She crawled out from under the holly tree where she had spent the night, squinted at the morning sun, and walked to the stream--scratching and yawning and generally unlovely, picking dead leaves out of her hair. The great outdoors rated about three-point-five on a scale of ten, as far as she was concerned. Unlike Maureen, Jo preferred civilization.
She wanted coffee instead of water from the creek. She wanted a hot shower and some clean clothes. She wanted a pizza with anchovies and mushrooms and sausage and green peppers, washed down by a big frosty pitcher of dark beer.
She wanted toilet paper.
Nobody has ever written an ode to toilet paper, she thought. One of the greatest inventions of modern man, and it goes totally unnoticed. I'm going to buy a ton of it when I get back.
Her fire was dead ash and charcoal on scorched stone. She didn't need to light another one: there was nothing to cook. Oh, she could catch some more of those terminally stupid trout. Half-charred fish for breakfast sounded really great. It just needed hunger for a sauce.
Make that starvation.
She splashed cold water on her face and scrubbed her hands with sand from the stream after fertilizing some bushes. So much for morning rituals. She thought she should find the trail pretty soon. She hadn't run that far downstream after panicking.
That hadn't mattered after climbing out of the sinkhole. She'd only been able to walk for maybe five minutes before her adrenaline ran out.
She tugged Maureen's jacket closer around her shoulders, snuggling against the morning chill. Another problem with the Great Outdoors was the lack of central heating.
Or maybe she always felt cold because she was always hungry. She looked at her wrist and then tried spanning it with her other hand. She was definitely losing weight. She'd never had much body fat to start with, and those trout weren't keeping up. Better find that dumb man and take him out for pizza before she faded into an Irish ghost.
Jo laid her hand on a rough-barked old willow and listened with her inner ear. All she got was that static hiss pulsing quietly as if she was listening to the blood rushing in her own ears. The land lived, and somewhere in that life, David wandered.
Scattered, he'd whispered. He'd only focused on her fear and anger. Now that she was out of immediate danger, he'd gone cloudy again, lost in the slow drift of the forest.
The agenda for the day was move upstream, find the trail, and follow it back to the dragon. Anything beyond that was beyond her horizon. She didn't want to even think about those teeth and meat-hook claws, those razor-edged scales, those cold yellow lizard eyes. But they were tied to David, and she had to go.
The stream burbled quietly, talking to itself like a contented baby playing with his toes. She followed it upstream, dodging tangles of briar and deadfalls and wet nasty-smelling patches of the forest floor that threatened to suck the boots right off her feet. She was amazed at what she had run through on the way downstream. Had run right straight through and never even noticed.
Suddenly, the forest thinned, and the trail cut across the water. Directions to Dragon World, she thought. Take a right at the first traffic light, go straight on from there. You can't miss it. Biggest attraction in the whole frigging forest. Thrills and chills for all ages.
Like those teeth, she thought, and that chill settled deep in her belly. She remembered those steak-knife teeth, hanging about two inches in front of her nose. She remembered the cold hardness of the claw hooked under the waistband of her jeans, holding her down.
Arguments that had been tickling at the back of her head forced their way forward and gained a voice. Just what exactly was she doing? Why didn't she just sit down for a minute on that nice convenient moss-covered rock and meditate on her actions before they become fatal?
She was going to find out what was happening to David and stop it. If that dragon was part of it, she was going to chop it up into paté and spread it on crackers.
With a Swiss army knife?
With a frigging piece of chipped flint, if that's all she had. She was hungry.
She could get seriously dead trying. She remembered a Nature program Maureen had watched last month on PBS, they had a Parental Advisory at the start of it. Remembered what the tiger's fangs did to that cute little deer. Ugly. Jo reminded herself that she was female, about five foot two and a hundred pounds before she went on a diet, and used to shriek at creepy-crawly things and ask Maureen to kill spiders.
But she'd just killed a man, yesterday.
Did she? Who did she think had been following her?
Oh, shit!
Jo broke out of her funk and grabbed the gun. She twisted from side to side, nervously checking the shadows under rocks and the distant trunks of trees, but saw nothing dangerous. She shoved her left hand into the forest dirt and felt the same vague sense of something cold and angry watching, something afraid and staying just beyond sight.
The chill of it had forced her into hiding. The holly tree had been her natural barbed wire, a guard no man or animal could sneak past without making noises in the dark. It had welcomed her, as if it had turned its barbs aside to let her in and then closed the gate behind her. David's work, she'd thought, but when she tried to talk to him through the trunk all she'd found was the same static heartbeat. The forest protected her but wouldn't speak to her.
David.
Was David worth dying for? She wasn't talking metaphor. She was talking about the thing she'd called T. Rex. With cause.
She was talking about David. She was talking
