Wonderland (Deadly Lush Book 2) Read online

  It was only a split second before Shiloh regrouped, her fingers darting to her calf for her second knife. It slashed free of its sheath as she jumped to her feet, and she splashed headlong toward the tribal man before he could come at her in the same fashion. He may have been the bigger opponent, but she could be quick.

  Agility, Jayx had drilled into her. If she was ever at a disadvantage, agility could give her the edge she needed over strength and mass.

  The Tribal's lip curled back in an ugly snarl, and he was on his feet to meet her when she reached him.

  Direct collisions weren't going to play out in her favor with this brute. She cut her momentum sharply to the side at the last second instead, sleight of hand flipping her blade in her grasp for a back-slashing motion across his ribcage as she whirled past. She teetered to catch her balance behind him, looking for signs of the damage she hoped she'd done.

  Blood trickling down his side, he followed her around, seemingly unhindered by the wound.

  Certainty wavering, Shiloh was not so quick to run at him a second time, and that small window of hesitation was all he needed to come clomping at her instead, saber arcing out of its sheath.

  So it was going to take more than drawing blood to slow him down. At least he’d evidently lost his spear in the fall.

  She ducked and dived as he reached her, but she couldn't afford to turn defensive. She slashed at the back of his calves mid-roll. His saber cleaved down into the water, missing her by inches. An insane thrill surged in her chest, and she splashed to her feet afire with giddiness. Or delirium. It was hard to say.

  Quick and unflinching she flung her knife at him. Better to try that trick now, when she still had others as backup.

  He thrashed it aside with his own blade, a metallic ring slicing through the air.

  Two down.

  Chest heaving faster with excitement, the crazed Tribal sloshed toward her once again, thinking he had her disarmed.

  Two knives at once this time. Shiloh amped herself up for the conflict, silencing her inner scream. She'd asked for this.

  Come at me, you confounded brute.

  Saber tip dragging in the water, he lugged his filthy mass across the silvery battleground. This time it was slower, taunting. She felt the maggoty focus of his gaze lusting after her blood.

  Could she not have attracted a smaller member of the Tribe?

  He picked up speed as he neared, brandishing his weapon. It was a terrifying visual, but Shiloh told herself it was no different than her sparring sessions with Jayx. It was just another deadly dance, another give-and-take, her reflexes tuned to respond to his signals.

  But he was not Jayx.

  She feinted away from the onslaught, dodging the saber a second time, but his arms swung at a different height than Jayx's, and it was too close. It was then that she truly appreciated the fact that nothing about him moved like Jayx. Not to mention, everywhere she might have aimed to take out Jayx's vitals was slightly off-set from the target areas on this man. A slice to Jayx's heart was a slice to this man's ribcage. To gouge out his eyes she'd have to hoist herself off the ground. Even a knee to the groin was more ambitious a maneuver.

  A third time she avoided his cleaver, but he was slashing back and forth at that point and caught her on the back-lash, hooking the side of her face with the hilt. She toppled, stars shooting across her vision. Sprawling in the water, she had just enough presence of mind to haul herself back onto her knees and scurry out of reach, relinquishing a knife in the process.

  She only had one weapon left in her grasp. This was going downhill fast. Her head pounded, her neck hot from whiplash. As deadly dances went, she had just been rendered the partner with two left feet.

  She could hear him coming after her. Desperate, she flopped onto her back, slogged herself up onto an elbow, and hurled her last knife to deter him.

  This time it caught him in the gut. A much-belated tribute to one small bit of her intensive training.

  He faltered, going to his knees. His breath seemed to catch on the pain, and he dropped his saber to clutch at the knife. His other hand went to catch his balance against the lake bed.

  Had she done enough damage to keep him at bay? Even the playing field, at least?

  But his head came back up, setting her in his sights with renewed provocation. Not for the first time, she heard what sounded like a tiger's growl puttering up from a Tribal's chest. Then he was crawling forward, murky eyes wide and spittle snarling from his lips.

  Rabid. That was the word for what had come over him.

  Boots scraping against the lake bed, Shiloh scrambled to get away. What was it going to take to immobilize him? She fumbled to don her brass knuckles, a last resort. Even with a knife in his gut, he overtook her. Try as she might, she couldn't get her feet underneath her while her head was spinning like a gyroscope. His burly hand came down on her ankle, and, ape-like, he dragged her body underneath him as he crawled forward.

  She kicked and clawed, winning a knee between herself and his mass. It kept him at bay momentarily, but did nothing to force him off.

  His weight itself would crush her. Shiloh squirmed uselessly, a painful pressure building in her chest where she was pinned. Her ribs strained under his mass, her lungs becoming pinched. Rabid froth dripped in her face, and she shook it out of her eyes, fighting to keep her arms from being restrained. It was a fruitless effort, given her disadvantage. After two well-aimed, brass knuckled punches to his face, he smashed one of her wrists down into the water, then won her other forearm. His clawlike nails dug into her flesh. Arching into a strangled scream, the water level lapped at Shiloh's cheeks. Any deeper, and she would have drowned simply from being pinned.

  There was one last tactic at her disposal. She had never hoped to be close enough to employ it, but if done right it would serve sufficiently as her end game.

  With her head arched back, she focused all of her remaining strength into leveraging it up out of the water to connect her skull with his face. Her neck snapped with the exertion, a pinched, guttural shriek escaping her with the last dredges of willpower she possessed. Her forehead rammed hard into his nose, and a sickening, juicy crunch cracked in her ears.

  His rabid mouth-breathing gurgled to an abrupt halt. Hot liquid trickled down her neck, and she opened her eyes just in time to see the blood pouring from his broken nose before he went limp on top of her.

  All of her remaining breath squeezed out of her lungs. Like a pile of boulders, his deadweight pressed down upon her.

  She struggled through a few convulsing half-breaths, fighting as if the wind had been knocked out of her. Was that the knife in his gut, poking hilt-first into hers? It was hard to tell if the trickle of liquid she felt there was water or more of his blood. Probably both.

  With a great, heaving concentration of willpower, Shiloh strained against his weight, a strangled cry ebbing out into the conquered quiet.

  He barely budged.

  Shiloh relented, gasping for air. It was hopeless. How was she ever going to muster the strength to free herself, if he barely even budged? She gave a frustrated, exhausted – and admittedly disgusted – groan, giving it up for a moment in order to work on catching her breath. Maybe if she just let the fatigue pass, let her over-exertion fade, she could try again with more success.

  The evidence of their skirmish stilled across the surface of the lake, the water returning to a still pane peppered only by the drizzle. Shiloh stared up at the stormy sky, the epitome of long-suffering, trying to meditate herself into a half-comatose state that required less oxygen. Soon her desperation glazed over and she realized how happy she was to simply lie there, spent, staring into nothing, her hampered lungs scraping in the bare minimum, in and out, in and out. Replete in her tentative hibernation, she couldn’t say how long she lay there; long enough.

  She came back into herself suddenly. A quick intake of breath, a focusing of dilated pupils. Her overdrawn resources partially restored, she returned to her o
bjective with renewed determination.

  This time, the corpse responded to her efforts, shifting off of her one painstaking inch at a time. Every second she had to endure his meaty oppression was torture, each shift that didn’t quite dislodge him a prolonged cruelty that made her want to sob in defeat.

  And then, at last, his offensive bulk sloughed off into the water. Shiloh did let out a sob then, crawling onto her hands and knees. Recovering from the initial over-exertion in no way meant she was back to a regular state of welfare. Her muscles were a watery mess, her head pounding as if someone stood there punching her even now.

  Blood dripped from her parted lips. Probably not even hers. Maybe hers. She didn’t really have a good sense of how things had ended up. Couldn’t even tell the extent of where she hurt.

  But her gaze landed on her Tribal victim, his maggoty eyes staring blankly up into the rain.

  If she’d aimed wrong, her skull-bash move could have resulted only in a broken nose. As it was, it would seem the shard of his nose had gone right up into his brain.

  A cocky, brazen rush went through her.

  She’d done it.

  Hello, and welcome to Paradise, she fancied herself greeting the next band of newcomers. My name is Shiloh, and I run this town.

  5 – Survivor Revolution

  When Shiloh returned to the Dauntless, headdress of ram’s horns dragging beside her, hair plastered to her face with rain and grunge, blood spattered across her person, a hush fell over the group of refugees on deck. There were the double-takes, the subtle steps backward to make way – Jayx tuning in to everyone’s reaction and turning to see what the stir was about.

  Shiloh cast the crown of horns at his feet. As good as the head of one of their enemies. A blatant statement.

  Silently taking in the offering she’d so kindly bestowed, Jayx looked up to read her face. Shiloh stared defiantly back, letting the trophy speak for itself.

  Would he publicly berate her for breaching the island without his approval? If she was going for an indisputably hardcore impression to claim her independence, maybe it would be better to not give him the chance to dethrone her.

  “One less Tribal to worry about,” she announced curtly, and spun to retreat to her quarters below-deck. “Oh, and Tace – I borrowed this.” Pausing to procure the throwing star, she held it up for the other girl to see, and then chucked it so it embedded itself in the deck at her feet. Bowing her head of buzz-cropped dark hair to eye the weapon pilfered from her stash, Tace bent to retrieve it, saying nothing. The draping cowl of her moth-eaten sweater drooped open to reveal the nasty scar slashed across her chest. If Shiloh was going to pick a partner in crime to slay Tribal alongside her, it would be Tace. There was something about her. Something fearsome and austere that named her the refugee Shiloh worried about least.

  The gazes of the group followed Shiloh until she vanished below-deck. She didn’t flinch at all under the scrutiny, welcoming the controversial vibe that might start a much-needed conversation. That’s right. Stick that in your spineless pipe of wispy confidence, and smoke it, the lot of you.

  *

  The knife thudded into the trunk, two inches from its mark. The smell of maple filled the clearing as sap wept from the gouges, trees bleeding gold across red-smeared targets Shiloh had painted with fruit dye. She didn’t hit the center every time, but at least she always hit the targets, now, instead of flinging her weapon with gusto off into the jungle, like she never wanted to see it again. And at least the blade was sticking, rather than the discouraging splatter of hilt-first repetition that clamored and clanged to the ground in disgrace, again and again and again when she'd first started doing these exerecises.

  Hurray for the ability to do some actual damage, rather than basically handing her weapon to the enemy after drawing them after her with a rude smack in the face.

  She retrieved her knife; flung it again. Her arm ached from the redundancy of the task. Every muscle in her body was sore from her encounter with the now-deceased Tribal. She had hoped to limber up the stiffness by returning to her exercises, but so far she wondered if she was just adding insult to injury. The pain flared as she worked to extract the blade – deeper this time – from the silvery bark.

  The softest crackle in the underbrush, just a crisp whisper of dead leaves and feather-light brush of a fern, drew her around right as she freed the blade, and she felt the undertow of reflex seize her body and sweep her up in its current, propelling her limbs into motion. Like a puppet caught in a riptide, she swept through the pattern almost without even realizing it, and her blade sailed through the air and pierced a trunk next to the pocket of cover where he lurked.

  Blue eyes peering out of the green shadows, he glanced calmly at the knife that suspended itself next to his head.

  Jayx reached around the trunk and wrapped his fingers around the leather-bound hilt. The roping muscles of his arm bunched as he pulled it free.

  A strange mix of relief and guilt fluttered in Shiloh's chest when she saw it was him. Relief that she hadn't just been discovered by another hungry Tribal scout – she wasn’t ready to face another quite so soon – and guilt at being caught beyond the Boundary.

  Then she reminded herself: she’d already thoroughly disbanded the restrictions from applying to her. No point in feeling sheepish for something she’d already rubbed in his face.

  So maybe the guilt had more to do with nearly making a shish-kebab out of Jayx's right eye.

  “Good ear,” Jayx congratulated her notice of his arrival. He stepped out of the trees and offered the knife back to her. She met his gaze as she took it, trying to read his true opinion of her presence. Of the risk she entertained by being out here, playing in the Restricted Zone.

  “Still working on my aim,” she said.

  “Good thing.” A wry tinge laced his voice. His eyes traveled down from her face, finding a fresh, bloody pattern of bite marks on her arm. It had been two days since her Tribal-slaying. He took her arm in his hand for inspection. “What's this?”

  “Carniflora,” she replied evenly, referencing the carnivorous flowers that inhabited pockets of the island.

  “A new crop?”

  “Same as before.”

  He eyed her quietly. “You went back there?”

  “What can I say. You get a taste for hunting, you have to feed it. Thought it might be wise to go a few rounds with something on a relative leash, before tackling my next real quarry. And I figured, maybe I’ll have help, next time. Always better as a team.”

  She could hear the ferns breathing in the silence that met her prod. The silence that judged her, pooling at her feet like a puddle of her own foreseen blood. She could feel the sharp crystal edges of Jayx's clear, clear eyes, cutting into her. Like many-faceted pieces of sky, crisp and all-seeing from their pedestal that looked down on the rest of the world. It was hard not to be intimidated by his unknown thoughts. His sheer, unrelenting calm.

  “Did you really go looking for a trophy?” he asked finally, when he decided to release the charged silence. “Or did you find yourself in harm’s way, and simply come out ahead?”

  Shrugging, Shiloh assumed an attitude of nonchalance, trying to ice herself with a similar cool. Trying to ice herself with the same hardcore confidence he oozed. The hardcore confidence he oozes as easily as you're prone to ooze blood, all the times you would bleed to death in his wake while he hacks effortlessly through legions of foes. “Wouldn’t you like to know.” She raised the knife to her lips; licked the maple sap off the blade for pure effect. Let him wonder, just for a minute. Let him realize she was her own person, that his control only extended so far and would best serve everyone if used to direct the energies of the monsters he was creating; not to restrain them.

  “You made your point, Shiloh. Don’t get cocky,” Jayx warned.

  “We going to stage an invasion, then? Organize an attack?”

  “Are you so eager to get someone killed?”

  That sobere
d her up, just a little.

  Jayx took the opportunity to broach the lecture on his mind. “We start making our stand, someone is going to die. And when they do, you’ll wonder if you were right, if we were really ready, if there was more we could have done to prepare first, if we should have gone the extra mile just to be sure. It’ll eat you up.”

  Shiloh pictured the scenario, and imagined that he was right. Still, her point wouldn’t rest. “Not if something else eats us up first.”

  Jayx leaned back against a tree, crossing his arms over his bare chest to consider her.

  She plowed on. “They know we’re here. If you expect me to believe they’re just twiddling their thumbs out there waiting for us to amass our forces or fine-tune our plan, well, I’d be stupid to count on that. We have to make the first move, Jayx. Don’t we?”

  Jayx let his opinion swirl cryptically inside his own head before treating her to a frustratingly small glimpse, as usual. “Ideally.”

  “Well?” Shiloh threw up a hand in exasperation. “The Dauntless was a smart move when we were stuck at a disadvantage in the fray, needing a retreat, but we can’t just drift stagnantly in the shallows like useless lily pads forever. I get it,” her tone softened, taking on an empathetic quality. “You don’t want to lose anyone else. You’ve already lost too many. But I asked you to make the island fear me, and now…it should. You’ve succeeded, Jayx. We’re ready.”

  He nodded, but very quickly Shiloh realized it was more of a humoring nod, than a gesture of agreeance. “Ready,” he mused, skeptical. “The enemy we have pitted ourselves against is as fierce and inhuman as they come. The only way to combat an enemy like that is to become the same. Or worse. Do you really mean to stand there and tell me that you have become sufficiently worse than the enemy we’ve sworn to dethrone because of that very inhumanity?”

  Shiloh blinked. When he put it like that… Suddenly, she felt a wave of doubt. Of confusion.