Across Carina (14 page)

Then she peered at Sal and me. “Care to stay for the show?”

She grinned as thin, red snakes hissed from her arms and waist. They appeared to be a part of her, their bodies fused into her flesh.

“Who are these women?” I asked Sal under my breath. “Are they here for us or the others?”

“The others,” he whispered.

“Then are we safe? Do we need to be worried?”

“
We’re
safe,” he said. “Our minds aren’t.”

I didn’t want to know what that meant.

I kept my eyes on the women—three witches with wings. They swung their whips, cackling and circling the trio. The boys and the girl were still on the ground. They were trembling, murmuring. It sounded like begging.

I nudged Sal. “What if they think we had something to do with the fire?”

“They know we didn’t,” he insisted. “The Erinyes sense guilt very keenly, and we’re not guilty. If we were, this would all be about to go very differently for us. They
punish
those who offend the gods.”

“Why are you saying it like that?” I asked. “What’s going to happen?”

Sal didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The Erinyes descended upon us, their wings beating quickly, near imperceptibly. As they touched the ground, their wings slowed into lacelike fans. The witch in the middle spoke first.

“Which of you started the fire?” she asked, looking directly at the brunette.

Neither he nor his friends answered. They were still trembling, their eyes locked on the ground.

“Speak up!” the Erinys commanded.

She lifted her hands, and somehow this lifted their heads off the ground. Their skin and eyes began to vibrate in resistance, but still she had power over them. With her hands still raised, she swayed, staring at each of them, and her gaze lingered on the brunette. Her snakes hissed, biting across each other to reach him.

“You think that you can deceive me,” she said to him, “but eyes cannot lie. You
believe
that your eyes can lie to me, and therefore you misuse them. Clearly you have no need for the eyes in your puny, cheating sockets, so I will take them.”

The brunette sputtered, looking from one Erinys to the next. “Please! Please don’t take my eyes!”

Tears rained from his eyes and splattered on the ground. He clasped his hands in desperation at the Erinys who had threatened him.

“Please!” he begged. “I’ll do anything! I’ll be your servant for life!”

The Erinys shook her head. “You will be my servant for death.”

She pinched her fingers together, and the brunette froze. He’d been right in the middle of another wail, but she had cut it short—paralyzed him. He was just staring now, with his mouth agape and hands stiff in the air.

The Erinys flew to him. She stood tall over his body and rested one hand on his cheek, the other over his eyes. His pupils were dilated.

With her thumb and middle finger, she reached in and—as if it were the most natural act—plucked out his left eye! The brunette collapsed in his own blood. It was already gushing from his eye socket.

The Erinys rolled the eyeball in her hands, letting her snakes take turns licking it. Then she tossed it to her sisters. The three played a brief game of catch before throwing it far into the field.

The brunette writhed on the ground, cursing heaven and hell. His friends wept above him. I wanted to weep too, but I was terrified. I had just witnessed the most horrific thing. I couldn’t imagine anything more, but I knew that there
was
more. Another of the Erinyes was flying toward the brunette, laughing under her breath.

Sal barely turned to me. “It’s going to get much worse,” he said, “but we can’t leave. The Erinyes enjoy their torment, even more so when they have an audience. If we stay, we’ll be safe and in their favor.”

I nodded silently and tried to focus on the ground, the wheat, the moon—anything. As much as I despised the brunette for killing Dion and the other dryads, I was suddenly grateful that I hadn’t had to kill him. I couldn’t handle any more death on my conscience.

Someone yelped, and I looked to see that the Erinys had kicked the brunette’s friends out of her way. They were rolling over each other into the field. The brunette was still on the ground, with both hands covering his bloody eye socket.

“You have killed by fire, and so you shall die by fire!” the Erinys boomed across the field.

“Sister,” another of the Erinyes interjected, “let it be a slow burn!”

“A slow burn!” the third Erinys chimed in.

They cackled in unison.

The Erinys who was standing in front of the brunette nodded.

“Let it be,” she said.

She pointed at the ground a few feet away from him, and a small flame appeared. The flame began to creep toward him, growing in size. He tried to stand, but the Erinys all but paralyzed him once more. He could only move his toes—and he kept twitching them like it would do something. He had been left with just enough hope that he could escape, even though we all knew that he couldn’t.

The fire reached him. It wrapped around his foot and up his leg, spreading across his lower body. He opened his mouth, but could not speak.

His friends watched him burn. They looked at each other and then at the Erinyes, realizing their fate.

“You two are next!” the Erinyes shouted all together.

The friends tried to run away, but the Erinyes hurled their whips at them. At first the whips didn’t appear long enough, but then, before my eyes, they lengthened and caught the pair, dragging them by their feet to the fire.

The girl dug her fingers into the ground. “We didn’t start the fire! It was him!”

“You watched it happen and did nothing to stop it!” screamed the Erinys who was burning the brunette.

As brutal as he and his friends had been to the dryads, I didn’t know if I believed in death for death. I tried to look away—I did—but I was hypnotized. The brunette’s face had turned red and was beginning to blister and peel. His features were gone. He was anyone and everyone. My doctor, a teacher, a friend . . . my brother.

“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop it! Please don’t hurt him!”

Sal gripped my arm tightly. “Jade, you forget your place.”

All three Erinyes turned to me. Their snakes were slithering across each other, seething in a floating nest.

“Would you like to join him?” one of the Erinyes asked.

“No,” I said, looking down. “I’m sorry. I forgot my place.”

I stood there for a moment with my head down, thinking. If the Erinyes could sense guilt, then they could probably sense truth.

“I lost one of my brothers to a fire,” I added. “I’m sorry. When I screamed I thought I was looking at him.”

They scrutinized me in heavy silence. I waited. I made no smart remarks or faces. I just waited. And one by one, they finally turned away.

“Is that true?” Sal asked me. “What you said about your brother?”

I nodded. “Why do you think they left me alone?”

He took my hand and held it until the Erinyes were finished. We knew each other’s pain now. We understood. But that didn’t make the pain any less. There was so much more that I wanted to say, so much that I needed to feel. And I knew that Sal felt the same. After Garrett, after Dion, we couldn’t just stand there and watch such familiar suffering like it was part of a movie. But we had to try. Because we couldn’t say, and we couldn’t feel—not while we were being watched.

The brunette was burned into shriveled skin and bones. His friends were kept bound in the whips, only able to move their arms. They started to murmur and to reach for one another, as if to offer a final embrace.

The Erinyes did not seem to mind. In fact, inch by inch they withdrew their whips, and the boy and the girl moved closer. After several minutes, the two managed to wrap their hands around each other’s necks—but they didn’t embrace. No. They began to choke each other.

I gasped.

“They are avoiding a fate like their friend’s,” Sal said.

“But it’s still death!” I cried.

“A less painful death.”

Their faces colored blue and purple, their hands relentless on each other. Their veins bulged and stretched across their cheeks like spider webs. And the Erinyes watched—ever so calmly—until the two were on the verge of suffocation.

Then one of the Erinyes set fire to the boy’s arms. The heat was so extreme that it began to melt his arms, and he could no longer reach the girl. The two would indeed suffer the same as the brunette.

The Erinyes reeled in their whips and began to ascend, their wings beating fiercely. They left the boy and the girl to burn in the ashes of their friend. They looked once at Sal and me and then flew into the clouds, abandoning us with three mangled corpses.

I vomited at Sal’s feet. He didn’t say a word. He just picked me up and carried me out of the field. I didn’t know where we were going, and I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and leaned against his chest. The last thing I saw was him looking down at me.

I awoke in the shade of a weeping willow. I was propped against its trunk, swathed in a lambskin blanket. A warm breeze drifted across me, and I was happy to see the sun again. I stretched myself awake, yawing compulsively.

A few feet away Sal was bent over a fire pit, cooking something that smelled delicious. On Earth I had never slept outside or eaten anything cooked in the open air, but this morning I was desperately hungry. When Sal saw that I was awake, he carried over a plate of meat.

“Where did you find this?” I asked, taking the plate.

Sal nodded to the east. “Neighbors.”

I didn’t wait to shove the bite-size pieces of meat into my mouth. It didn’t matter what animal, or what part of an animal, I was eating. What mattered was that I finally had food, and it filled me. I squeezed my lips around it like a vacuum.

Then, just as quickly as I had started eating, I stopped. I realized that the meat had been cut up for me. It was the closest I had ever been to having breakfast in bed.

“Do you live here?” I asked Sal, pausing to breathe and look civilized.

“I have for the last few months,” he said. “I drift from village to village, trading my labor for food, blankets, and other supplies. There’s a kind old widow who lives a few miles from here. Sometimes I help farm her land. That’s where I got the meat. We passed by her place last night.”

“Last night,” I echoed, remembering the fire. I guessed I’d been asleep when we had stopped at the widow’s house.

“Yes. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

The memory flooded both my mind and appetite. I set my plate down, but Sal picked it back up and held it in front of me.

“You need to eat,” he said. “I imagine it’s been a while. Now tell me, where did you come from?”

“I already told you I’m from Earth,” I said.

I took the plate, but I set it on my lap and didn’t eat.

“Yes, but why are you here?” Sal asked. “There must be a reason, a story.”

“Do you really want to talk about all that right now? How are you?”

He had lost Dion, his love. We could focus on that. I didn’t want to feel any more pain.

He rubbed his tired, puffy eyes and looked away. “I’ll be fine.”

I suddenly remembered one of my dreams from the night before. Sal had been wailing to the skies in a helpless ball.

Actually, that probably hadn’t been a dream.

“The dryads said you loved her,” I said.

“I did love her.”

I picked a piece of meat off my plate and chewed it slowly, pretending that it was something else—cake. Yes, cake. The least I could do was eat to appease Sal in his misery.

“I only knew Dion for a short time before she died,” he said. “I did love her, but we weren’t quite in love.”

“You don’t have to be in love with someone to miss them,” I said.

“I know. I’m just saying . . . don’t pity me. Humans and dryads aren’t meant for each other. I’ll be fine. I’ve made it this far, and hope never dies.”

His tone was entirely unhopeful. He spoke of Dion the same way that he had spoken of his parents—callously. I knew that he didn’t mean to sound callous, but he was trying too hard to be some happy realist. It was his way of coping, I supposed, and I decided not to confront him about it after his hospitality.

Please,” he continued, “tell me how you arrived on Getheos.”

His skin looked especially bronze, and his eyes had more golden flecks in them than they’d had the day before. I wondered what that meant.

After his food finished cooking, we scarfed down breakfast—my appetite having increased the longer that I had looked at him—and meandered toward his garden. It wasn’t far.

It was an exquisite, colorful garden, at least thirty square feet, brimming with fruits and vegetables. Sal found the biggest cantaloupe that he had and cut it open for me. I carried my half and bit into it as we walked. It was succulent and deep orange in color, with sweet juice that lingered on my lips.

I told Sal about Garrett’s death and about the disillusionment that had followed. I described the mysterious green spot that I had seen at Doctor Pine’s and the shadow man who had lured me onto my roof. I detailed my ride to The Mango Sun, where the demented Charlotte and her brother, Eden, had quarreled over me. I told Sal everything, and to my delight he believed me. He said that he had experienced some of the same things.

Although Sal had never visited The Mango Sun, or any planet other than Getheos, his journey to the world of the gods had been extraordinary nonetheless. It had started when he was a child. . . .

As a boy, he suffered from a lisp and introversion so severe that he felt inhibited around his own family. His classmates at school did not like him, and they tormented him incessantly. With no one to play with, Sal absorbed himself in books where he could imagine himself as the hero and feel whole.

One weekend, years later, when his parents were out of town, his older sister abandoned him to go to a party. Sal spent two days straight engrossed in a book of mythological stories. The idea that several gods could coexist, each unique and powerful, gave him the hope that one day he too could find his niche.