Power Games (29 page)

‘For what?’

‘To wash.’ Her hands spread up his thighs. ‘Take your clothes off.’

She helped him remove his shirt. As she peeled it open, she ran her hands across his muscled chest. The patch beneath his collarbone stung, the burn almost healed but still sore to touch.

Next came his jeans.

‘And the rest,’ she said.

Jacob could feel her cool breasts pressed against his shins. He took a risk and reached down, catching one in his hand. Tawny gasped in surprise or affront, but it lasted only a second before she sank closer. Her breast filled his palm, the nipple stiff and pronounced. She took his other hand and pressed it to her chest. He imagined her nakedness, her head thrown back and her hair trailing into the water …

Jacob’s brain told him he was aroused, but his dick wouldn’t work.

Tawny took a step out of the water, her chest level with his face, and he felt her fingers guiding his chin. Obediently he tasted, licking and biting her skin. He cupped her ass, slipping his touch into the moist slit. At the front she was completely hairless, not what he had expected, and it felt strange, alien, without being able to see.

His cock lay dormant. Tawny freed it. He felt her tongue engage and if anything was going to get him hard this was it.
She flicked across his penis, circling the head, and moaned, taking him in her mouth. Everything about this should have been turning him on, but every time he went to let go something stopped him.

Tawny after the crash; how she had recoiled from his injuries.

Get him away from me!
She had yelped, as if he were a monster.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked now. The question came from a different mouth to the one that had moments ago been pleasuring his balls; it was the voice of his History teacher at school.
Pay attention, Jacob! What’s the matter with you?

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Keep going.’

‘Like hell I am. You want to screw, then try getting hard.’

‘What do you think I’m doing?’

She laughed scornfully. Jacob heard the swish of water as she backed away.

‘Sorry if I didn’t realise it was going to be such an effort. The impression you gave me before we came out here, I thought you’d be spunking all over the place!’

‘I guess I’m not in the best frame of mind. Go figure.’

A pause before she asked, ‘Is it me?’

‘No.’

‘Is it because you can’t see me?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘It must be. If you could see me you wouldn’t be having this problem.’

‘It isn’t a problem.’

She snorted, confidence restored. ‘It isn’t anything.’

He fumbled for his clothes. Tawny didn’t help.

‘I’m not used to this,’ he said.

‘Believe me,’ Tawny hauled herself from the pool, ‘neither am I.’

He felt, rather than heard, her go.

Jacob dressed alone.

He put everything on the wrong way round, and had to wait for the next person to come to the pool and assist him before he could get back to camp.

45

N
ight fell. The fire flickered, red and gold, casting a glow across their sleeping bodies. The lagoon was a sheet of ink, creamy moonshine thrown across its surface. Flames leaped and sprang; and beyond the beach, behind the palms, the deep jungle trembled with nocturnal imaginings. Dark screams sprang from a dark place.

Celeste went to the shore. She listened to the wash of the sea as it kissed the sand and with it her toes. It was warm at night, soaking up the heat from the beach.

Serrated cliffs were visible, giant silhouettes above the silent indigo. In a spill of moonlight, a shape glided darkly through the water.

Another shark fin followed instantly.

The realisation of this prehistoric creature was incredible. Fear was dwarfed by awe, for in this context the animal seemed less terrifying than majestic.

Here, it belonged, and they were the imposters. This was its home, not theirs.

She daren’t tell the others that she couldn’t swim. She didn’t want to be weak, or to be ruled out of things, the pathetic woman that Carl always told her she was.

Tawny had already targeted her for sticking to the shallows instead of the pool.
‘You can’t soap-dodge for ever, you
know.
’ If only she knew how Celeste scrubbed night and day, rinsing off her crime until the skin bled and tore. Then Tawny had added, maliciously, under her breath, ‘
Fucking Europeans.
’

Celeste returned to the fire, cracking and hissing as it spat orange gems into the night. Sleeping bodies were scattered on the sand. By the forgiving glow of the flames, Jacob looked young and vulnerable, like a child. Innocent.

A sparkle caught her eye, winking in the darkness.
Diamonds.

Next to a gently snoring Tawny was a shallow, wide boulder, on which the chain was delicately laid. Celeste knew that Jacob had bought the necklace for her. Tawny hadn’t stopped going on about it, making sure Celeste was in earshot every time she did. ‘
He pursued me like you wouldn’t believe—flowers, jewellery, you name it! It’s kind of cute. What sane girl says no to diamonds?
’

It had been months since Celeste had last stolen. She watched the gems, thinking of Jacob, and Tawny, and Carl, and how out of control the world had become.

She crept closer. Temptation beckoned.

She listened for Tawny’s exhalations, a rhythmic murmur, and reached out.

Unseen, Celeste lifted the diamonds, her swift fingers pearl-white in the liquid sable. Her pulse slowed. Her blood calmed. She watched Tawny’s face and wondered at how something so lovely could be so unkind.

All night she held the jewels in the palm of her hand, tight, as if someone already knew they were there and would come to take them from her.

A shriek erupted from the forest. It was met by a second, this one a shout, almost human. Kevin shivered. He turned his back on the trees that marked the limit of their territory.

The dividing wall was deep and inscrutable. It frightened him; in the pitch it crept closer, a faceless, nameless shroud behind which mad things flourished.

Everyone was asleep.

A solitary tear rolled out of Kevin’s eye and plopped down to his ear. He sat up, swallowed his sobs, and traced into the sand the KC symbol that adorned all his album covers. Come the morning, when the tide washed in, the sign would dissolve. It felt significant.

At home, the world revolved around Kevin Chase. Out here, Kevin Chase ceased to be. All the petty grievances he had held against Sketch, how trivial they seemed now. All the times he had told his mom to staple her cake-hole shut, or sworn at his PR, or stomped off with Trey, or blasted Rusty for a pointless thing …

He wished Sketch were here to tell him what to do. Kevin had never decided on much himself—assistants were always on hand; hordes of his subjects grovelling to help—and who could blame him? He had lived like a god, and gods didn’t need to look after themselves. Out here, he was no god. He was a castaway.

If he were back in LA, hearing this shit happen to someone else, he would figure they had all died. Of course he would. More bleak was the fact he would give it all of five minutes’ thought before focusing on the next distraction: where to get a cookie milkshake, who was giving him most love on Twitter, where the label wanted to shoot his new kick-ass album cover …

Maybe the loss of his pills would bring about a quicker, merciful end.

The pills.

In living memory, Kevin had never let a day pass without them. Realising their loss had been like toppling from a skyscraper. He would keep falling, and only when he had fallen for long enough would he start to see the effects of the lapse. He was convinced that things were about to change.

Without his pills, he would start to transform.

Into what, he did not know.

Mitch checked the gold watch. Three a.m. Noiselessly he drew a log from the pile and held it to the fire. The end glowed, throwing off sparks that whispered and cracked. The fire betrayed their presence. It found them out. It made them conspicuous to anyone who cared to look. It was a single candle left to burn in a deserted house.

Angela stirred and moaned, turning in her sleep. Mitch stilled. He waited. He had to be sure. He didn’t want anyone following, not where he was going.

The torch was lit. Mitch turned to the raven forest. It welcomed him, the noises deep inside calls to a dark and curious part of his soul.

With barely a ripple, the trees swallowed him.

Inside, the tropical air was singing. Animal cries whipped through the canopy, impossible to separate or identify. Monkey screams and livid birdcalls, a flutter of wings and the shake of a branch, vibrating undergrowth swarming round his feet—and, at a lower, more menacing pitch, a suffering yowl. It was caught in the throat, thick, mournful, melancholy, close to a growl but not quite. At intervals it seemed horribly close, at others far away, but then Mitch reminded himself there could be more than one creature making it. The forest was rife with nameless plagues.

Flame held aloft, he began the trek to the mountain. It was easier than the first day. Others had taken the route since, flattening the vegetation into a path. Though the night brought with it new menace, nothing could be as bad as the heat of high noon.

After a time he emerged on to the plateau. Up here the starrich vault seemed close enough to touch, and the crisp, clear moon was dimpled with craters.

He crossed the plinth, without hesitation scrambling down the side of the mountain, gripping the holds and footings that broke up the lethal gradient. Several times he stumbled, slipping on loose dirt, and grabbed a clutch of weeds, careful not to drop his torch for fear of setting fire to the dry, sun-baked moss.

Finally he was spat out onto the beach.

It was an unfriendly shoreline; the crags were cruel and the sea bruised and heaving, swelling around clusters of hostile, skull-splitting rock and churning white froth against the cliffs. He remembered a movie he had shot in the eighties, his renegade character on a mission to rescue his lost love. Mitch had punched pirates, leaped into writhing breakers and abseiled down precipices.
Tony Gunn.
He hadn’t thought of the character’s name in years.

Across the sand, the mouth of the cave grinned back.

Mitch advanced. What footprints he had seen would have been washed away—unless a new set had been made. He felt fear, but he also felt deliverance. If they were here, he would find them. He could not be the hunted any more.

He had to become the hunter.

Even before Mitch entered the fissure, he could feel how freezing it was. Guided by torchlight, he stepped into its damp, slick interior. It smelled of salt. Stalagmites rose like witches’ fingers from the pitted sand, lifeless yet organic,
the misshapen bulges that millennia had spawned, one lonely drip at a time.

Drip, drip, drip …

Sound echoed through the cavern, ghostly and thin. It must connect with another cavity further up, some flue where the wind got in.

Drip, drip, drip
…

Mitch moved deeper. To think of this hollow as unexplored since the sun first warmed the Earth. To think that he was the first person to enter …

Or was he?

A snake of sand, twisting between rocks, and there, illuminated by the glow, was a chain of footprints. Fright slid under Mitch’s skin. Ahead was darkness, into which the prints meandered then disappeared. He held the flame high, his knuckles tight, afraid to look further in, afraid as a child of what might soar from the shadows.

Drip, drip, drip
…

His torch was being extinguished. Dribbling stalactites pit-patted on the stick, making it falter and fizz. The glow around him shrunk, closer and closer, and died.

A sour lump rose in his throat.

Turning, Mitch saw he had been lured in deep. The entrance to the cave was a remote pinch in a stifling canvas and he dashed for it, stubbing his toe on the uneven ground and tripping in his haste. The aperture of open beach trembled closer.

A cry of wings! Black terror. An explosion around his head, hitting him, slapping his face, clawing his hairpiece, as the cave sprang to frenzied life. A rush of air punched him forward and knocked him flat. Fragments of black fog assailed him, leathery and swift and hectic, and beyond his own cries of alarm wheeled a shrill, ceaseless squeak. Mitch buckled
his arms over his head, his mouth filled with grit, as the stampede prickled and shivered across his back. With horror he realised that something had attached itself to his head. It whipped and pulled, twisted and tore, trying to break free. He could feel its claws rip through his toupee, tangled in the thick crown and yanking it free. A colony of bats shot out into the night and he reeled after them, yanking his rug with one hand and the other flailing its way in the dark.

Onto the beach he flew like a madman, thrashing his head until finally, disastrously, the rodent broke free, taking off into the night with a thick slap of wings.

Its silhouette flew against the moon, that heavenly orb as round and bald as the man now gazing up at it, for clasped in the fruit bat’s toes was the senator’s chestnut wig.

46

A
ngela found refuge in closed eyes. There, she could be with him.

She tried to capture every detail, the crease in Noah’s cheeks and the way his eyes lit up when he laughed. The day he had picked her up in his friend’s car, the first time they had gone to the lake, and she had spent the whole ride watching his hands on the wheel and wanting to hold one.

In her mind they were together. It didn’t matter where they were, so long as they were together. She was buried in the warmth of his chest and could smell his skin, that safe, Noah smell. Sometimes she captured it so sharply that she could almost believe it were true, and when she woke in bursts to the eternal sky and remembered where she was and what had happened, her heart almost stopped.