She looked back to find Alex still on his knees, but his arms were above his head, as if he was trying to flag down a helicopter on a desert island. He was waving at her.
‘No! Tara, no!’ His voice was ragged, hoarse in his determination to be heard, to stop her too.
Why were they both . . .?
And then it came to her ear: the background rumble – which her subconscious mind hadn’t considered relevant a few seconds earlier – was now a roar. The ground shaking beneath her feet wasn’t a hallucination. She saw a flurry of birds of all sizes, all colours, pitch into the sky. She heard the monkeys scream as they swung branch to branch, tree to tree on the borders, trying to escape.
Her mouth open, her eyes wide, she looked down to see the ground coming unstuck from beneath her feet. Not just there. The vast bank of mud – turned over, despoiled, denuded and now left unprotected against the full battery of tropical elements – was cleaving from Mother Earth, Iriria. From higher up, above where they stood, it was already beginning to slide down the mountain, an unstoppable tide gathering speed at a rate that she couldn’t believe.
Even before William yelled at her to get back, back into the trees, she had begun running, managing two, three, four paces before her feet were swept from under her and she fell backwards. She heard the men’s shouts as she felt the ground pulling away beneath her body, trying to take her downhill with it. Her hands grabbed automatically for anything within reach, finding only a sinewy vine that trailed down from a surviving tree at the edge of the clearance site. She was lucky – it was sappy and strong enough to slow her speed, and she was still close enough to the edges that the breakaway was shallow here. For a moment, all she could see was sky – grey, heavy and low – as the mud spun her around and she clung to the vine, but then she felt the force lessen and she could push herself up just enough to sit; the ground still rumbled and shook beneath her splayed palms but she was no longer at risk of being dragged along; the main body of the slide had broken free and was now heading . . .
Heading for Alex. He had been at the very base of the clearing, bottom and centre. He was still there.
‘Alex!’ she screamed. She couldn’t understand why he was continuing to stand there. The mudslide was heading straight for him.
‘Tara?’ She saw his head turn and for the briefest moment, there was eye contact and she realized he had been looking for her. He had been waiting to see her, to know she was okay.
‘Run!!’ she screamed, with a force that she thought might turn her inside out.
He began moving, scrabbling, sliding, back towards the trees. But it was impossible to escape – the sheer speed, the terrifying velocity . . . Nature will run, William had said, and she screamed again as in the next instant, the mudslide picked him up and whisked him from sight. The wave slammed into the trees and the forest screamed as if in pain, giant timbers creaking and cracking from the force, their roots being lifted like weeds in a dahlia bed.
Tara couldn’t stop screaming. She couldn’t accept what she was seeing. Nature roiling and frothing, breaking and destroying itself. The frightening power, the noise, the putrid smell of the ripped-up earth . . .
And then, almost as quickly as it had come, the thunder subdued, the fury spent. The mud tide was dispersed and broken up, its speed slowed, its force lessened by the tangle of trees, stopped by the forest . . . until there was only a haunting silence. No birds crowed; not even the monkeys shrieked. All life felt wiped out. Eradicated.
A sob wracked her as she stared at the vacuum that remained, the space where Alex had been now glaringly empty. As if he’d never been there. Her body folded as though she was going to be sick. She felt convulsed by pain, racked by horror as the image of him being snatched and thrown repeated itself in her mind. It was unsurvivable, she knew that. As her own feet had been swept from under her, she had experienced the same feeling she’d had in the canoe – of a great unstoppable force working against her.
William ran, sure-footed and agile, across her field of vision, down the mud with a speed she never would have anticipated. He was silent and focused. She knew what he was trying to do. But it was pointless. He knew as well as she that the curse had been fulfilled.
She sank back, unable to support herself. Even to breathe felt hard. Her heart didn’t want to beat. It couldn’t support the pain that was spreading through her like a poison. Alex was gone and whatever pain she had thought she’d known before, it was nothing compared to this. She was oblivious to the cold, wet mud oozing around her, through her hair, into her ears, down her shirt. She was aware of nothing but a searing pain. She felt consumed by a white light that was burning her from the inside. To have found him, only to have lost him . . .
No!
Her heart wouldn’t accept it. Her brain was numb, the self-recriminations jabbing at her as she remembered how she had refused to show him the slightest mercy, telling him secrets that she knew would haunt him as they had her, guarding her heart with a grim and ruthless determination until she had been able to escape him again, just as she had ten years ago in London. She had got exactly what she wanted: Alex Carter out of her life.
He was the man she had loved to hate, and she had loved hating him! He had put the fire in her belly to succeed and thrive, to show him she had gone on to a
