The Chosen (19 page)

He pulled her into the solid warmth of his chest, asking no more questions, stroking her hair. “It’s all right. You don’t need to tell me. Whatever happened was horror enough for you. I’ve been there myself a time or two, especially when I was young. I wasn’t meant to be a Hunter like Pa. It was too much for a child to take.”

A comforting hand rubbed up and down her back, draining away the fear and the pain so she could function again. His strength during her moment of weakness meant more than he would ever know.

China pulled her head up from his chest and looked into his face. “I’m sorry. The dark stairs. I remember stairs like those before . . .” She stopped, the thickness in her throat making it hard to speak. She swallowed hard.

“It won’t be dark as long as we have Marley’s coil illuminator. And I will be with you.”

She glanced back above them, but she could see nothing but darkness. The space smelled of damp earth and mildew, and a faint trace of sulfur carried on damp air. “We won’t get back out that way, will we?”

“I don’t think we were meant to. But if Diego found a way out, then so shall we.”

They moved forward, cautiously, but as quickly as they could. The days and hours were counting down, and every minute was precious, not to be wasted. Up ahead the stone staircase leveled out into a smooth floor. The chisel marks revealed it had been carved out in the rock by the hand of man, not nature. Three separate tunnel entrances branched off from the landing.

“Which way do we go?”

Remington narrowed his eyes and moved the light of the coil illuminator over each tunnel opening. “I don’t know.”

 

 

He ran the rim of light from the coil illuminator over the rock above the tunnels, looking for some sign. There, chipped into the stone was the triple cross. He jerked his head to the tunnel on the left. “That way.”

China didn’t argue, just stuck close to him, her step determined, her head held high. They wandered for hours through the stone tunnels, and with their trudging steps and the relative quiet of the tunnels, it seemed interminably longer.

Finally China broke the silence. “You spent an awful lot of time reading your mother’s diary and Diego’s codex on the submarine.”

“Are you trying to strike up a conversation with me? It really isn’t necessary.”

“I was getting to an honest question. I wanted to know if you found anything in the diary that might help us.”

“Ma’s diary said a lot of things. It talked about the differences in the Hunters my father worked with. It talked about how the Legion was beginning to crumble as men gave up trying to fight what they saw as a losing battle after centuries. It talked about her fear that her three sons were spoken of as the answer to the age-old prophecy that would end the threat of the Darkin to our world. My mother didn’t want us to be the Chosen.” But most important Ma’s diary had told him about something that had little to do with Hunting or Darkin. It had contained insights into how she’d loved her husband and her boys.

A pause stretched out between them as China nibbled on her bottom lip. She turned to him, curiosity in her eyes. “What did she want for you?”

“She wanted us to have normal lives. To find a woman someday who could handle the life we were raised to lead as Hunters.” He’d closed the diary after he’d finished it and realized what a special person his mother really had been.

“So what kind of woman is that?”

“Well it isn’t anyone I associated with at university, from the upper echelons of society back east, I can tell you that much.”

“What about a hearty western frontierswoman who’d be able to handle being married to a Jackson? I doubt they’d wilt under the tough and dangerous circumstances you and your brothers face as Hunters.”

He frowned at her. “Now you make it sound like I’m looking for oxen. No thank you.” He wanted a woman who was both intelligent and tough, with beauty and a sense of humor. He’d begun to think that kind of woman didn’t exist—until he’d met China. Granted, she wasn’t totally human, but that was beginning to matter less and less to him. He appreciated her humor even in the darkest of times. He appreciated her intelligence and her natural beauty. Most of all he liked that no matter how hard things got, she forged forward, never questioning the importance of her purpose. In that way she was very like him.

“The light’s getting low.” He shook the coil illuminator to regenerate the flow of energy and glanced at the woman walking along beside him. Her blond hair tumbled down her back, and the now ragged edges of her black dress swung around her booted feet.

She caught him staring at her. “What, do I have something stuck in my hair?”

He grinned. It was tempting to tease her, but they’d already been through enough for one day. “No, I was admiring your beautiful hair; it’s like cornsilk.”

China snorted. “Do you really think those rivers Diego mentioned are real?” she asked, quickly changing the subject. “They could just be Hunter exaggeration.”

“I don’t think he was exaggerating. What could he hope to gain?”

“He might have thought to scare us off.”

Remington gave a brittle laugh. “Diego knew my pa better than that. He ought to know Cyrus’s boys were just like him.”

“So if he wasn’t exaggerating, then that clacking I hear can’t be a good thing.”

“Never is.” Remington ran his hands along the butt of the Blaster and lightly traced the trigger to know exactly where it was. The clacking and skittering sounds grew louder, like a malevolent whisper echoing on the stone walls.

“What do you think it is?”

They turned a corner, and Remington stopped dead. Nothing could have prepared him for this. The River of Scorpions was an actual river bed that cut the chamber in two halves down the middle, filled with hundreds of thousands of scorpions of all shapes and sizes.

Despite Diego’s description, the writhing mass of scorpions chilled his blood. Next to snakes, scorpions were some of his least favorite creatures.

“How do we get across?” China’s voice wavered, which strengthened his own resolve to get this over with and press on. He couldn’t let his own irrational fears keep them from moving forward.

“Diego was pretty damn specific. Go in on foot and you’ll drown in the things.” He resisted the urge to shudder, thinking of all those legs and the sting of a million tails.

“We could blast them,” she suggested, then gave him a manic grin.

“I think you like that gun too much. Besides, you might kill a good chunk of them down the middle, but then it would only get the ones remaining fired up enough to sting anything within striking distance.”

China was being awfully quiet. She wasn’t still contemplating using Marley’s Blaster was she? He glanced back just to be sure. Her head was tilted back, and she was staring at the ceiling of the cavern. “What are you looking at?” He cranked his head back and narrowed his eyes in the dim light to see if he could see it too.

“Don’t those look like steps to you?” She pointed at a row of symmetrical lines that carried over from one side of the cavern to the other.

“Upside down steps, maybe. Isn’t any way we could walk on them.” The longer he stared at them, the more his perspective shifted. “Maybe those aren’t stairs at all; maybe they’re handholds.”

China frowned, pulling her bottom lip in between her teeth and gnawing on it. “It’s worth a shot. Not like we got any other options here unless you wanna spend the next few months building a bridge.”

He raised a brow. “You could just fly across.”

A wide smile instantly brightened her face. “I can, can’t I?”

Remington double-checked the straps on his back to ensure they were secure, then rubbed his hands together. He started climbing the roughhewn steps in the wall. At first it was easy enough. He could use both his hands and his feet. But the more horizontal the surface of the cave wall became, the more he had to rely on just his arms. His shoulders and forearms burned from the exertion, and his fingertips were raw, scraped, and throbbing from digging into the rock.

“I’m going to fly over to the other side,” China called up to him. Her voice echoed off the stone walls. The sound threw the scorpions into an even bigger frenzy.
Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t—

Remington heard the increased clacking of their hard bodies moving against one another and their claws snapping. He glanced down and saw the undulating tide of arachnids. His navel shrank back to meet his backbone. God, he hated the things. He cursed under his breath and kept going.

A bright flash of color and a loud squawk came from the opposite side. China turned back from a parrot to her human form and leaned her shoulder up against the rock wall. “How long you plannin’ to hang out in here?” Her tone held just enough gibe that he started moving faster.

His grip wasn’t as sure as it should have been. And he slipped, dangling one-armed fifteen feet over the swarming scorpions. His stomach dropped not just to his toes, but out through the bottom of his boots. China’s cry of alarm didn’t help any. After all he’d been through and done, he sure as hell didn’t want to die in a writhing pit of pain, stung to death by those things.

A curious grinding sound started to shake the steps above him. He grabbed hold of the rock step above him and hung on as the ceiling started lowering toward the scorpions. His muscles screamed, and his fingers began to grow damp and slip.

“Remington!”

“Not now!”

“Remington!”

He glared at her. “Holy hell, woman, not now!”

She returned his glare, threw her hands up in the air in disgust, then pointed. “Listen to me dammit! It’s a bridge! You’re on the underside of a bridge!”

For the first time Remington looked up instead of down.

The steps were part of an arched bridge of stone that lowered slowly downward from the ceiling of the cavern toward the dark living river of pain below. His arms were just about to give out. With one last heave he swung his body weight and managed to kick one leg up on top of the steps. The shaking of the bridge made his hold tenuous at best.
Snap!
The strap on his pack suddenly gave way, throwing his body off-balance and threatening to dump the remainder of their meager supplies—and more important Diego’s transcript and the small stone statue—into the River of Scorpions.

 

 

China nearly nibbled her fingernails to the quick as he clung to the underside of the bridge like a baby monkey to its mother, the pack dangling off of him. The stone bridge was lowering in channels in the walls, bringing him close enough to the scorpions that she was certain he was going to drop the pack, fall in, or both.

Remington grimaced as he scrambled to the topside of the stone bridge. The weight on his shoulder shifted as the pack slipped. His Hunter reflexes served him well as he grabbed it and swung it up onto the steps. He lay there for a moment, the air sawing in and out of his lungs.

The bridge came to rest with a heavy
thunk
on the ground below. China ran to him. His chest and belly were scraped raw and red from the stone.

“You did it!”

He gave her a weak smile. “How’d you find the bridge?”

“It was more like it found me. I leaned up against one of the carvings on the wall, because I spied what I think is an exit, and the carving sank into the wall and the bridge started to move.”

Remington rolled to his side and sat up. “Better than landing in a pit of scorpions.”

China carefully leaned over the edge and looked down. There were no rails on the bridge; it was simply an arch of stone steps, and she didn’t want to fall in any more than Remington.

The scorpions writhed and twisted, their claws clacking and their tails arching as they snapped and stung at one another just five feet below them. She shuddered.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Remington got to his feet and held out a hand in invitation. “Ladies first.”

The exit China had discovered was cleverly hidden between the folds of rock on the far side of the River of Scorpions. From the opposite side it couldn’t be seen. Only if you managed to survive the river was it possible to find it at all.

“What in the blazes were they thinking to hide Elwin’s piece of the Book in such a place?” Remington muttered.

China ran her fingers along the walls, trying to keep her bearings as the narrow passage twisted and turned upon itself, coiling back and around until she had no sense of direction. “I’m sure they thought if it was the local’s version of Hell, then no one would try to steal it. That, and they probably had guides who knew this place.”

Remington gave a humorless, dry laugh. “And never mind about the poor bastards who’d eventually have to come down and get it out to save the world.”

She speared him with a glance. “Didn’t the three brothers who hacked it apart intend for it never to be reunited?”

He gave her half a smile. “Know your Hunter lore, do you?”

“A little.”

“Then you know when Cadel, Haydn, and Elwin separated the Book of Legend, they did it because the Gates of Nyx had cracked open, and they feared the Book would be taken by the Darkin. Problem is, the only thing that can close the Gates back again—”

“Is the whole Book. I know.”

He quirked an eyebrow at her, telling her without words exactly what he thought of her retort. China quickly changed the subject. “What else did Diego’s transcript of the codex say we were in for?”

“Diego didn’t lie, if that’s what you’re asking. It mentions both a River of Scorpions and a River of Blood. Something about a room with a wind of blades, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense, a place of biting cold, and the house of fire.”

“Well at least there’s no more water. That’s a relief.”

“China McGee, you aren’t like other girls. Only you would think what’s ahead was mild compared to another swim.”

He gave her a brilliant smile that made her stomach do a backflip. China pressed a hand to her belly to quell the sensation. Her feet seemed to stick to the floor.

She glanced down. Her feet
were
sticking to the floor, and the walls were starting to grow shiny and smooth the farther they walked down the passage. The odor of rotten eggs permeated the air, making her want to gag. “What the hell is that stink?”

 

 

The acidic bite in the air was enough to make Remington’s eyes water. “I think we’ve found that River of Blood Diego mentioned.” The passage widened, opening into yet another cavern split in two by a wide river. This one flowed from an opening in one wall and out the other. It was a bubbling rust-red color, and twists of white steam eddied over the surface. A weird silver-white slime seemed to drip from the ceiling and coated the rock walls, making them look like they’d been plated in silver. It was weirdly beautiful and disturbing all at once.

The edges of the stream bed were black, smooth, and slick. A human skeleton lay half in, half out of the river, its fingers dug into the rock as if the person had died trying to crawl out. China shuddered.

“You don’t think that’s one of those bone warriors do you?”

“Let’s be sure.” Remington shoved the rest of the skeleton into the river with his boot, where it smoked and quickly sank beneath the surface. Damn. That stuff was lethal.

China whistled. “Looks like sulfuric acid. It’s eaten the rock down to the layer of volcanic glass beneath.”

Remington glanced at her. “Is that a guess or based on your extensive in-depth study of chemistry?” he asked, a note of sarcasm in his voice.

“Darkin, remember? If it smells like sulfur and looks like it could eat your hand off, chances are it’s acid.”

Remington smiled. “You’re smart, I’ll give you that. If we ever get out of this hellhole, remind me to introduce you to Marley. He’ll like you.”

“Even if I’m Darkin?” she challenged.

Remington shrugged. “Point taken. I’ll tag along to referee.” He surveyed the space looking for weird stairs, points of rock that could be possible levers, signs of the Legion, anything that could potentially get them across. “Now how do we get across it?”

“I’m not sure I can shift again so soon, otherwise I’d fly across.” China narrowed her eyes and stared at the slime. “How do you think that stuff survives in here?”

He turned and peered at the wall. “What? That gelatinous glop? It’s not even a living thing. It doesn’t have to survive anything; it just is.”

China got closer to the glistening silvery white material that covered nearly every surface in the chamber. “I think it’s more than that.”

She pulled a piece of the mamey sapote fruit from one of the packs and dipped half of it into the slime.

“Dear God, what do you think you’re doing?”

“An experiment.”

She approached the reddish bubbling river with caution, taking care to hold her breath, and she lightly dipped the slimed section of the mamey sapote into the river. It steamed a little, but when she pulled it back, the fruit’s outer brown skin was still intact, and the slime slipped off of it, far more thin and watery than it had been before.

China grinned at Remington. “Look. It works!”

He frowned. “Are you sincerely suggesting we coat ourselves in that goo?”

“Did you have another suggestion, other than spending years building some sort of air flotation device to ferry us across?”

Remington opened his mouth then snapped it shut, making his teeth click together. He paused for a moment. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. Come here and I’ll cover your back.”

This was not at all what he’d had in mind when he’d been thinking of them covering one another’s backs. China swept her hand over the surface of the rock, collecting a handful of the gelatinous muck. She slapped it onto his back and shoulders and began to spread it out. It clung to his skin and clothing, oddly warm and slippery feeling.

“For the record, this is disgusting.”

China snorted. “And getting sprayed down with viperanox guts isn’t?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Turn.”

The only good thing about having China smear the slime over him was that she touched nearly every inch of him. Every gliding touch of her hands amped up his physical attraction to her another notch. “Make sure you get a nice thick layer on me,” he said as she rubbed the substance over his thighs. He was hoping she’d go higher.

She arched a brow at him. “I think you can get the rest yourself. My turn.”

For the first time since they had passed the River of Scorpions he had a reason to smile. He scooped up a handful of the nasty mucus. It oozed through his fingers and clung to his hands. He smeared it over her form, taking extra precaution to make sure there was a good layer of the stuff on her very nice breasts.

China wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. Now I’m wishing we had water.”

“Then it
does
bother you more than you were letting on.”

China glared at him. “I’m doin’ my best to make do with our situation. You could try the same.”

The river was narrow enough, not more than a ten-foot stretch, but it was still too wide for a man to just jump across. Remington took their packs and threw them across. One made it; the other didn’t. It dissolved into a thin brown ooze on the surface of the acid.

China groaned. “Please tell me that pack wasn’t the one with the codex and the statue.”

“It wasn’t. That was our food supply.” He tossed the Blaster as well, landing it safely atop the remaining pack. He let out a sigh of relief.

China caught his gaze. Panic was showing in her eyes. “How deep do you think it is?”

Remington frowned. There was no way to really tell. “As long as this stuff works, it won’t matter. I can swim across . . . with you.”

But that first step was a doozy. If the slime didn’t protect them, if it had just been a fluke, then he was likely to lose a limb and die a swift, horribly painful death. Of course, considering their surroundings, if he didn’t try it he was going to die a long, agonizingly protracted death by boredom and starvation.

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Any last words you wish to say to me before I leap to my death?”

Her mouth trembled a bit, and he instantly felt like a cad for teasing her. “Don’t say things like that. We’re going to be fine. We’re going to survive.”

So much for being lighthearted, he thought. He made sure even the bottoms of his feet were covered in slime before he lowered his foot slowly into the river. The liquid was hot, but it didn’t sear his skin.

He slipped his other foot in, prepared to tread water until she got in so he could swim across with both of them. His feet touched bottom, and the liquid reached up to his chest. Remington glanced back at her. “Come on in, the water’s fine.” He was braced for the mucus to wash away, and his skin and bones with it. “Hurry up.”

China snorted. “If you don’t mind, I’ll hold back on hoopin’ and hollerin’ about it until we reach the other side.”

She sat on the edge of the riverbank, took a few fast, deep breaths, then one big long draw of air, and held her breath as she slipped into his arms.

Remington swam as fast as he could with a one-armed stroke across the river and hoisted China up on the bank. The slime dripped off of her, running in rivulets and puddling around her in silver pools. A burning sensation in his legs told Remington his own coating of slime was wearing off quickly.

He pulled out of the river and looked at his legs. His pants were disintegrating below the knee and his boots were steaming. “That stuff worked better than I expected, but not quite good enough.”

He tore off the boots and his socks, leaving his feet bare. “If Diego’s right, we’ve got a few more tests before we can reach the Book.”

China groaned.

The walking got tougher as they went on. The tunnels twisted, rose, and fell. The slime had dried to a thin crust that she picked at as they walked, trying to peel it off her skin. China was so damn hungry her stomach growled nearly as loudly as a hellhound, and they’d long since run out of both food and water. Her body was feeling the lack of food, and her feet were beginning to drag.

The floor dipped below her foot, making China’s ankle roll under. At first she thought it was just the uneven surface of the paving stones. But as she caught herself to keep from stumbling, she heard something out of place in the cave-like room they’d just entered.

“Remington . . .”

He turned and looked at her, swinging his coil illuminator in her direction. “Did I just hear something click?”

She nodded and moved closer to him, grasping his arm as the rumble of stone grinding against stone echoed behind and above them. A limestone slab slid down and blocked the doorway behind them. From the ceiling dropped a series of shining obsidian blades on either side of the room. They began to swing in opposite directions, crisscrossing paths in the middle, making it impossible to dodge between one swipe of a lethal blade and the next.

Remington held her back behind him, watching the movement of the blades that flashed each time they passed the beam of the coil illuminator. “We should have anticipated this and been more careful.”

“So this is what the wind of blades meant,” China muttered. “At least they named it accurately.” The air puffed into her face, blowing her hair back each time a blade swung by.

 

 

Remington watched the blades move, analyzed them. “There’s a space between them in the arc of their swing. If we time things just right, we should be able to make each space and move between them.”

He grabbed her hand and crouched into a running stance. “We’ll make a run for it on the count of three. One. Two.”

“No!” She yanked her hand from his. “There’s no clear path. Our movements have to be to a precise beat to make it through the blades.” She began to hum a tune as she watched the blades.

He crossed his arms. “And you have a better method?”

A glint of amusement lit her eyes. “I think we should go
dancing
.”

He glanced at the blades and frowned. “Dancing? Now?”

“It’d at least make death a bit more fun.”

Remington sighed, grasped her hand lightly, and spun her about, putting his hand at the base of her spine and holding her arm extended to the side to waltz with her.

“This what you had in mind?”

“Well, it’d be better without the swinging blades of death, but I suppose it’s the only chance we’ll get.”

He tracked the movement of the blades. “Keep humming that tune.”

She obliged, and together they began to sway. Remington glanced at the blades, counting silently in his head to the time of her tune. One. Two. Three. One. He moved them forward. Two. Their feet came together, and he pressed his hand against her waist, signaling her to quickly turn as the first blade came swinging back. Three. He took a quick step backward as the blade finished passing behind them, waiting a beat before moving forward on the next step. The stream of air caused by the blade ruffled the back of his hair. That was close. Too close.

Over and over they repeated their waltz step and turn, slowly dancing across the room in time to the soft hum of her voice. Beneath his hand her body relaxed into the rhythm, and China closed her eyes, content to follow his lead.

It would have been easier to get caught up in the moment, to believe they were just dancing at some social soirée among his college friends in the midst of a ballroom aglow with gaslight. Remington wished he could relax into it as she did, but he kept the relentless, repetitive count going in his head. Their very lives depended on it. So he did the next best thing and looked his fill at the smooth planes of her cheeks and the dark fan of lashes resting against them. She looked, in a word, angelic. His gaze dipped lower to the lush mouth pressed into a near kiss as she hummed.