A Haven in Ash Page 6

  He shoved the amulet in his pocket, keeping one hand over it. Rising to his feet, he swiveled, head just cresting the rye as he turned to find the wall, and Alixa—

  Somewhere behind, the rye rustled.

  Not the wind—but something in it.

  Jasen’s heart skipped. The bottom fell out of his stomach.

  The vile, bitter smell of rot met his nose.

  Scourge.

  6

  “Jasen?” Alixa called again. Renewed panic filled her voice.

  “Stay back,” Jasen called in a heavy whisper. “And be quiet!”

  “Jasen, you need to—”

  Run, I know! he did not say.

  He turned away from the rustling, directing toward the wall again. Putting on a burst of speed, he set into his third sprint of the day—

  A growl filled the air. Something heavy moved—

  “Jasen!!” Alixa screamed.

  It had risen—

  Now the ground vibrated, as it leapt—

  Jasen twisted back.

  His breath caught in his throat.

  In the twilight, the thing was even more frightening. A streak of awful grey, the color of diseased flesh, only the eyes were distinct—and they were just as black as Jasen remembered, perhaps blacker, empty pits he would get lost in—

  Then he tripped, and the world went sideways.

  “Jasen!” Alixa cried.

  He shoved back to his feet. Pain raced up his arm—one hand in his pocket, he hadn’t been able to break his fall other than to twist, the way a cat did as it fell through the air.

  He grunted.

  All these precious seconds …

  Pushing off again, he broke into a desperate sprint. He groped through the rye, pushing stalks aside, slipping through them far too slowly—and that damned burning in his arm, like he’d been stung by an oversized wasp, right in the elbow, its black venom spreading in each direction like fire—

  The wall loomed—yet still the scourge flew, Jasen could feel every vibration as it landed hard behind him. Did it find itself tangled, like the other? He dared not look to check; would focus only on Alixa’s eyes, panicked whites, as she screamed words he didn’t register but which surely meant only one thing: that the scourge was drawing closer—and this time Jasen was out of luck—

  A particularly fierce cluster of stalks refused to yield, pushing back, jabbing at his skin like barbs.

  He pushed with all his might—

  The scourge roared, right behind him. A blast of hot, rancid air kissed the back of Jasen’s neck, and he felt every hair there wilt, like grass exposed to a noxious fog—

  “JASEN!” Alixa screamed.

  He tripped and spilled over.

  The fall sent him tumbling into the very short span of grass between rye and the boundary around Terreas.

  It also turned the world upside-down. He twisted in a desperate bid to save his arm. But that only put him more off-kilter, and where he might’ve kept his footing and been able to turn the stumble into an awkward vault over the boundary, back to safety, he instead went over. The boundary’s stonework approached his face much too hard and fast—

  He slammed his head.

  Stars erupted with a fresh burst of pain, radiating out from his temple.

  Jasen’s head swum in a daze. Dimly, he was aware that he had impacted the ground—but that had been long seconds ago, hadn’t it?

  Another wave of airborne rot washed over him, parting the fog.

  He blinked up at the sky—it was night; why was it night? Hadn’t it been blue?—and then every sense returned in one fell swoop—just in time to see the scourge part the last of the rye mere inches from where he lay sprawled.

  The sight of it sucked the breath from Jasen’s lungs. Flesh hanging, the wolf-like thing loomed like a spectral nightmare. A thin scattering of stars had filled the sky where the clouds had finally seen fit to part, but the scourge’s ghoulish body, too long and terribly proportioned, blocked them out.

  Its mouth was a yawning maw, huffing like an overheated dog … and above it were those terrible eyes. Black, empty chasms, darker than the truest night, they stared down at Jasen. He could fall into their depths and perish.

  It leaned forward.

  Every hair, including those that had fallen flaccid and dead to his skin, rose. It was an animal’s response, a last desperate bid to puff himself up and scare off this imposing threat—and that was all Jasen was: an animal. No better than these creatures that forsook their land, he was simply another creature in a chain, with no purpose greater, no meaning.

  And now, Jasen was prey.

  He wished he could run. But his whole body was frozen, his brain too; the gears spinning in it had come to a grinding halt.

  The scourge pressed closer.

  A hot breath caressed Jasen’s cheeks. It stank to high heaven, enough that a man might vomit until his stomach gave only spasms and tiny sprays of bile. Yet still Jasen couldn’t move. Could only stare into those eyes, coming closer, closer …

  Its nose touched him on the forehead.

  A dog’s might be wet. This was dry, lank, cold.

  It sniffed.

  Working out what I’ll taste like, Jasen thought.

  Another sniff. Deeper, this one.

  From somewhere very, very far away, a tremulous voice whispered, “J-Jasen …”

  He didn’t see; his eyes were shut tight, lest he stare into that cavern of a mouth, the last thing he would ever see. But he knew why Alixa spoke; he felt it, felt the vibrations of earth, coming nearer, and heard the way the rye parted, left and right.

  More of them. They’d come to feast.

  “J-Jasen …”

  He wished he could tell her to go. To flee, so she need never watch.

  No words would come. Only shallow breaths, leaving in shudders.

  New noses pressed him, right to his skin. One, on the left, buried itself in the fold where his jaw transitioned to neck. There was something hot and sticky on it—the blood of a fresh kill, Jasen thought. He did not cringe; merely flinched just a fraction, before another found his chin.

  They breathed.

  Jasen did not.

  Every inhalation was long. Each exhale rasped out.

  Then they receded, noses leaving him one by one.

  Jasen waited, his eyes pressed tight together. To look would be madness; to take a last glance into their jaws now they had scented him, deemed him worth tearing apart.

  Alixa, he willed. Go. Please.

  The scourge shuffled …

  The rye shifted.

  The vibrations of their feet began to … move away?

  They were leaving him?

  Jasen shook. He cracked on eye, just a fraction …

  The scourge had turned their backs on him. They slunk into the rye. Only their backs remained, long and lumpy, the vertebrae of their spines protruding like misshapen welts.

  And then they were in the crop, and going.

  Jasen stared.

  But … why?

  He had no time to think, for as the scourge vanished into the field, Alixa’s hand came down on the boundary behind him. “Jasen,” she wheezed. “Come over.”

  The first time he tried to speak, his vocal cords would not work.

  The second time, he said, “I can’t.”

  “Please,” Alixa begged. Now that his ears were attuning back to her from the scourge, he could hear the sound of tears in her voice, a warble threatening from her throat. She was close to falling apart.

  So was he.

  “Please come over,” she whispered.

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re not trying!”

  No. But the adrenaline had left him, turned him into ooze. He didn’t have the strength to move, couldn’t, probably ever.

  “Just wait,” he whispered. Now the words were coming harder too; the adrenaline flooding out of him just as quickly as it had flooded in was letting the fear take over. His throat stuck,
the way it did when he felt himself about to cry, but tried desperately to hold it together. A tremor had set off in his hands, buried in the grass to either side of where he’d fallen.

  His skin was cold. So cold.

  “Jasen,” Alixa breathed. “Please.”

  He closed his eyes. Rested his head against the boundary.

  He should move. He should. He needed to. Those scourge had gone, but they weren’t far away. They might change their mind. They might turn on their heels, lumber back over here. So Jasen needed to move, ancestors curse him, haul himself back over the boundary. He had his mother’s pendant, and he’d been lucky enough to escape twice with his life. So force yourself out of this fog, why don’t you, and get back to Terreas instead of continuing to tempt fate?

  No use. The muscles wouldn’t go.

  Damn, but it was cold.

  Alixa let out a pained noise. “Ohh, Jasen … Move! Move, damn you!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Move!”

  He shook, hard.

  Something sharp was pressing against his back

  “Argh!” Alixa cried.

  She gripped the boundary wall behind him, and with a cry like none other he’d heard from her, she leapt over the top—

  Her dress caught. The pained battle cry in her throat turned to a note of panic.

  She slammed hard into the earth at Jasen’s side.

  “Alixa,” he breathed. A fresh burst of panic swept over him, unlocking him. He twisted, one hand grappling for her.

  Lifting her head, Alixa turned frightened eyes to him. They were so wide, dominated by so much white—

  A scourge roar rent the air.

  One charged—no, two.

  “Alixa!” Jasen breathed.

  She stumbled up, and he grabbed for her shoulder, fighting to pull her to her feet too even as he barely managed to unfold his own from under him. They didn’t want to go, didn’t seem to know which should be where, for as soon as one was settled he staggered on the other.

  Scourge leapt out of the rye, not more than twenty feet hence, a pair of them.

  Alixa shrieked—

  “Up!” Jasen wheezed. “Back—over—”

  But her dress was stuck, tangled against a hard shard sticking out of the wall. The material pulled taut, and try as she might, she could not free it, could not rise properly, could not even twist to pry at it with desperate, nimble fingers—

  The scourge leapt, one after another—

  They didn’t have time. The scourge were too close, decimating the distance too quickly. One more leap—

  Jasen grabbed Alixa’s shoulder to just shove her back over, drawing every last vestige of strength he had left in him.

  The scourge roared, leapt again—the rye crumpled beneath their feet—

  No time!

  And then, from nowhere, burst a third. It darted out of the rye from the west, bounding in a great diagonal leap—

  Jasen slammed his eyes shut, knowing this was over, that the three of them would tear him and Alixa apart in mere moments.

  The sound of a violent impact shuddered Jasen’s eardrum almost to bursting. But the scourge hadn’t slammed into him or Alixa. They’d collided with—

  One beast roared; another yelped.

  A thud as a body slammed to earth.

  Jasen cracked an eye.

  The third scourge had intercepted the others. Now it reared in front of Jasen and Alixa, its back to them, and swung its claws at the two that had turned this way when Alixa fell. One of them staggered up from its side, where it had cratered a deep depression in the rye. The other snarled, batting out—

  The scourge between loosed a roar of its own, and drove its claws across the other’s face. It fell back, keening—and the third struck again, bearing down on it from above, the bony fingers of its paw splayed so its claws covered the widest possible swath. Its victim screeched—and it was struck again, and again, knocked down—

  Alixa had clutched Jasen’s wrist without him even realizing. “What’s happening?” she cried—but that too was a wail, like the scourge’s agonized cries, and her shriek was so high and wild that Jasen was sure all of Terreas would hear it; perhaps it could even be heard in all of Luukessia.

  The first scourge had regained its footing. It crept a wide berth, blank eyes on Alixa and Jasen—

  Before it could take more than a step, their savior leapt for its throat.

  It screamed, kicking free—

  And still its eyes stuck on the two children, never leaving. It was as if its one sole purpose was to get to them, and though something stood in its way, the creature barely knew about it. It only wished to pass, and it would do so at any cost.

  It loosed itself from the third scourge’s teeth, leaping backward. Then it came in again, even wider this time, staring as it put on a mad rush of speed—

  The third scourge leapt at it. Catching it from below, it flung the attacker backward. Then it reared onto its back legs, paws risen to the sky, claws extended on those bony, protruding knuckles enshrouded in the dead, lank skin of the dead—

  It swiped down—and the scourge below it shrieked, a skree of death, as its stomach split and its innards spilled out. In the frail light of the minute scattering of stars, the gore was pitch dark.

  Alixa gasped and averted her eyes with a whimper.

  The remaining scourge hesitated. It moved, like one would make a feint in a game of kick-about that Terreas’s children played … but the awful sound of its companion being torn asunder triggered whatever fight or flight instinct resided in its brain. After one last, longing look at Jasen and Alixa, it loosed a low growl and then turned away, loping into the rye.

  Their savior waited, back still to them, watching.

  When it deemed the beast was a safe distance away, it pivoted—

  Jasen’s heart froze in his chest.

  It was going to eat him and Alixa. That was the only reason it had come to fight the others off. This scourge was starving, willing to take down its brethren so it might secure a meal for itself. And in their dalliance, Jasen and Alixa had guaranteed their own deaths.

  But the creature did not press in. It regarded them for a long, long time—perhaps only seconds, but in its black gaze those seconds drew out the way the Mr. Hughes stretched dough with a roller—and then, finally, it too loped away.

  Not far, though. Just into the rye, perhaps twenty feet along the field’s edge, and there it waited, attention once more trained on Jasen and Alixa.

  She still averted her eyes. Her face was clasped in her hands. Sobs racked her body, her shoulders heaving up and down.

  “It’s...” Jasen began, and then lost his voice. He tried again. “It’s okay. We’re safe.”

  Alixa only cried harder.

  He couldn’t blame her. How many seconds ago was it that he had been close to falling apart himself? No more than thirty, surely. Yet it felt as if hours had passed between stepping out here to find his mother’s pendant—three minutes ago, wasn’t it?—and then running, and those foul creatures’ noses upon him …

  Now his fear had fled, replaced with utter bewilderment.

  “Alixa,” he prompted, tugging at her shoulder. “We need to cross.”

  She didn’t move, at least not far, and then Jasen remembered why: her dress had gotten stuck. Keeping one hand on her shoulder, to reassure that he was there, he reached behind and unhooked the fabric. It felt torn, a small hole made where frayed ends now entwined each other; she’d have some explaining to do, followed by repairs overseen by Aunt Sidyera and her endless tongue.

  But she was alive. They both were.

  Thanks to …

  Jasen eyed it briefly. Still, it watched.

  “Alixa,” he prompted again. “Come. I’ve freed you. Let’s go back.”

  He thought she was going to be as stuck as he had been. Yet she moved, clambering awkwardly over the wall. She braced herself with only one hand; the other she kept around her mouth, h
ardly muting the sobs coming from her.

  When she was over, Jasen followed. It was difficult, though he had crossed it with such ease earlier. His legs felt bruised somehow. And when he placed an arm down to grip, a stab of pain went through him, and the ache remained. This arm would hurt for weeks, probably.

  He ran fingers across his forehead. The ache from smashing into the wall remained there. The centerpoint of it was hot and already starting to rise. Looked like he’d have some explaining to do as well.

  Alixa fell against the wall on the other side. Jasen dropped down beside her.

  She cried, hard. He thought to sling an arm over her shoulder … but this had been his doing, again, and he did not think she would appreciate it. So he did not touch her, just sat a few inches away, waiting for her sobs and tears to run out.

  When they had, she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the boundary.

  “What just happened?” she whispered after another long time.

  It was a good question—and one Jasen had no answer to.

  But he knew someone who might.

  7

  It took much goading to convince Alixa to accompany Jasen to Shilara’s run-down little place on Terreas’s edge. The encounter with the scourge seemed to have sapped much of her fight, though, because she agreed to be led, hemming and hawing as they drew closer.

  Not that Jasen wished more anxiety upon his cousin, but he couldn’t deny that he was glad to be able to push her more easily into this. It was a rare frame of mind that Alixa would be in to willingly visit Shilara, and presently he needed her. She had witnessed the altercation too, after all.

  Though the village itself still saw some activity at this time, and indeed well past it, mostly focused on the tavern, many villagers retired when full dark fell. Shilara was among them, affording them the rare sight of her house without her perched in front of it, a flask in hand. Amber light gave her away behind curtains that were not pulled perfectly together, so she was still awake. If not, Jasen was ready to rouse her.

  He hammered a fist on the door.