#in which: lani does a little blood sacrifice

[greatshell-rider]

“Al, wait!” Toby cried, scrambling after her. “We shouldn’t be here!”

“What are you, scared?” she called over her shoulder, long strides quick and eager.

“Yeah! Yeah, I am! If M. Harriet finds out about this . . .”

“Hmmm,” was all the response he got.

He shook his head, making the light streaming ahead of him from his headlamp wobble, and hurried faster to catch up to the thin slip of a girl marching through the cave, her blond hair swinging smartly from side to side in its ponytail, synced to her step. She was so sure of herself, always in motion, never waiting for any one or thing to tell her what to do. The camp counselors had never stood a chance. Toby couldn’t convince her to leave using threats; he had to appeal to her own interests and goals, not what others thought of or would do to her.

So he tried again. “Randall said the meteor shower’s peak is happening at three A.M., which is—” he checked his wristwatch— “an hour away! We won’t see anything good unless we start heading back now—”

“What does Randall know?” Al interrupted, dismissive. “Besides, don’t you want to see Jack again? We’re doing this for you, remember.”

“We don’t have to be doing this at night,” Toby complained, but he hesitated. Jack. Two days had passed since he’d stumbled upon that lost hiker in the woods while in the middle of the deep-woods navigation scavenger hunt, two days since Toby had seen or spoken to him—and even just hearing his name made him shiver.

The memory was so distinct in his mind. Kneeling by the stranger’s head from where they lay a distance from the closest deer trail, apparently having collapsed and definitely unconscious. They had a pulse, but was badly sunburned, with cracked lips and no water bottle or snacks that Toby could see. Dirty, disheveled and torn clothes, all fabric and skin caked with dust, but their hair had stayed soft, long black curls falling over Toby’s hands like water as he’d carefully moved the hiker’s head to a more comfortable position after rolling them over onto their back. As soon as he had touched his water bottle to the hiker’s lips, they’d awoken, dark green eyes flaring open to meet Toby’s own. After some awkward explaining and introductions, Toby had learned:

1. The hiker’s name was Jack.

2. Jack was far from home.

3. He wanted to return, but couldn’t leave the mountains until he found something that had been lost.

4. That thing was in Spruce Fire Cave.

And Toby knew this already: Spruce Fire was within Blue River Campgrounds, and no outside visitors were allowed in.

“But I need it,” Jack had said, fierce and earnest, gripping Toby’s hand hard. “It’s rightfully mine. They took it from me and—” A snap of a tree branch startled them both, and Jack jerked to his feet, looking like a deer who’d spotted a hound. “They can’t find me,” he’d hissed, then disappeared into the trees before Toby could object, right as Al had stepped out, asking who that’d been.

Al could keep a secret though. She kept plenty of her own to herself; Toby didn’t know if a soul knew where Al had come from, or who her parents were, not even the counselors or M. Harriet. But she also had connections, ways to smuggle information or goods in and out of camp, and before sundown of the same day, she’d found out more about Jack from her contact in town.

A ghost, apparently. Jack was a ghost.

“How long has he been haunting this mountain, again?” Toby asked reluctantly, brought out of the past by the realization that he’d been quiet for a while now, and they were deeper than ever in Spruce Fire Cave.

“Mal says the stories start some ten, fifteen years back,” Al said, ducking under a low outcropping of rock before turning sideways to squeeze down a narrow passage. She grunted, and her next words came out strained. “Overnight hikers can hear him at the edges of their campfire at night, asking for directions. But they say he’ll stay lost until he finds his compass. His mother’s or something.”

“His mother who died in the fire,” Toby said, gut twisting, and he barely even noticed the constriction on his ribs as he followed after Al.

“Well they both died—though no one can agree exactly how—but it was his fault. And that’s why he’s the ghost. He’s got to make it better. So they say.”

“So they say,” Toby echoed, then concentrated as they reached the tricky part of the cave, where the ceiling was relatively high, but the path narrow, with a crevice wide enough to fall down on Toby’s left. The counselors had made everyone go single-file here, with an adult at the beginning and at the end of “Traitor’s Teeth”, as it was called, because of the jagged rocks forming the lip of the crevice that made it look like a grinning mouth. But just a little farther, and they would reach the end of the cave, the largest cavern with its clearwater pool and impressive curtain of stalactites that almost seemed to glow when all the campers had their flashlights turned on them. Toby remembered his cabin’s visit from the beginning of the week well, and the counselors had warned sternly about the consequences of littering in the cave—no way a compass had been left there, if one had ever been found.

But Toby still had to try and look. He couldn’t help but sympathize with ghosts; he’d grown up with his father telling him about his grandmother, after all. If there was a chance he could help Jack—who looked no older than Toby’s fourteen—he had to take it. No matter what he did, he couldn’t shake the image of cradling Jack’s head in his lap, the weight of it on his hands. He had seemed so real, so vulnerable, and the thought of the pain that he had experienced, was still experiencing, for fifteen years now, made Toby’s heart ache.

Al was right. The counselors never would have let them go up into Spruce Fire alone. Sure, it wasn’t safe to be here at night, but it was the only way.

They were still on Traitor’s Teeth. Toby nearly bumped into Al before realizing she’d stopped dead in her tracks. “Al?” he said, peering over her shoulder.

Silently, she pointed. Barely a foot ahead, a chunk of stone was missing from the path, leaving a ragged hole that joined with the crevice. Al swore quietly, then stepped up to the hole and leaned over to examine it.

“Al, careful!” Toby grabbed her shoulder in alarm, partly to keep her from falling, and partly because the sight suddenly made him dizzy. The nausea in his stomach rose, and coldness flushed down the back of his neck as his nervousness returned. “Al,” he forced out, holding himself steady against her, “now we really need to get back. There’s no way we’ll get past that!”

“You’re right,” Al said, straightening.

“No, really, it’s too big. We can’t—wait, what?”

“Let’s go, Toby,” Al said, turning around and moving his hand off her.

“Awesome,” he said faintly, shuffling his feet to go back the other way, but had to stop when the nausea hit again, this time like a punch to his stomach. He groaned and hunched over, barely holding himself back from puking the remains of dinner—chili dogs—into Traitor’s Teeth.

“Toby?” he heard Al say, but dimly, as if she were far away rather than right next to him, and felt pressure on his shoulder as she grabbed him. “Are you—”

And then he was falling.

And then it went black.

~~~~

Toby woke to Al calling his name and shaking his shoulder, then the glaring yellow light of her headlamp when he opened his eyes. He groaned, trying to turn away, but it hurt too much, he realized. Every bone in his body hurt, and his head was screaming. He touched his temple, and it came away wet with blood.

“Finally you’re awake,” Al said, in a different tone Toby had ever heard from her. “I wasn’t looking forward to dragging you, you know. Now, up you go.” She tugged on his arm, and he let her pull him unsteadily to his feet. “Woah,” she said as he swayed, his eyes squeezed shut and teeth clenched tight as a new wave of nausea swept over him. She laughed when he sagged against her, but slung an arm over his shoulders to support him. “My, how close two can get in less than a week.”

Her laugh upset him. “What’s funny about this?” he asked, forcing his eyes open. His headlamp was out, but Al’s still worked, and he could make out gray stone all around them, different from the brown rock of Spruce Fire. “Al, where are we?”

She pointed up, and Toby craned his aching head back to see a ragged rip in the rock ceiling above them. The light of Al’s headlamp threw back dramatic shadows in the stone teeth, making them look huge and sharp. He blinked a few times in confusion, his body hurting so much he could hardly think, but then everything that had happened caught up to him. “We fell down Traitor’s Teeth?”

“You fell,” Al said, tipping her head toward him. “I more like, skidded down, on my feet.” She moved her free hand down diagonally, making short, jerky stops to mimic a descent down an uneven slope. “Easy enough. But come on. It’s close.” She started walking.

“You followed me down?” Toby said in disbelief, forced to stumble after her with her arm still around him. “Why didn’t you go for help! Now we’re both stuck down here! Al!”

She grinned, teeth glinting in the light of her headlamp, but her eyes stayed forward. “Aw, but I care about you. Aren’t you flattered I came after you? You just matter so much.”

He stared at her. Al might’ve disdained the counselors, and knew nothing but fight with authority figures, but she wasn’t ever mean to her peers. Not to him. They . . . they were friends. And she was smart, smarter and faster than any other kid at camp. Had Toby fallen down the crevice, she would’ve gone for help. This wasn’t like her. None of this made sense.

“Where are we going?” he said, alarmed, as he realized they were going. “Al, the Teeth are back there!” He struggled to turn around, get her arm off of him, but her grip was strong, and she kept pulling him forward.

“While we’re down here, we might as well explore,” she purred. Her light, playful voice didn’t match the rest of her at all—not the quick, urgent stride of her long legs, nor the strange, feverish light shining in her eyes. Her entire body buzzed with tension, reminding Toby of a cat crouched in the grass, one pounce away from a kill.

“Al, I want to go back. Please.” His voice trembled on the last word, and Toby was suddenly aware he was close to tears. He could barely stand, let alone walk, his head wanted to explode, and his stomach was still twisted in knots. “I’m done with this cave, done with Jack—”

“Not yet you aren’t,” she murmured, more to herself than him, and came to a stop. Abruptly Toby realized they’d come to a dead end, a bare wall of nearly straight stone before them. It was a paler gray than before, with veins and patches of smoky white throughout it, and it looked oddly smooth, not natural at all.

Al let go of him, and Toby slumped to the ground. All he wanted was to curl up and let the pain take over, but he forced himself to watch as Al walked up and placed a hand against the stone, lightly, skin just barely touching. “ ‘Bury a child of Veranas under ashes and starfall to unlock the gate,’ ” she mused to the rock, “ ‘and unworldly treasures shall be yours.’ ”

Toby jolted at the name of his grandmother. His pain dimmed, only to make room for the fear. “Who are you?” he whispered, trembling. “What do you want with me?” Al turned to him with a smile sharp with delight, and suddenly Toby remembered the moment before he’d fallen down Traitor’s Teeth.

Al had pushed him.

He shrunk away as she approached him, and cried out when she grabbed him, but she ignored his kicks and flails as she dragged him up to the stone wall.

“Stop,” he begged, hitting at her side with his hand. “Please, don’t.” One strike must’ve hit harder than the rest, because she grunted, then adjusted her grip to twist his arm sharply behind his back. He cried out, and could only struggle feebly as she forced him up close.

“Hey, be glad I don’t have to use the knife,” she told him. One hand still twisting his arm, she used the other to grab his neck and press the bleeding side of his head, where the fall had cut him, against the rock. “Let’s see if this works,” she said cheerfully, and from the corner of his eye, he saw her bend down to look at his wristwatch. “Two fifty-eight in four. Three. Two. One—”

Fire lit up the side of Toby’s face, a pain sharper and crueler than the rest of his strains and aches combined. He screamed, but didn’t hear it, as his jaw dislocated and his back arched and his whole body began to hum—

Before finally, blissfully, he returned to the black.

~~~~

Lani emerged from Spruce Fire Cave a short time later, a little dustier than she’d started, with a bit of blood staining the collar of her t-shirt, but triumphant. With her headlamp turned off, she looked around the entrance of the cave, then used a tree as a handhold and clambered up the cliff face a ways to reach her brother, sitting on a ledge and watching meteors streak down from the heavens in fiery ecstasy.

“Heyo, Jack,” she hallooed, plunking down beside him.

He rolled his eyes. “Is he okay?”

She rolled her eyes back. “Your boyfriend’s fine. They’ll find him in the morning or never.”

“He’s not—” Jerry cut himself off with a frustrated puff of air, taking a moment to calm himself before continuing in a carefully not-angry tone, “Did you get it?”

Lani fished around in her pocket, pulled out a snail shell, and tossed it to him. Jerry caught it by the fingertips, preventing it from sailing down the mountainside, and threw her a resentful glance. She smiled back, and he exhaled again before turning the shell around in his fingers to examine it by starlight.

“What’s it do?”

She snorted. “It’s a snail shell, Jerry. Snails, uh, live in them.”

His head jerked to her. “This isn’t it? All of this was for nothing?”

She flapped her hand at him. “Calm down, poltergeist. That’s just a neat shell I found in the cave. Curious that a snail found its way all the way down there, you know? I wonder if there’s a species on this ’scape that—”

“Lani,” Jerry cut in, teeth grit. “Did. You. Get. The. Information. Or not.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. There was a skeleton beyond the wall, pale bleached old thing. I sprinkled some of Veranas’ blood on it and it woke right up, chattered away at me about curses, fates, damnation of the world and the failure of my line and all that, then got to the good stuff. Well, I had to threaten to break its ribs with my boot first, and then it agreed to answer my questions, i.e., the good stuff.”

“And?”

“He was here,” she said simply. “We’re on the right trail.”

Jerry let out a long breath, leaning back to settle against the rocks. He stared blankly at the sky. “I was right.”

“Yep.”

They sat quietly for a while, watching the meteor shower. Or, maybe Jerry was. Lani didn’t bother. She tapped her chin after a minute or two. “Although.”

Silently, Jerry turned his head and looked at her. When she said no more, he raised his eyebrows. “Although?”

She lifted her eyebrows back at him. “Someone was here before us. Path was ruined.”

Jerry groaned, hunching over and dragging his hands down his face.

“Crevice got bigger,” Lani continued in a conversational tone. “And the grain of the gate was swirled in a different pattern this time. Skeleton didn’t mention it, but it was hiding a lot. Or it’s not advanced enough to remember anything more than what’s already been programmed. But this, plus what happened to your shoelaces . . .”

“They’ve caught up with us again,” Jerry growled, face still in his hands. “I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them. All of them, I swear.” He repeated that a few times in a dark mutter to himself, along with a few other threats no more creative.

Lani didn’t bother listening to that, either. She was thinking. Her brain was doing that all the time, even without her sometimes, no matter what her brother or other spectators might say in regards to her actions, but now she focused her thoughts solely on this one question, this one puzzle and game. Regular hunters would have attacked them already by now, laid a trap in the cave, probably. Or an ambush on one of the trails. Maybe even a blatant slaughter of the camp—not to cover up their tracks, but as a warning, an example made to their subjects of what happened to those who attempted escape.

But we did escape, she reminded herself. They had to be careful now, not to let them get away forever. A weakness she could exploit.

But that wasn’t the puzzle here. Part of it, but a mere digression from the true question. Whoever had been at the gate had not been their hunters, not the regular ones at least. The signatures didn’t match. So. The question. The puzzle and the game.

Who had it been?

#my writing #Lani & Jerry #in which: lani does a little blood sacrifice #woe to me in transferring these pieces of writing to tumblr from google docs #i have to go through and reformat all the itatlics

[neontigrr]

damn rylan, back at it again with the loveable idiots — hello everyone & meet natalie, 29, devil’s disciple and sad sack of shit. she’s a recovering addict and an artist, part-time waitress at hale’s diner, part-time gardener at greer’s greenhouse, full time nerd and tiger enthusiast. find her info, facts & wanted connections below!! TW: DRUG ABUSE, EMOTIONAL ABUSE, OVERDOSING.

BIO:

at ten she’s a spark begging to be ignited. a kid with a bright imagination, but her parents aren’t happy. school is hard for the girl who’ll spend hours covering textbooks in flowers — why should two plus two matter, she thinks, when i can make the paper bloom into whole gardens, full of creatures staring back at me, when i can create my own world? her parents have never been the kind to waste their days daydreaming. they look at their youngest daughter and think: where does she take it? all this carefree passion of hers, where does it come from? she lacks her father’s disposition for numbers, how clinically pristine they look when lined up one after the other, and how satisfying they feel when preceded by a plus sign on a bank invoice. she has none of her mother’s backbone, the way she carries herself as if pure, molten gold flew into her veins — staring everyone down, making herself taller. she seems to only have eyes for fleeting things, mundane passions: for her colors, for the music of a guitar, for the way the desert sand blows into her hair at sundown. come a couple years, all she has eyes of is the boy playing his guitar among the wrecks of a car parts graveyard — says his name is elvis and she knows that isn’t true, but in las vegas, somehow, you can make yourself be whoever you want to be. she smiles, and says her name is tiger instead: in another life, perhaps, she was fierce and with a bite.

at seventeen she’s golden spotlights on the vegas strip. atomic bomb waiting to explode, all summer glare and midnight rides into nowhere: it’s her and elvis in his daddy’s car and it feels like they could conquer the world, if they wanted. he sings to her, she dances for him, characters straight out of a ‘50s song, loaded with a naivety that tastes like the american dream. no time for overbearing parents, no attention paid in school: it’s just them, skin on skin, flowers blooming from her fingers in spray paint over abandoned buildings. this could last forever, she thinks, she begs, she prays: a life like this could last forever. (a life like this drains the best of her). elvis was born to be a king like his namesake, and he’s got dreams of fame and glory that don’t contemplate her presence. street artists never become rockstars, and she has time for nothing more than the creatures lunging out of her fingers, onto the paper. she’s skin and bones, ink and notes, like she could live off of music and drawings alone — and him, always him, a golden god, a forbidden hymn. the night he signs his first record deal she grabs her inks and her pens — draws a present on his skin, a crown for the king to be. and as she draws, she prays: that their dreams can be true, that this is not a happy chorus in a ballad, but a rock opera, a discography for the ages to come. she prays for him like a beggar at an altar: and maybe there’s magic in that crown she draws, there’s truth in the prayer she pours into it. he wins his dreams and leaves her behind: prayers always require sacrifices.

at twenty-two she’s broken lightbulbs under strangers’ feet. she’s shards of glass she could cut people with, but it’s herself she harms; see, elvis’ gone but there’s tons of friends in his place. there’s mary jane, addy, crystal, lucy and all her diamonds. vegas is a wonderland, a new high hidden ‘round every corner, and kind people willing to hand ‘em out like candy to an hazy, improvised alice — the drawings grow darker now, shadows with caved-in eyes and hollow chests. the colors don’t come the way they used to, and when they do they all look like a shade of nightmares — blood red, nausea green, despair blue. she looks for answers in his songs: on the radio, in her mind, she swears he still sings about her. has to follow him to the middle of the desert, to a festival where he stands on a stage and people swear he looks just like the real thing, the king himself. she doesn’t see him, though, but a hole where all her strength used to be, the us against the world turned into the open jaws of a ravenous monster: us against the world, and then the world collapses. wonderland turns to the land of nightmares, and the needle, it is her salvation — down the rabbit hole, she thinks, and someone must come out on the other side. either her, or the ghost of her. either her, or her evil turned to flesh. there is no white rabbit but a man — a good man, a honest man, with an inclination to fixing broken things. he helps her up to her fit, treats her alike his daughter and his sister, and when he begins asking her to help fix the remains of a broken bike, she begins to wonder whether he isn’t trying to fix her, too. sometimes he calls her tiger and she remembers when she fancied herself a wild and untamed thing, escaping cages, just following her instincts. under the heat of the south-west sun, she smiles. maybe all tigers were lost creatures at first.

at twenty-nine she’s neon gas begging to be lit up. there’s a tiger on her forearm, hides the scars of a previous life. there’s always ink under her fingernails, sometimes it seems it shines in the dark. charming has become her home: the devil’s disciples, her family. the bike she’d begun to fix with the man who helped her now bears the name of tempest, and she rides it out with the devils letting it add to the spirit in her heart — wild, untamed, free. her family becomes charming, becomes the devils, becomes rett, lani and rowan. she’s made herself a home in the sand: an old garage, turned inside out, now overflowing with flowers and colors, sparkling gems and drawings hanging at every corner — and a canary, otis, that sings her to sleep every night. she’s called it dustland, a sort of mythical place at the edge of charming, willing to welcome all the broken, all the wounded and the lost. but she loses herself too, now and then. at times she looks past the profiles of houses and buildings, and knows there’s a den of wolves in there, which hold the key to that rabbit hole she once lost herself in. at night, when the desert gets cold and her bones don’t feel anything like a tiger’s — she swears she can hear the wolves howl, beckoning. when she does, she turns to the ink to remind herself of how life was drained out of all shades, because of the needles in her arm. sometimes it’s enough to keep her breathing to the night. sometimes.

ABOUT:

• ‘heart over matter’, because she barely ever acts on anything other than pure instinct. • she lives in a refurnished garage on the edge of town, and she’s given it the name of ‘dustland’. it’s full of trinkets and good luck charms, colors and drawings hanging on every corner, flowers, healing gems and her bird, a pet canary named otis. it’s a big enough place to hide people who need to lie low for a while, people who need to get patched up or goods that need to be out of the radar of unwanted visitors.  • the above mentioned ways the dustland has been used before are also some of the biggest ways in which nat contributes to the mc. she’s not much use in a fight, but is resourceful enough to always find ways to help and prove her belonging in the club, be it by smuggling goods, helping the wounded, whatever it’s required that doesn’t imply bloodshed.  • when she isn’t working, you will find her drawing on virtually any available surface. she tends to create beautiful, meaningful portraits for the people she loves the most too — they’re all some sort of surreal, odd watercolor portrait. • she has several tattoos other than the devils’ one, the most prominent one on her right arm: a big, colorful tiger she got about a year since her arrival in charming. it was a drawing she made channeling the nickname rett had given her, and it was inked by none other than the original nat, natalia ballard. • she’s a vegan, and a creative cook — she loves creating elaborate salad mixes and cakes with unexpected ingredients (flowers, herbs, peculiar fruits she seeks out at farmer’s markets, etc). • her bike, tempest, is a bike she and rett fixed back up while he was helping her get clean. it’s a little old and rusty, but still fights to this day (and nat finds the symbolism in it lovely).

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

coworkers/superiors at either of her two jobs (hale's diner/greer's greenhouse). someone from the gang who knows her / elvis / any of her friends, since they were all pretty involved in the drug dealing business. someone from the gang who might tempt her with substances again. fwbs (none of these will become actual relationships because she's taken, in that sense, but it might be a fun, or even relatively toxic, dynamic until then). people within the mc she's closest to — sibling figures, people who have a special connection with her, people who can't stand her, people who will often ask for favors such as hiding someone at her place or smuggle something somewhere. neighbors of sorts (she lives on the edge of town, in a garage basically in the desert, but there could be someone in the neighborhood who occasionally drops by for a coffee or something). friends from the auto shop! her bike, tempest, is an old thing she put back together with the help of rett, but it still needs constant care. i'd love for someone from charming auto to be telling her this bike needs to move on to its next life, ngl. enemies (it's rare for nat not to be well-inclined towards someone, but sometimes she gets a bad vibe from people and will turn stone-cold to them, and that's a dynamic i'd very much like to explore). some sort of trainer who might help her grow at least some fight in the physical sense. + literally anything, i'm down for whatever dynamic so just hit me up!!

#charming.intro #FILE / mister cut me some slack. #drug abuse / #overdose / #when will i chill it with the idiots w good hair? never ! #anyway nat's an old muse of mine #and means a lot to me #so i'm excited to bring her around <3