Entangled (28 page)

He’d just introduced himself as Matthew Aubrey (sounding plummy, awkward and English as he shook her hand) and now sat opposite her across a little metal table in Starbucks in Newport Beach.

As volunteers in the DMT project they’d signed an agreement not to leave campus during the trials, but after Becky, still raving, had been straitjacketed and admitted to the psychiatric wing of UC Irvine Hospital, they’d both wanted out for a while.

They hadn’t talked at all during the fifteen-minute cab ride. Leoni had sat far over on her side of the back seat, brooding about Sulpa and
Jack. She knew that somehow, in showing her the former, the Blue Angel had also revealed the latter.

What was even more chilling was the way her visionary battle with Sulpa had followed her into the physical realm in the form of Becky. And the way, at the last, that Jack had looked out at her through Becky’s eyes and recognised her.

The same Jack, without a doubt, who had sent her adoptive father to her bed.

The same Jack who’d wrecked her life so casually that he seemed to have forgotten all about her until the Blue Angel had arranged for their paths to cross again.

The same Jack who was also, somehow, Sulpa, and bathed in the blood of murdered children.

The same Jack who now had further plans for her.

(‘This is going to be so much fun!’)

Leoni shuddered and took a sip from her latte. Across the table Matthew was watching her. Their eyes met, and he said in a rush: ‘It wasn’t an accident, you know.’

‘What wasn’t an accident?’

‘It wasn’t an accident that I showed up to stop Becky strangling you.’

Leoni sat forward: ‘I don’t mind whether it was an accident or not. I’m just grateful to you for being there.’ She thought of the big woman’s putrid tongue in her mouth and shuddered again. ‘If you hadn’t stopped her something really bad was going to happen to me.’

‘I think she would have killed you,’ Matthew said with conviction. ‘That’s why I was sent to protect you from her.’

Leoni’s heart skipped a beat, but she tried to look nonchalant: ‘Oh, really?’ she said, ‘Sent by whom?’

Matthew shrugged and shuffled his big feet under the table: ‘If I tell you you’re going to think I’m insane.’

‘Try me,’ laughed Leoni. ‘After what I’ve been through in the last few days I have a very high tolerance for insanity.’

‘OK.’ He took a big gulp from his bottle of water and lowered his voice: ‘I did something stupid.’

Leoni raised an eyebrow: ‘Yes?’

‘I wasn’t scheduled for any DMT sessions today, but I had a really amazing one yesterday. I mean, utterly extraordinary. And I wanted to try to revisit it …’

‘So …’

‘So the thing is … I brought this little private stash of DMT with me when I joined the project. Not the kind Bannerman gives us by injection, but the kind you smoke. And this morning I suddenly thought – why don’t I smoke some? So I got out my stash and fired up my pipe …’

‘But that’s totally against the rules!’ Leoni exclaimed.

‘I know. Bannerman would be pissed. But if I hadn’t done it I wouldn’t have been there to stop Becky.’

Leoni looked puzzled and Matt continued: ‘I’ve smoked DMT before, but this time it was different. I didn’t go shooting up into the stratosphere. There were none of the usual crazy colours. After three or four big tokes I felt dizzy and lay down on my bed.’ He paused, took another gulp of water: ‘Even though I’d closed my eyes I could see light pouring through the window – and I quite liked it. I felt drawn to it. Then this amazing woman came in on the light. I can’t describe how she did it. One minute there was just me in the room. The next minute she was there. I reached out to touch her but my hands passed right through her. I said: “You’re not real, are you?” And she said “Yes, Matthew, I am.” So I said: “OK. What do you want?” And she said: “Get down to the lab right away. Someone needs your help.” Believe me, I didn’t feel like arguing. She was six feet tall and had blue skin.’

Ria had no idea how long she’d been unconscious. Now she was alert again, and her eyes were back in focus. But because she was lying on her stomach, with her wrists and ankles roped tightly together behind her back and her spine bent into an excruciating arch, she couldn’t do anything except take it from Grigo. ‘You bitch,’ he shouted, raining blows down on her ribs and thighs with a thick wooden staff. ‘You messed up my face.’

So Brindle’s father had been right. Only Duma and Vik were dead. Treacherous Grigo, Sulpa’s special friend,

(‘You don’t know him as well as I do’)

was still very much alive.

Ria felt pleased that at least she really had messed him up. Even in the dark, lit only by the guttering flames of brushwood torches, with her own face crushed sideways against the spiky marsh grass of the valley floor, she couldn’t miss Grigo’s brow, split from his hairline to the bridge of his nose, or the big gaps she’d knocked in his front teeth.

Then –
THUMP!
– the heavy staff cracked hard against a rib and, despite her best efforts at self-control, she groaned.

As she had known it would, this sign of weakness only goaded Grigo on to greater efforts. Somehow he drove the tip of his staff under Ria’s body and into her sternum, winding her and leaving her gasping for breath. Then she watched out of the corner of her eye as he moved around, searching for a good angle, and finally struck down at her face. ‘Should have married me, Ria,’ he taunted, ‘instead of screwing an Ugly.’

She could sense that a second blow was coming, one that would break some important part of her head, when Grigo was intercepted by Vulp and Bahat, two older men she knew well who had both been good friends of her father. ‘Not like this,’ Bahat roared, hammering a punch into Grigo’s chest. ‘It’s not what we agreed.’

‘She’s to get a proper trial,’ exploded Vulp as he grabbed Grigo from
behind, pinned his arms, and dragged him kicking and screaming out of reach of Ria. ‘No harm comes to her before that.’

Vulp and Bahat had both passed forty summers but remained important figures in the Clan and could still pull their weight in the hunt. Vulp had the shoulder-length white hair and venerable beard of an elder but a lean, strong physique. His left eye was grey and his right eye was brown. Bahat, swarthy and brooding, was known for his bad temper. Although not tall, he was broad and heavy with a livid crescent-shaped scar originating on the right side of his head above his ear, curving across his cheekbone and disappearing into his grizzled beard. Despite his reputation for ferocity, Ria remembered him best for trading funny stories with her father around their family hearth, and the way his eyes – now glowering and serious – used to twinkle with delight just before he delivered the punchline.

Bahat stooped and cut the rope tying Ria’s ankles to her wrists but left in place the other ropes that still bound her wrists together behind her back and trussed her ankles. As he straightened, Murgh bustled up. He was a short, bow-legged, self-important man with a thick, powerful upper body and huge, rather sinister hands. ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded.

‘We’re stopping your son from killing the prisoner,’ said Vulp.

‘Many feel she
should
be killed now.’ Murgh made it sound like a reasonable proposition. He had a big, lumpy, florid face, a bruiser’s nose, small darting eyes like a jackdaw’s, and a ring of grey hair around his head that encircled a large shiny bald patch. ‘She and the Uglies murdered Duma and Vik,’ he continued in the same tone. ‘We all know they did it. So what’s the point of a trial?’

Ria gasped, stunned at this unexpected turn. She and the Uglies had killed Duma and Vik?

‘It was the Illimani,’ she croaked, but her voice was weak from the repeated blows and a tumult of shouts drowned her out.

‘We don’t know
anything
for sure yet,’ Bahat roared at Murgh. ‘We have the bodies of Duma and Vik, without their heads, a very terrible thing. Grigo has made allegations about how this happened. Many believe him. That’s why we’re all here. But Ria’s side of the story MUST also be heard …’

‘WE DON’T NEED TO HEAR HER SIDE OF THE STORY,’ someone else screeched, in outrage. ‘It’s obvious she’s guilty. We just caught her with the Uglies.’

Paying a price of searing pain in her ribs, Ria rolled onto her side and struggled to sit up. She
knew
who had killed Duma and Vik, and it hadn’t been her and the Uglies. So why had Grigo invented this story, pinning the blame on them? Was he acting from spite – calling out the braves, hunting her down – just to get back at her? Or was Sulpa using him to play some much bigger game?

Ria was also desperate to know what had become of Hond and the Uglies. She pulsed out a thought-question
‘Brindle. Where are you? Tell me you’re alive!’
But there was no reply and no sense of any connection with Brigley, Oplimar, Porto or Jergat either.

Meanwhile the argument continued to expand around her. The outraged screech had come from Vik’s father Chard, tears dripping from his eyes, his features contorted with hate, who now stood shoulder to shoulder with Murgh. Then Duma’s father Kimp joined them. ‘She’s guilty,’ he said. ‘Let’s kill her now.’

Vulp and Bahat were solid guys. They might have been old but they didn’t back down. Ria had to give them credit for that as she listened to the furious shouting match, piecing the story together as best she could.

Early that morning, Grigo had come running into camp covered in blood. He’d told how he, Duma and Vik had been out the day before on the hunt in a remote valley where they’d stumbled across Ria naked behind a tree having sex with a young Ugly male with a gimpy leg. Because such behaviour was an affront to Clan morals they took the couple prisoner but were attacked by a huge gang of Uglies who murdered Duma and Vik, on Ria’s instructions, and would have murdered Grigo as well had he not escaped. He claimed the Uglies had made off with the heads of the two murdered boys, obviously intending to use them in a cannibal feast, and Ria had left with them, not as their prisoner but of her own free will. Grigo also claimed some of the Ugly braves had pursued him but he had led them on a chase for most of the previous day and night before losing them and getting back to the safety of the camp.

This was the incendiary story he and his father had used to recruit a posse of a hundred men to hunt down Ria and the Uglies. With Hond and Rill already out of camp searching for her there were few who were prepared to argue against the idea. Nonetheless, her family was well
respected so Vulp, Bahat and many others only agreed to join on condition she was captured alive and brought back for a fair trial before the assembly of elders.

Now Ligar and Bont, friends and age-mates of Hond, stepped forward to stand beside Vulp and Bahat.

Bont was a big bear of a man with a tangled mass of shaggy brown hair hanging down almost to his waist. He was thought by some to be slow-witted but he was good in a fight so nobody messed with him. Ligar, small and delicate with fine, sensitive features, was a deadly accurate shot with the vicious hunting bow presently slung over his shoulder. He was clever and funny, able to make a fool out of anyone in an argument. ‘Your story’s full of shit,’ he told Grigo. ‘If Ria ran off with the Uglies like you say then how come she was heading back towards camp when we found her? If the Uglies killed Duma and Vik then how come they were carrying Hond on a stretcher and caring for him? I’m not saying you’re lying, Grigo, but if you want to lynch this girl’ – he nodded at Ria – ‘without a proper trial then you’re going to have to get past me to do it.’

‘That goes for me too,’ said Bont. He’d been slouching but now stood up to his full height, towering over Grigo, and balled his huge hands into fists.

Watching the whole drama unfold from where she was sitting Ria was under no illusions. Her life hung in the balance. But little by little her protectors prevailed, winning more and more of the braves over to their point of view, and Murgh’s lynch mob – reduced to a hard core of less than twenty – was forced to back down.

Grigo, spitting with fury, had to be restrained: ‘You’ll burn in the morning,’ he yelled at her.

‘Murdering bitch!’ screamed Chard.

Somehow Duma’s father Kimp got past Bont’s guard and drove a kick into Ria’s bruised rib. Then Bont hit him once and he dropped. ‘Anybody else want to argue about this?’ the big man asked.

But there were no takers.