"Pain is optional," Brian had told her, one time while she re-taped his ribs. "You can overcome pain with an effort of your will and mind. Concentrate on something greater, on survival or on revenge, and the pain will go away. Pain is optional."
Bullshit, her critic answered. Pain is nature's way of telling you that you just fucked up.
Her head throbbed along with the beat of the trail--a dizzy, nauseated migraine of a hangover like her worst morning-after ever. Was it from Sean's glamour, or from her own thwarted Power, or just her raging hatred? She twisted sideways against the agony of her shoulders and vomited in great racking spasms.
Dougal and Padric walked on, ignoring their burden. They followed a clear trail, beaten as if well traveled but by men or horses only. It was too narrow and rough for carts.
Watch the path, the voice in Maureen's head ordered her. Ignore the pain; ignore the rampage in your belly. You are going to escape. You'll need to know your way through this forest.
She marked down a rounded lump of rock through the woods, here, a massive grandfather beech, there. The path dropped into a gentle valley or glen, down to a brook crossed by a ford, the feet of the men splashing quietly. Then the trail rose again, through switchbacks on a steeper pitch, the ground rising as if Dougal set his keep upon the heights, for a view or for defense.
Padric's foot slipped, and he cursed. Maureen matched him word for word and topped him, as the jerk lanced through her body and struck fire from wrists and ankles and shoulders and head. She vomited again, the twisting of her belly just adding to the white heat agony.
Pain is nature's way of telling you that you just fucked up.
Fucked up, big-time.
Maureen cursed between the jolts and the spasms in her belly, silently but fluently. She wouldn't believe one man who was kind of nice, wouldn't obey a rational warning. Now she was trussed up like an animal for a zoo. Now she was helpless, a slave to men who wanted to breed her like she was some kind of fucking cow.
No, pig. Cut the mixed metaphors, Maureen. Hanging from a game-pole like a gutted pig, the bastard said. Pig-headed Maureen.
Heads floated into her nightmare.
She saw heads by the trail, skulls, on poles. The bastard decorated his path like a cannibal, for Chrissakes. They stared at her with sightless hollows for eyes, the same bleak stare her vision had placed on Sean's head just before he left.
The head was where the soul lived. She remembered Grandfather telling tales out of Irish legend, of heads talking even when severed from their bodies, living on for years and carried across the seas. Telling of trophies, the heads of enemies preserved and handed down from generation to generation as treasures of the family.
Maureen remembered Grandfather's face, the Dies Irae face when he'd seen the bloody welts across her back and couldn't do a damn thing about them because he was old and weak with the drink and had no place else to live. I'll take some fucking trophies, dammit, she swore to that helpless angry god. I'll jam Sean's head on a stake shoved through his asshole. I'll nail Dougal's skull to his own goddamn gatepost.
Hack it off like Brian hacked Liam's head free from his shoulders to roll around the alley in the snow. Before it burned.
Would the bodies burn, here in the Summer Country? She remembered the uncanny fire. That would rob her of her trophy.
She vomited again, racking dry heaves trying to rid herself of something that was not inside her.
Chapter Fifteen
"Shit," Jo repeated. "It's a goddamned dragon."
She closed her eyes on the blasted impossible forest and counted to ten, and opened them again.
It was still there.
"There ain't no such animal," she whispered to herself.
The beast was all hard and glittery and black, armored with scales as sharp as obsidian flakes. It wasn't a flying dragon, no sign of wings--at least her hallucinations weren't trying to get her to accept something physically impossible. It was just a snake with four stumpy legs about as thick as trees, a tail that went on forever, and a sharp head filled with even sharper teeth.
She stared at it, willing it to go away--willing the entire world to go away and dump her back in the stinking slush of Naskeag Falls. The world refused, listening to the part of her mind which said that warm was nice, that green was nice, that it was about damned time Maureen's psycho brain came up with something useful. If only her delusions didn't include so many teeth . . .
The dragon kept coiling and uncoiling like one of those garter snakes Maureen used to catch in the back yard--a garter snake sixty feet long. With teeth to match.
Maybe it only ate virgins. Different taste or something. Then she didn't have a thing to worry about.
Her palms were telling her otherwise. She wiped the sweat off of them, smelling her own fear, and then gritted her teeth at the stupidity of moving and attracting attention. The dragon lifted its head slightly, but it wasn't the jerk of a startled animal.
It knew she was here. It was smelling her, with that long forked tongue as red as a fire truck and damn near half as big. If it wanted to eat her, she'd only be a burp by now. What the hell was it waiting for?
Hey, Lent just started. Maybe it's an old-line Catholic, gave up red meat for Lent, virgin or otherwise. She knew she teetered on the edge of hysteria and clamped down on the images.
The dragon coiled and uncoiled like an Escher
