Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)(34)
“What do you want, candy girl?” he asked.
“You,” she said bluntly. “I have a true love, but he doesn’t know I’m coming back, and there’s no sense in staying celibate until we’re together. All that can happen later, though. You have to help us now.”
“I suppose I do,” said Gideon, as Cora coughed the last of the black water from her lungs, as she clung to Kade like she feared drowning in the open air. Her skin still glistened with oily rainbows, but her eyes were her own again.
“And after, if there’s time, before we go, I’ll show you how we plough the fields in a world made of sugar.” Sumi’s smile was guileless and wicked at the same time. “It’ll be nice.”
“I suppose it will,” said Gideon, as Jack reached for Cora’s wrist, clearly intending to take the other girl’s pulse, and had her hand swatted away. He smiled a bit, seeing that. There were always costs, always consequences, when the Drowned Gods chose to speak.
Jack, rebuffed, turned her attention back to Gideon. “When do we ride?” she asked.
“When the tide shifts,” he replied. “If we’re to ride with the blessing of the Drowned Gods, we’ll do it when their power is at its greatest. You’d best be nice to me now, Jacky-my-girl. It looks like we’re going to be neighbors for a long, long time.”
“Only if we win,” said Jack.
Gideon laughed. “Did you forget? I never lose.”
Jack’s expression, always sober, turned grim. She looked at Gideon levelly, until he squirmed in his throne and had to fight the obvious urge to turn away.
“I’m counting on that,” she said.
Silence fell, save for the thin, gasping sound of Cora’s sobs, and the distant, untamable roaring of the sea.
13?THE BROKEN CROWN
JACK SAT RAMROD straight in the driver’s seat of the wagon, reins clutched in her gloved hands, hair braided so tightly that it became a measuring stick for her posture, sketching the line of her spine. She kept her eyes on the horizon, and on the growing shape of a small village protected by a vast wall, huddled in the shadow of a castle like a fawn seeking protection in the jaws of a lion.
Sumi lounged next to her, perfectly relaxed. She’d managed to acquire a wicked-looking baling hook from somewhere inside the Drowned Abbey and was using it to pick her fingernails, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that it was a rusty piece of metal large enough to pierce her entire hand.
Christopher and Kade sat to either side of Cora in the bed of the wagon, their shoulders hunched, tense, protective. There was no ocean here, no way for her to drown again, but her skin gleamed with rainbows, and no matter how much water ran from it, her hair never seemed to dry. They knew how close they’d come to losing her. Her and Kade both.
Cora said nothing as they rode, only gazed back at the shimmering line of the sea, and shivered, and clutched her fingers in the tatters of her shirt like she could serve as her own anchor, her own rocky shore.
Behind them came the acolytes of the Drowned Abbey, with Gideon at their head, seated astride a creature risen from the briny depths that was something like a great black frog, and something like a terrible fish, and something like nothing that had ever been intended to walk beneath the Moon. The luminous lure sprouting from between its bulbous eyes dangled in front of its terrible maw, sending glints of light dancing across its teeth. Gideon’s sedan chair was affixed to the creature’s back, and he rode with the comfortable ease of someone who knew that the most terrible of potential fates was in front of him, aimed at someone else.
Further back, behind the silent, hooded acolytes, who carried barnacle-encrusted swords and left trails of saltwater behind them, like they carried the sea itself in their pockets, came the villagers from the nameless settlement that lay beneath the Abbey. To be a villager on the Moors was to be a pawn in the long, slow game of life and death played between monsters, and they knew what was expected of them. They marched with grim expressions on their faces and the tools of their trade in their hands, baling hooks and fishing spears and tridents. Some of their number carried torches as well. Fire and water stood in opposition, but the casual reminder that most things could be flammable under the right circumstances was tradition, and tradition had a large part to play in this encounter.
Jack held the reins but didn’t move them, trusting Pony and Bones to know the way, and tried not to think of Alexis, alone in the windmill, waiting for her to come home. Alexis wouldn’t care if Jack won or if she lost, only that she survived, and Jack wished she could be that generous with herself; wished, with a fierce inner loathing, that she could be that generous for Alexis. If they failed to get her body back, she was going to break. Maybe not tonight, maybe not for weeks or even months, but she could feel the fault lines forming, could barely fight the urge to score her sister’s unwanted flesh with her fingernails, trying to scrape enough of it away that she could find the cleanliness buried somewhere deep within.
They had to win. If they lost, even if she lived, she died, and it would be the kind of death that lightning couldn’t save her from. They had to win.
Clouds gathered overhead, obscuring the great red eye of the moon. In the distance, thunder rolled, and a cold wind swept across the Moors, rattling the brush and chilling the flesh of the marchers. Jack flicked the reins, keeping her eyes only on their destination.