes, that jagged seam became a black lightning bolt, growing wider and darker and longer. . . Water still swirled around her waist, but now she also detected an insidious tug, much stronger than before.

From above came a hard bang and a thunk as rocks ricocheted and rebounded before slamming down in a stony fusillade. Crack! The rock wall squealed, singing with the strain. CrackCRACK!

And that was when the Uzi actually moved.

Terror blazed through her veins. Almost without thinking, she sprang, her right hand splayed in a grab. If her ankle shrieked, she didn’t feel it. All she saw were Wolf ’s hands, the one knotted in her parka and the other, gloved, clinging to the taut snake of rope that would have to be strong enough to hold them both. She felt his wrist sock into her palm, and then she was swinging a half-assed trapeze move as Wolf whipped her, hard and fast, like a stone in a bolo, trying to fold her against his chest. He might have done it, too. He had the strength she lacked, and he was solidly anchored besides. But then the Uzi shifted again, a sharp jolt down that knocked the breath from her chest.

She missed, dropping as the rock crumbled beneath her feet. Skating away, the Uzi was swept in a sudden tidal surge into this new and ever-expanding fissure, one that had grown so wide it was a sideways grin and then a toothless leer and then a black scream that matched her own.

In the next instant, the wall shattered and split and opened with a roar.

6

“Wee-wee-wee .” Aidan’s right arm blurred. There was a whickering sound and then a mucky whop as a whippy car antennae connected with bloody mush that had once been the sole of a right foot. “Weewee-wee, little piggy!”

“Don’t hit me anymore, please, don’t . . . AAAHHH!” The guy, Dale Privet, let go of another shriek as Aidan whapped his left foot while Mick Jagger shouted about how pleased he was to meet you.

God, Greg so wished that wheezy old cassette recorder would just die already. He had another monster of a migraine that was keeping time with Charlie Watts. But Aidan loved the Stones: The pros, like, blast it 24/7. How this little rat-creep even knew anything about guys who were professionals at torturing other guys scared him shitless. This whole nightmare was like the time Greg was six and his older brother—really, an ass**le, so Aidan would’ve loved him—took Greg to the old Mexican place, a rotting husk hunkered at the end of a oneway country lane. What Greg remembered most was when a couple of giggly guys in these glow-in-the-dark Scream masks plunged his hand into squelchy cold goo they called monster guts. It was only spaghetti, but Greg was so freaked he peed himself.