Fates (11 page)

Not Blood Nymphs. Not yet.

Inside each flower, a girl hung suspended, pierced with hollow vines that slowly drained her blood. Corinthe circled the flowers, a sick taste coating her tongue, and saw glimpses of paper-thin skin and unseeing eyes, of blood swirling through the hungry plant. It wasn't the light that made the petals appear to change colors; it was the exchange of fluids from plant to girl. She knew vaguely how Blood Nymphs were created, but seeing the process up close made her feel sad and sick at the same time.

Sad. Sick.

Human feelings.

At the last flower, Corinthe stopped. This girl was early in the transformation, because her hair was still black—the same color as Miranda's hair, Corinthe thought, and felt a momentary ache, wishing she had her Guardian's advice.

The flower's pistil had pierced the girl's skin right at her wrist, just below a small tattoo of a jasmine flower. Corinthe watched as the girl's blood slowly leaked out of her body, into the plant.

Was it too late to do anything for her? Corinthe couldn't be sure. As far as she knew, the process of alteration was reversible if caught early enough. But past a certain point it could not be stopped—both plant and human would die.

It doesn't concern you.
Corinthe heard Miranda's voice urging her to move on. This girl's future was not in her control.

Already the girl's skin was ghostly white. Soon her skin would take on the blue tint of the flower that changed her. Her blood would slowly be replaced with a fluid that would keep her alive, but only until she could feed like the rest.

It was a horrible thing to watch, but something compelled Corinthe closer, until she was just inches away from the girl. The aroma of cloves was overwhelming now, and Corinthe realized it hadn't been Luc's scent she'd been following.

She raised her hand, hesitated, then gently pushed a tendril of hair from the girl's face. The girl stirred and moaned quietly. Her lips were blue-tinged, bruised-looking. Corinthe stared, unable to look away. A memory tugged at the back of her mind, but she couldn't make it materialize.

“Hello?” Corinthe's voice was soft as she leaned closer to the girl.

The girl's eyelids fluttered, and she opened her eyes. Corinthe couldn't look away.

She searched around the edge of the clearing and found a rock the size of her palm, smooth and tapered at one end like an ax blade. She closed her fingers around the stone and stood in front of the girl.

The vine was meaty, and sawing at it barely made a difference, but she didn't stop, gripped by something she didn't understand. The desire to free the girl was her only thought. It moved her past the pain, the sharp agony she felt in the vine, in the plant itself.

Clear liquid oozed from the cut vine and ran down her wrist. It itched, and Corinthe swiped at it. Her pulse thundered in her ears as sweat beaded her forehead.

It wasn't working.

The vine was stringy and tough, and the rock just wasn't sharp enough. She stopped to catch her breath, looked around for something sharper, and felt the air around her begin to vibrate.

A subtle rippling pattern ran through the canopy above her, and the leaves whispered words she didn't understand. Branches closed in, eating away at the blue sky.

The Nymphs' whines started quietly but crescendoed until they were nearly deafening. Bursts of pain exploded in Corinthe's head; she dropped the rock and squeezed her hands over her ears. The noise sent her to her knees. It felt as though a knife was splitting her in two, making her whole body throb.

She fought the urge to scream as the pressure built inside her head. Just when it seemed that everything in her would explode outward, the sound abruptly stopped. The silence was deafening, beautiful.

Slowly, Corinthe took her hands away from her ears and dug her fingers into the earth, pushing her body upright. Her legs trembled, and a faint buzzing still echoed in her head. The clearing was revolving slowly in her vision; she took several deep breaths. A Nymph landed soundlessly in front of her, baring its teeth.

Corinthe moved into a crouch and scuttled backward. There was a hiss behind her. She swung around: another Nymph, close enough to touch, watched her through narrow eyes.

More Nymphs dropped from the trees, until she was completely encircled.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt anything.”

What had possessed her to try to free the girl? The urge felt like a distant, foggy memory, and it had clearly been a mistake.

“I was looking for someone, but he isn't here. If you could direct me to a gateway, I will go and never return.”

Low, angry humming met her request.

A tangle of vines detached from the trees and slithered along the ground like a massive green snake. The trees had begun to lean closer, to weave their branches together like a fence, and she knew she had no hope of escape. The humming of the Nymphs swelled again. The vines lashed out together, encircling her legs and yanking so hard she fell onto her back. More vines twisted around her arms, pinning her to the ground.

Suddenly, a low rumble like the sound of distant thunder reverberated through the ground. For a second the plants stilled, and a hush fell over the clearing. Even the Nymphs stopped crying. They began, inexplicably, to retreat.

The rumbling grew louder and changed into a thousand tiny beating wings. The canopy of branches above her parted, and Corinthe saw an enormous dark blot against the sky: thousands of tiny winged insects were swarming toward her. Corinthe felt her blood run cold.

Hornets.

She struggled to breathe through the panic filling her body. Fueled now by fear, she strained against the vines, kicking her legs, thrashing and pulling, but the vines only tightened their grip.

The first hornet stung her on the thigh and a searing flash of fire shot up her leg. She screamed, heard her voice sucked greedily away by the vegetation around her, as though the trees were feeding on her pain.

More fire: on her stomach, her left arm, her hand, one agonizing jolt after another. She barely noticed when the vines loosened and slithered away. The hornets' venom coursed through her body; it instantly made her limbs weak and her fingers numb. When she rolled onto her side, her vision wavered, and the trees swam in and out of her sight. The clearing grew dim. Was it nighttime already?

Her body was so heavy. …

She wanted to sleep. …

Dimly, she thought she saw a small carving in the tree just in front of her. Almost like a door …

Her body quickly grew numb; the fire turned to an icy cold like she'd never felt before. But in her mind, she felt calm, cloaking her fear in a softness, a quiet. She seemed to hear music playing … as though the locket was open and calling to her. … Her mind was turning slowly, like the ballerina on its stand. …

Corinthe realized, with complete clarity, that she was dying. This was what she got for interfering. This was her penance.

Barely conscious, she watched the carved door swing open in the tree's trunk.

A gnarled hand reached toward her.

Everything went dark.

R
ed sand.

Luc opened his eyes and lifted his head: red sand stretched for miles and miles along the coast of a dark ocean that swept all the way to the horizon.

Dirt covered his face. His eyes, teeth, ears—everything felt gritty, as if he'd gone through a sandstorm.

His mind was fuzzy. He remembered jumping but not landing.

There had been wind. A fierce, howling wind he thought would rip him apart and a searing pain that made his whole body shudder uncontrollably. And then … God, why couldn't he remember? Had he actually survived the fall off the building? Had he passed out from the pain? Luc had seen it happen on the field—a guy from another team who got his shin kicked in so hard the bone broke through his skin. He'd fainted, and Luc didn't blame him.

He rolled over onto his back despite the screaming in his muscles. He rubbed the sand from his eyes, then felt around for a lump on his skull. He must have cracked it.
Really
hard.

In the sky, two identical suns were sitting next to each other.

Double vision was a sure sign of a head injury—Ty had been out for a month after a bad hit gave him a concussion last year.

Very slowly, Luc raised his hand in front of his face. One hand appeared in his field of vision, but overhead, two suns still blazed on opposite sides of the sky.

What. The. Hell.

He pushed up onto his elbows carefully. Every inch of his body hurt, as if he'd been thrown off a building. No, not thrown—
jumped.
He slowly stood up, taking deep breaths to counteract the pain. His legs were weak, and he stumbled a few steps before regaining his balance. Behind him, his shadow, or shadows—two of them?— trailed across the sand. They fell in opposite directions and had a stretched look to them, the way shadows do when the sun hangs low in the sky.

Luc blinked several times to clear his vision, but two shadows remained. He was oddly reminded of early-morning soccer practices, of endless drills across the field as the sun started to rise—and how his shadow would dribble the ball alongside him, long and distorted, as if it belonged to a man eight feet tall.

Had he been dumped in the Black Rock Desert? No, this body of water had to be the ocean, which meant he must be somewhere along the shoreline. Yet there were no boats in the water, no people on the beach, not a sign of life anywhere.

And Christ, it was sweltering, like running an oven in a heat wave.

Something tugged at the back of his mind—some deep fear he couldn't name. Something was
wrong,
even more wrong than the two suns. He pinched the inside of his arm, feeling the pain wash over him, but he didn't wake up. No, not dreaming. Maybe he was in a coma.

Maybe you're dead.

He inhaled and tried to quell the rising fear that tightened his chest. He couldn't be dead because he didn't
feel
dead. He hurt everywhere, and the sand scratched his eyes and sweat beaded on his skin.

Dead people didn't sweat like this.

So if he was alive, then where the hell was he?

To his left, cliffs rose, sheer and jagged; a purplish-blue sky swelled above them like the taut belly of a balloon. The cliffs ran alongside the beach, parallel to the ocean, trapping him on this small strip of sand.

He fumbled for his phone, but the screen was blank. It must have been water damaged.

“Hello!” he shouted.

His voice echoed off the rocks and bounced down the beach. No one answered. He slowly turned around, dreading what he already knew he'd find. Behind him, more of the same: endless miles of cliffs and sand and ocean.

Panic welled up again and this time he didn't try to fight it. Hours earlier, he'd thought his night couldn't get any worse. Wrong.

He saw something glinting in the sand. His pulse sped up. A few feet away, the blade Corinthe had thrown at him lay half buried in the ground. He spun around to see if she was there, too, then crouched and carefully extricated the knife from the sand.

Had
she
somehow brought him here? Had she dumped his body, thinking he was dead, and bolted? Maybe she had brought him here by boat. …

The idea brought his gaze back to the water. He watched the dark surface of the ocean and felt a prickling at the back of his neck. It wasn't right. The water. It didn't
move
right. He'd spent enough time on the bay to know that water rippled, even if there was no wind.

His feet felt weighted with lead as he stumbled to the edge of the ocean. The water wasn't dark blue at all; it was black. And it just sat there, a giant puddle of inky darkness. Shadows undulated
beneath
its surface. They almost looked like … eels.

Millions and millions of eels.

Luc backed away quickly, a shiver of fear sliding down his spine, despite the cloying heat.

“Looking for something?” a voice said from behind him.

He swung around, clutching Corinthe's knife. A useless move, since he had been in a total of zero knife fights before and had no idea what to do with it.

A woman stood a few yards away from him. She was barefoot on the red sand and wore a long white dress. Her hair was as black as the ocean and hung nearly to her waist. She didn't appear to be affected by the heat at all. Her pale skin practically glowed under the sun's light, and the shadows she cast stretched long and narrow behind her, giving her an eerie air.

She smiled at him. Her teeth were very pointy; one was so sharp it looked like a dagger. And her eyes—like looking into a pit of tar, inky and bottomless. They completely unnerved him.

Luc couldn't shake the feeling that he'd seen her before. That same anxiety flickered through the back of his mind—there was something he should see or remember—but it dissipated when he tried to focus on it.

“Where did you come from?”

His voice was hoarse and raw. He swallowed against the dryness. In the sand he saw his own footprints, but around her there were none. He took a step backward.

This seemed to amuse her, because she laughed. The sound, not entirely pleasant, was quickly suctioned away by the heavy air. “That's not important. All you need to know is I'm a friend. And I came to tell you: Corinthe is responsible for your sister's current …
predicament.
”

Luc felt his stomach seize up. Jasmine. “What—what are you talking about?” he stammered. “What do you know about my sister?”

The woman tilted her head and stared at him almost with pity. “I know she's in trouble,” she replied softly.

“What do you mean?” Luc was losing it. Blood pounded in his temples; he could hardly hold on to the knife, his hand was sweating so badly. “Where is she?”

“She is imprisoned in the Forest of the Blood Nymphs,” the woman said evenly. “Because of Corinthe, she's in mortal danger.”

Luc felt as though someone had punched him in the chest. “The Forest of the … what?” He shook his head. This
had
to be a nightmare. Or everyone around him had suddenly gone insane.

“Of the Blood Nymphs,” the woman said.

“Who the hell are you? Is this some kind of sick joke? Where's my sister?” Luc instinctively raised the knife until the blade was pointed directly at the woman's throat. He hoped she wouldn't see that he was shaking ever so slightly.

But she just tipped her head back and laughed. When she looked at him again, her black eyes seemed to devour the light reflected in them.

“You can't hurt me. And you don't scare me. I told you—I'm a friend. We can stand here and play games or you can go after your sister. Either way, it makes little difference to me.”

Luc felt as if he might pass out. His thoughts were spinning in dizzying circles.

“How do I find her?” he asked, practically spitting out the words.

The woman shrugged. Suddenly, she seemed to lose interest in him. “Corinthe can tell you.
If
you can trust her, that is.”

Rage ate away at him, made him want to punch her. Riddles. This was clearly some kind of sick game to her. “How do I find Corinthe, then? What the hell
is
this place?”

She smiled again, and the rage turned to fear. There was something vicious about her smile—it was the way a cat might look at a mouse.

“Don't worry,” she said. “Corinthe will find
you.
”

Another chill went down Luc's spine, despite the sweltering heat. He took a step toward her, but she turned and then simply vanished into the thick air, which shimmered with heat. Then Luc remembered the woman he had seen when he was riding the bus, the woman who had simply materialized from the steam.

Was she following him?

Several seconds later, he thought he saw her again at the base of the cliffs. She raised her hand and waved to him. The sun glinted off her finger. A ring, maybe. The glare stung his eyes and he had to look away. When he glanced back, the light was gone, and so was she. Then a figure appeared at the top of the cliffs, silhouetted in the brightness.

How the hell had she gotten up there so fast?

It didn't matter, because she knew where his sister was, and when he caught up with the woman, she was damned well going to tell him how to find her. He wasn't going to wait for Corinthe to find him. She would probably try to skewer him again.

Crazy. This whole thing was crazy.

He had to find Jas.

Without thinking too much about what he was doing, he tucked the knife into his belt and started to climb. He wrapped his hand around a bit of rock, found a toehold, and hauled. He tried to ignore the pain from his cut and bleeding fingers.

This was far more intense than any training he'd ever done for soccer. At the Y, they'd made him strap into a harness before letting him climb the rock wall. Here, there was nothing to catch him if he fell.

Still, he climbed, hand over hand, feet scrambling for purchase. The suns beat down on his back, pushed sweat into his eyes until he could barely see, and yet he went on.

After what felt like an hour of climbing, he pulled himself onto a small ledge and took a break. The progress was agonizingly slow, a diagonal path across the sheer cliff face. One wrong step would send him tumbling down to the sand. He wiped his face, feeling the sting of salt in his torn-up hands.

The cliffs seemed higher than when he started. The hopelessness of it all made his shoulders shake. Just above him, a swollen belly of rock jutted out over the black ocean. There was no way around it. Carefully, he found handholds and curled his fingers into them. Fresh waves of pain radiated up his arms, and blood trickled down his wrists.

Judging by the heat, the sun—well,
suns
—were directly overhead now, so he kept his eyes on the gray rocks in front of him. Gray, the color of Corinthe's eyes. The woman on the beach had said Corinthe was responsible for his sister's … imprisonment?

His foot slipped and he barely caught himself.

Focus, damn it.

His biceps burned as he fought to keep his grip. His fingers were on fire. His foot slipped again, and it took everything he had to lift it back onto a small ledge.

He clung to the side of the cliff as rough rocks scraped his skin. Sweat rolled into his eyes, blinding him as he tried to blink away the burning sensation.

His arms shook, and his fingers slipped another inch. He fought to reclaim his balance and dug deep down into the place where survival instincts took over.

He had to hold on.

For Jasmine.

He let out a breath through clenched teeth and closed his eyes, rested his forehead against the rock. The suns weighed down on him, blistering and stifling, as if they were trying to force him into the black ocean.

Cramps seized his legs, and his left foot slipped off the ledge. The momentum pulled him off center, and his fingers began to slip.

He couldn't hold on. No strength left. His body gave up and stopped fighting even as his mind screamed to keep going.

His other foot slipped.

And he fell.

Above him, the two suns hung side by side, twin bloated faces leering in victory. It was the last thing he saw.

He hit the water and went under. Blackness.

A water that was not like water.

He floated in it, into a creeping, airless coolness. Was this death? It was more peaceful than he ever imagined it would be.

Then … his lungs began to burn and instinct kicked in. He found strength he didn't know he had. He flailed. He fought for the surface. He went nowhere. The water seemed to be full of silken hands—touching him, groping him.

His entire body burned from the lack of oxygen, a new kind of pain that reached down into his core, and his mind grew fuzzy. His limbs turned heavy. He allowed himself to float through the darkness, memories swimming next to him.

“Don't worry, baby. It was just a bad dream.”

Mom stood next to his bed, smoothing her hand over his sweat-covered forehead. There was a pressure on his chest—his heart felt as if it were going to burst open. Light from the hallway spilled into the room he and Jasmine shared. His baby sister stood wide-eyed in her crib, watching him.