Flesh-&-Bone(59)

She heard a second grunt, and for a moment she strained to tell whether it was the same boar making shorter grunts or— No, there it was again. Two grunts overlapping. Then a third. A fourth.

Then two more.

Six of them.

Somewhere below her was an entire pack of the dead boars.

She closed her eyes for a moment and listened inside her body. She could not feel any cuts, but she could feel the warmth of blood inside her clothes.

She gingerly wiggled her fingers. They worked fine. She tried her toes. Also fine. There was pain in the backs of her legs, but she was comforted by the fact that she could feel her legs. After the first boar had hit her and she landed on the rock, Lilah was sure she’d broken her back. Not so.

It was a comfort, but it was not the end of her troubles.

She lifted one leg. Only an inch, but it did move. Pain shot up the back of her thigh and into her hip joint. Had the boar torn her side open? If that was the case, then she knew that she was probably going to die.

Lilah took a breath and successfully moved hands and feet, and determined that her spine was not too badly damaged. That was something. A cut, even a bad one, was something she could deal with.

She opened her eyes and looked up at the branches above her. Several of them were cracked and broken from her fall. Directly above her was one that had snapped off, leaving a spike of wood nearly eight inches long. She reached for it, moving slowly and with great care. Her fingers wriggled for the branch, her fingertips brushing the bottom of it. Almost . . . almost.

But it was too far.

There was no way she could grab it without sitting up, and that meant that her angle to the boughs would radically change. By bending at the waist she would be placing a great deal of her upper body mass at an angle toward her middle. That V position of her body would concentrate her weight into a single point instead of spreading it out over the surface of the branches. She would slide right through and probably fall.

She looked up at the branch.

She had to make that bend, but she had to do it faster than gravity could pull her. Bend, reach, lunge, grab. Without knowing how badly she was hurt, it was a terrible risk.

The alternative was to lie there and bleed to death.

Lilah closed her eyes for a moment, conjuring the faces of the people she loved. Annie, George. Tom.

And Chong.

He was a town boy and not a good match for her in any way.

But she did love him, and she knew that Chong loved her . . . even though neither of them had ever spoken that word. Love. She smiled. Chong was probably too afraid to say it. But then again, so was she.

Afraid of all that the word meant.

As a result, they’d had so little between them. A few kisses, a few tender words. Nothing else. And if she did not move, that was all she would ever have.

That wasn’t fair. She hadn’t survived all those years in the wild only to be teased by the promise of love. In the thousands of books she’d read, love was the most important thing. It could move worlds.

Could it move her fast enough to grab that branch?

“Chong,” she said, and this time it was his name she spoke. Not Tom’s. Chong.

She opened her eyes and glared at the branch.

Then all at once she threw her weight upward, tightened her stomach muscles, stretched with her shoulder and back, and braced for the screaming pain. The branches under her creaked and cracked as she lunged.

The pain was . . . immense.

But her hand closed on the branch.

She took everything the pain could throw at her. She bit down on it, snarled at it, opened her mouth and howled it out of her as she pulled on that branch. Broken twigs slashed at her side and legs and arms, but she took that pain too.

Pain had never owned Lilah, and it did not own her now.

Screaming with agony and rage, she whipped her other hand up, pulling now with both arms, with the muscles of her shoulders and chest and back.

Suddenly she heard a sharp crack beneath her, and the main branch on which she lay collapsed away from her, leaving her hanging. The pain, clever and deceitful as it always was, revealed that it had so much more to give.

She screamed, but she took it.

The muscles all along her tanned arms stood taut against her skin. Hot wetness ran down from her torn side, and fat drops of blood fell down into the shadows. Below her the infected hogs sent up a squeal of hellish hunger.

“Damn you,” she growled as she pulled herself up.

The whole tree swayed, tilting outward as if trying to shake her off.

Lilah pulled.