when they saw the bodies.
Two bodies, lying still and pale behind a furze bush. One was the nude figure of a young woman, the other a man. She was smooth, red-haired, vulnerable, beautiful. He had no hair at all. Both were lifeless. Josh walked up to the woman first, and felt for a pulse; then, the man.
“Nothing. Cold as earth,” he said. Isis smelled the woman’s foot and backed off.
Joshua looked at the motionless face. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, yet there was something about the face that bespoke age - reason, depth. It was more than the distance and darkness that color the mask of death; it was subtler, it was…
She opened her eyes. “Help me,” she whispered.
Isis laid her ears back and Beauty shuffled in the dust. Josh picked the woman’s head up off the ground, and as his fingers cupped the back of her scalp, he felt a slow trickle of oily liquid oozing out a small nozzle that was almost flush with the skin.
“You’re not Human,” he said in surprise.
“I’m Neuroman,” she whispered. “Help me.”
“How?” he asked.
“The quarry back there. At the bottom of the north slope, under a slab of white granite with a red vein in the shape of a J. You know what a J is?”
Joshua hesitated, then nodded. “I can read,” he said. In some places, people were burned for being able to read.
“There are two containers there.” She faltered and closed her eyes. “Bring them to me.”
Josh got up and ran back to the quarry, slid down the north grade, and found the J-veined rock. Under it were two steel pint cans. Stenciled on each was the word HEMOLUBE. And in small black letters underneath it read: Grade AAA. U.S.P.
Josh grabbed the cans and scrambled back up. He sprinted over to the supine woman. Isis sat on her haunches, watching. Beauty was kneeling down, feeling the woman’s forehead. “Cold,” he said. Humbelly sat in the grass at a distance, her wings moving slowly up and down.
The woman, aware of Josh’s return, opened her eyes and said softly, “Roll me over. Fill me up.”
Josh rolled her on her belly and parted her hair. On the back of her head a small valve was open, only slightly bigger than a spigot on the can. Josh punctured this with the point of his knife and carefully poured the viscous red fluid from the can into the hole in the back of her head. When the can was empty, Josh closed the head-valve with a snap.
The figure turned over and sat upright. “I’m alive,” she said.
Joshua took a step back. “Who are you?”
“My name is Jasmine.” She paused. “I owe you my life.”
“You don’t owe me anything. I do what I do.”
She had a feeling and smiled. “Quickly. Fill Ishmael with the other can.”
Josh rolled the lifeless man over on his belly and poured the viscous liquid from the other can into the spigot at the back of his head. Nothing happened, though. The man remained still as the earth.
“Too far gone,” said Jasmine softly. She inspected the can Josh had used on him. It was dented, with a small crack. “Or maybe this Hemolube was just contaminated.”
Beauty interrupted softly. “Who did this to you?”
“A Vampire and a Griffin, they thought Ishmael and I were Human. Left us for dead when they found out we weren’t, like the others.”
“What others?”
“Six others, in a carriage, tied together. All Humans.” She stopped. “Were they your people?”
“Most likely.” Josh stared into the distance.
“Well, then,” said Jasmine, standing. “Let’s get them.”
She found her caftan behind a log – camo-colored, of elegant design, a flowing yet nearly indestructible fabric – and put it on. Only then, when she was no longer naked, was Joshua aware of her sexuality, like ungrounded electricity. Beauty noticed it too, but ever the gentleman, he looked away.
The sun dipped its last light under the crest of the hills, putting everything in a somber cast. In the quiet of the moment, Isis cocked her ears and jerked her head left. The others looked in the same direction, but saw nothing. The black Cat sped off to the top of a long rise of rocks. In a few seconds she raced back to where the others stood.
“Yarrrrl,” she growled.
Josh ran silently with Isis to a niche in the rock pile and peered over it across the western plain.
Walking slowly toward them, a quarter-mile distant, were a dozen of Jarl’s soldiers sniffing at Joshua’s trail. Five appeared to be Bears, two were Ursumen, the other three Joshua couldn’t discern. He ran back to the others.
“JEGS,” he said. “Too many to fight. Time to run.”
“I dislike this running from,” Beauty said distinctly.
Jasmine looked from face to face, finally looking at Beauty. “When I was young, two hundred fifty years ago, there was a truth well known. It was said that for every thing, there is a season. Your fight, I think, isn’t with these soldiers.”
Josh and Beauty looked back toward the rise, where Jarl’s Elite Guard would be in a few minutes, and then ahead at the Forest of Accidents looming in the near east.
Jasmine spoke again. “I know a place to wait and think. A sanctuary, a friend’s hideaway. In the Forest.”
She held their faces in hers. They looked at each other. She knelt beside the man she’d called Ishmael and placed a hand on his forehead. “Good-bye, I,” she said, and looked at the others. “His nickname was I. That’s what people called him.” She took a moment to remember her friend, then began running toward the Forest. “Come on,” she shouted over her shoulder.
They followed her at a trot. By the time they reached the edge of the wood a minute later, night had fallen hard.
In the Forest, a blackness filled the air, deeper than any thought - a blackness without form. Shapes could be imagined in the night, differentiated only by subtle, textural variations. Here, a glossier black, there, more flat, and over there a thickening in the blackness: wet rocks in a stream, a cluster of young trees, an animal.
Occasionally through the matte of clouds that was the sky, a fleck of starlight escaped, but it was caught in the web of vines and branches that filled the forest. No light this night. Just cold, with the color of snow in a deep cave.
No sound rattled the leaves or clicked the stones. No rodent skittered, no tail slapped, no thing moved. Except once - perhaps the flapping of a great bird that could be heard high above the fringe of the farthest trees. But this noise, if it even existed, was quickly absorbed by the faint stale wind and carried into the depths of the wood.
So black, cold, quiet, still. A sense of breath lost, or held, of a momentary pause in the flow of things,
