"Whoa, now, boys," I drawled, doing as he asked and faking surprise. "Hold on there a second. There's no need to get violent. I'm just a little lost way out here in the woods, and I was wondering if you could help me. How do I get back to the Bone Mountain trail from here? Because I, like, totally lost my map back in the woods. One second, I had it. The next - poof! - the wind sent it sail - ing right over one of the ridges."
The leader frowned, his eyes scanning the woods behind me. "You're out here by yourself? Just you?"
"Yup, it's just little ole me," I said, making my voice even more syrupy-sweet and helpless. "All by my lonesome."
The man lowered his gun, his thumb tapping against the hilt as he tried to figure out whether I was telling the truth. Apparently, he wasn't concerned about one lone woman, because he holstered his gun.
"Did you hear that, boys?" he said, looking over his shoulder at his friends. "This poor little lady is lost. Lucky for her that she wandered into our camp, eh?"
He let out a dark chuckle, and all the men joined in his laughter, no doubt salivating over all the horrible things they wanted to do to me. They wouldn't be laughing in another minute, two tops.
I kept the empty, ditzy smile on my face and sidled even closer to him. "So can you help me figure out how to get back to the trail, then? Because I've got to tell you that it feels like I've been walking around out here in circles forever ."
The man crooked his finger at me. "Sure, honey. come on over here, and we'll fix you right up."
I went to him, my face all wide-eyed innocence, even as I surreptitiously palmed a knife and dropped it down by my side. Owen crept toward the man standing at the back of the pack, while Sophia eased a little closer to the side of the pit and hoisted her shovel up onto her shoulder, as though she were taking a break.
The leader held his hands out to his sides, like he was welcoming me with open arms. I stopped in front of him and gave him another empty smile. He lunged forward, grabbed my arms, and yanked me up against him, grinding his body against mine.
"Hey!" I cried out in a mock-helpless voice. "What are you doing? Get your hands off me, you creep!"
"Oh, I'll be putting more than my hands on you in a minute. You go ahead and scream as loud as you want to, honey." The man sneered into my face, his breath smelling of sour moonshine. "We like it better when they scream, don't we, boys?"
"Really?" I purred. "That's funny, because I was thinking the exact same thing about you. No, that's not true. I actually like it better when you just die ."
I brought my left hand up and slammed my knife into his throat. He died with a choking gurgle, spraying blood all over my hand, face, and clothes, but I didn't care. Because the warm, sticky drops told me that I was finally doing something to help Sophia - like killing these bastards where they stood.
I shoved the dying leader away, stepped forward, palmed a second knife, and rammed both blades into the next man's chest. By this point, the others realized that I wasn't the innocent little Bambi that I appeared to be, and they raised their guns once more.
But Owen and Sophia didn't give them a chance to fire at me. Owen put his pistol up against the back of the man's head in front of him and pulled the trigger twice.
Thanks to the silencer I'd given him, the gun barely made a sound, and the man was dead before he hit the ground.
Meanwhile, Sophia whipped the shovel off her shoulder and slammed it into the knees of the guy closest to her, causing him to howl with pain. He toppled over into the pit, and Sophia whacked the shovel against his head, caving in his skull with a satisfying crack .
That left one man standing. He looked around at his fallen buddies, his eyes wide with confusion and fear, wondering how they'd all died so quickly. He drew in a breath to scream, but my knife in his throat cut off that concern.
Less than a minute after it had begun, it was over, and all five of Grimes's men lay dead at our feet. A good start but not enough. Not nearly enough.
I walked over to the edge of the pit, bent down, and held out my hand. Sophia clasped it, and I pulled her up and out of the trench. Up close, the stench was even more putrid and overpowering, the bodies bloodier and more rotten than I'd imagined. How had she managed to stand it? Both now and back then?
Sophia swayed forward, and I held her until she was steady on her feet. Owen stood off to one side, watching our backs.
Soot and ash flaked off Sophia's once-white dress, which hung in burnt tatters on her back, while the heels had snapped off her shoes. Her black hair was a singed, tangled mess, while blood had soaked through the white bandages that had been placed over the gunshot wounds on her left arm and thigh. But the worst part was her skin, which was red, raw, and blistered, from her fingertips all the way up her arms. Her throat and face were as bright and shiny as a ripe tomato, her cheeks puffed up from the burns so that they seemed like they would pop if you so much as looked at them too hard.
Every single part of her had to just hurt . But she was still standing, still breathing, still in one piece. Everything else could be fixed - on the outside, at least.
"Jo-Jo?" Sophia rasped in her broken voice.
"cooper healed her," I said. "At least, he tried to. I don't know how well he did. Maybe he'll know more about how she's doing when we get back to his place."
Worry glimmered in Sophia's black eyes, but she nodded.Then the dwarf did something that she'd never done before in all the years that I'd known her: she threw her arms around me and hugged me tight.
"Thank you," she whispered in my ear.
I would have hugged her back if I didn't think that it would have caused her even more pain. "You are more than welcome. Now, come on. Let's get out of here."
Sophia nodded and pulled back. She leaned down, grabbed her shovel, and used it as a sort of walking stick.
Together, with Owen, we headed toward the woods and our escape route.
Chapter Eighteen
Warren stepped out of the trees and met us at the edge of the forest, still clutching his rifle.
"Anything?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Not a peep so far. I don't think that anyone in camp heard what happened here, but it won't be too long before Grimes or some of his men come to check on the others. We need to disappear into the woods before they spot us - "
It was as if his words summoned up all the bad, capricious luck that I'd been expecting ever since we'd first set foot on Bone Mountain, because one of Grimes's men chose that exact moment to run into the clearing.
"Hey," he called out, still jogging forward and waving to someone behind him. "Go get Stewie, and come help me. Mr. Grimes changed his mind. He wants the woman brought back - "
He turned around and stopped short at the sight of Owen, Sophia, Warren, and me standing to one side of the clearing. His gaze zoomed in on the dead bodies of his buddies sprawled among the worn tombstones. The guy sucked in a breath, but he did the smart thing and didn't approach us. Instead, he did something far, far worse: he pulled his gun out of the holster on his belt and fired three quick shots up into the air.
I cursed and started forward, ready to kill him, but Warren beat me to it. The old man raised his rifle to his shoulder and put a bullet in the other man's forehead.
But the sharp, staccato sounds of the revolver and the rifle echoed around the clearing, then bellowed through the trees and rattled farther out into the main camp.
Shouts rose in the distance, indicating that Grimes, Hazel, and everyone else would descend on the area in minutes, if not sooner.
"What do you want to do, Gin?" Owen asked. "Make a stand here?"
I shook my head. "No. There are too many of them.
They can easily outflank us, and they have more weapons than we do. Now we run."
Sophia hurried forward, but after a few yards she pulled up short and hissed in pain, despite the shovel that she'd been using to support herself. A bit of blood trickled down her bare leg.
"How bad is that gunshot wound in your thigh?" I asked.
"Just bandaged," she rasped. "Not healed."
That's what I'd feared, but there was nothing to be done about it. So I put an arm under Sophia's shoulder, taking some of her weight. Together, we headed for the trees.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack!
We didn't even make it into the woods before a couple more of Grimes's men raced into the clearing, guns out and firing at us.
"You take Sophia!" Owen shouted, raising his own weapon to fire back. "Warren and I will cover you!"
"Do it!" I yelled back. "But stay close to us! We can't afford to get separated!"
Owen nodded, and he and Warren let loose with another volley of shots. Their guns would be more effective than my knives at this range, even though all I wanted to do was turn around and throw myself at Grimes's men.
Together, Sophia and I hobbled into the woods and back up the faint path that Warren had made earlier when he'd led us down to the pit.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack!
Bullets zinged through the forest all around us as Grimes's men let off another round of shots. They put their stockpile of guns to good use, because the bullets slammed into the trees, cut through the leaves, kicked up wads of dirt, and pinged off rocks.
I put myself on the side of the trail where the bullets where coming from, protecting Sophia as much as I could, but I didn't reach for my Stone magic to harden my skin. I needed to save my power for something else that I had in mind, so all I could do was hope that Sophia and I wouldn't get shot in the meantime and that Owen and Warren wouldn't either.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack!
Owen and Warren returned fire, and several yelps of pain sounded as their bullets hit home. They had the advantage of using the trees as a screen, whereas Grimes's men were still standing in the clearing and firing blindly into the woods. Still, one of them could easily get in a lucky shot on any one of us.
Sophia hobbled along as quickly as she could, but it was slow going, especially since we were climbing back up to the top of the ridge that Warren, Owen, and I had used as a vantage point to spy on the camp earlier. Still, we trudged on and moved as fast as we could. That was all that we could do. Behind us, I could hear the crunch-crunch-crunch and crackle-crackle of Owen's and Warren's footsteps through the dry leaves as they stopped and started, firing, then moving up the trail, pausing to reload, then firing again, before repeating the whole process.
Sophia and I were about halfway up the ridge when a man stepped out of the woods in front of us.
Apparently, he hadn't thought that he would actually get ahead of us, because he seemed surprised by our appearance. He got over it real quick, though. He snapped up his gun and took aim at us.
Crack! Crack!
I pivoted so that my back was to the man, and the bullets punched into my silverstone vest with all the hard force of a jackhammer. The impact made me stagger forward, and I lost my grip on Sophia, who went tumbling down to the ground, her shovel flying from her hands.
Crack! Crack!
The guy put two more bullets into my back, both of which caught in my vest once again. I palmed a knife, whirled around, and threw it at him. The blade sank into his windpipe. He clawed at the blade, then foolishly pulled it out, essentially cutting his own throat. He waved his gun with one hand, while the bloody knife wavered back and forth in his other.
"That's mine," I hissed, darting forward, yanking the knife out of his hand, and shoving him away.
Letting out a high, whistling wheeze, he stumbled over the edge of the trail and rolled down the wooded hillside.
By this point, Owen and Warren had caught up with Sophia and me. My eyes locked onto Warren, who was limping and leaning on his rifle for support just like Sophia had been doing with her shovel. He was favoring his right leg, and my gaze dropped to his left thigh - and the blood and the bullet hole there.
"Warren?" I asked.
He waved his hand at me. "I'll live. Let's move!"
Owen darted forward, put his shoulder under Sophia's, and helped her to her feet. She grabbed her shovel to use as a walking stick once more. The four of us started back up the trail, with me in the lead this time, Sophia and Warren hobbling along behind me, and Owen in the rear, watching our backs.
Another man stepped out of the woods in front of us, but I was able to ram my knife into his chest before he even realized what was happening. I pushed him off the trail too, and we kept climbing, going as fast as Sophia and Warren could.
But it wasn't fast enough, not nearly fast enough.
Through the green wash of trees, I spotted more of Grimes's men running up the hill and converging on our position. Soon, enough of them would get ahead of us, cutting off our escape route, and more of them would swarm over us from behind. We'd be caught, trapped in the middle of a sticky web of death, and then we'd be executed, simple as that.
I couldn't let that happen - not to the others - and I knew what I had to do now. Maybe I'd always known that it would come to this.
I waited until we got to the top of the rocky ridge, hurried over to the edge, and risked a look down below. I counted around a dozen men, all with guns, in the main camp clearing. Some of them were running to the east, where the pit was and where we'd started our escape. A few others were staring up at the ridge, taking aim with their guns, and waiting for us to appear, although we were out of range of their revolvers way up here. Some of the smarter ones were running toward the west end of the camp, probably to another trail there that would lead them up to this location.
I didn't spot Grimes or Hazel, but I knew that they were out there somewhere searching for us, especially Grimes. He wouldn't let Sophia escape a second time.
