That was just her biological clock ticking. Men were men, interchangeable parts. She'd quit counting how many she'd screwed.
No, she hadn't. The number was fifteen. That was just practice. That was just a large enough statistical sample to tell her how special David was.
Special enough to die for?
Jo sat on her rock, chilled. Dying. Not having David in her life. The two feelings left her equally empty. At least with the dragon, dying wouldn't take all that long.
Special enough to die for.
She stood up, pulled the pistol out of her pocket, and walked quietly down the trail.
The forest watched her. She felt it, the mixed fear and protection all around her, the mixed fear and rage behind her. Whatever, whoever, was following her--it hated her but wasn't about to tangle with her. The fear was stronger. The forest told her that.
Raucous cries filtered through the trees ahead, caws and croaks that even a city girl could identify as crows. Jo slowed down, a cold lump forming in her chest. Crows and ravens were scavengers. A mob of them usually meant dead meat.
The chill spread down to her fingers and toes. That was how they always found the bodies in the Westerns, she remembered. By following the vultures. Grandpa used to tell his tales about the war, about the crows over the battlefield, picking at the dead. He'd talked about rats, too.
David.
The stranger had said David was dying. She was too late.
The cold turned her heart to ice. Jo staggered off the trail and pressed her forehead against the rough bark of a tree. David. Dead. She felt the corrugations of the trunk biting into her skin and wanted to pound her skull against them until the blood ran and her head split open and the pain ended in oblivion.
David. Dead.
Instead, she dug her fingernails into the bark as if she was a cat, sharpening them. Fiona, the shadow had said. Dougal. The bastard and bitch who ran this freak-show world. Her rage started to burn through her fingers, and resinous smoke rose where she touched the bark.
"Dougal and Fiona," she growled. Somebody should tell the ravens, dinner was about to be served in some other locations. Jo snarled. A part of her froze at the sound, so like a hungry lion stalking through the African plains.
{. . . not . . . dead . . .}
The whispers returned to mock her. David's voice rose from the tree, from the sticky pinesap gumming her fingers where she had gouged straight through to living wood.
She stared at her nails, at the grooves cut into the bark. Some bear must have done that. She'd seen that on PBS, too, another Nature program. That's how bears marked their territory. She couldn't have done that; she hadn't even split a nail. She'd just put her fingers where the bear had already torn the bark.
{. . . anger . . .}
She gritted her teeth and snarled again, this time with words.
"You want anger, I'll show you anger! I'll turn this goddamn tree into a torch! I'll burn your forest flat, your fucking vampire forest living off of David's body! I'll roast your god-almighty-damned land alive for taking my man from me!"
She cranked the Bic up to maximum flame and held it against the resin and bark. Her rage glared into the dampness, forcing steam to curl out and then smoke and then flame as the green wood spat into fire against its will. She drove the heat of fire deep into the heartwood of the pine. Burn, baby, burn!
{No!}
David's voice screamed pain as if it was his own flesh in the fire. Jo shuddered, and she beat the flames into silence. Boiling pitch clung to her palms and hardened. She peeled it off, leaving clean undamaged skin behind. Illusions.
The land is David, and David is the land, whispered the remembered voice. She'd taken that as metaphor.
She'd joined Maureen in the world of delusion, of voices in her head, of strangers following her around. Had she ever shot that man, been in the sinkhole, run screaming from the avenue of skulls? Was the dragon real?
{. . . real . . .}
David.
The crows still called their brothers to the feast. Jo stared at the charred circle of bark on the pine, the claw-marks matching her fingers, the thin white scars crossing her palms where the dragon scales had cut her.
Those cuts had healed too fast. This was a land of magic.
If David was dead, she had to see his body. She had to bury him. Then she would go and meet the owner of this forest. Debts would be paid.
With interest.
The cold anger carried her down the path, into the thin smell of death that grew into a garbage reek so thick she almost had to lean against the air to walk. Nearer and nearer came the raucous cackle of the crows, until they pounded her ears and the hiss of their wings filled the spaces in between their calls.
There were too many birds. You couldn't feed that many crows from the fields of Armageddon. And then she saw the long, low lump ahead, crawling with a buzzing horde of flies and suddenly realized the flies were the crows, and what she saw was huge.
It was the dragon. The frigging dragon was dead, not David.
She gagged at the thick stench of rotten meat and the maggot-crawl of crows and ravens. They tore threads of meat from the carcass, fought, swirled overhead, waddled around like overweight ducks with the gorge of carrion in their bellies.
She wrestled her stomach back into line. Damn good thing she'd skipped breakfast. To hell with what killed the dragon. The question she wanted answered was, Where was David?
She saw scraps of cloth on the ground, fragments of curved fiberglass, a scattering of arrows.
