Better Off Dead (12 page)

“He seemed as if against me he were coming with head uplifted,

and with ravenous hunger.”

—
   
Dante’s
Inferno

SEVEN

I couldn’t stop thinking about Tallis Black declining to have sex with me. As I crunched through the snow, intent on finding him, a good part of me was still embarrassed and mortified that he
’d basically turned me down flat. Even when sex was the most obvious way out of the dilemma presented by my innocence, he found the idea so odious or loathsome that he opted to endanger both our lives instead. Way to make a girl feel good about herself …

The more I thought about it, the more it just didn’t make sense. Weren’t men notoriously horny? Wasn’t the big joke that women were always the ones who weren’t in the mood? And it wasn’t as though I was heinously unattractive and begging him to have his way with me. I was beautiful! My body and my face were every man’s dream, yet Tallis wanted nothing to do with me. Was it possible he was gay? I couldn’t swallow the idea of Tallis being attracted to men, though. Maybe he was just asexual. Was it even possible for a human to be asexual? Maybe if he were an amoeba …

But Tallis Black was definitely no amoeba.

I let out a pent-up breath as I shook my head at the anomaly of the bladesmith. The irony of the whole damn situation was that I assumed women as beautiful as I was now had men swooning at their feet. All my life, I wondered what it was like to be gorgeous, alluring and sexy. I always wished men would look at me with blatant awe in their eyes, and view me as something besides Lily Harper, a sweet and smart, but not too pretty girl. Being beautiful now didn’t change how I felt about myself at all. How ironic!

Nearly tripping over a partially concealed tree branch, I suddenly became incredibly irritated that Tallis was nowhere to be found. I took a few breaths, feeling the iciness of the air stabbing my lungs. Looking around, I noticed dusky, bluish shadows were falling all around me. Night was on its way and being alone in the forest wasn’t a good idea. Actually, it had been silly for me to go after Tallis alone in the first place—especially in these woods. They didn’t exactly fill me with feelings of security or safety. I turned around, intent on retracing my steps back to Tallis’s cottage. If Tallis wasn’t back by the time I returned, Bill would have to figure out his own dinner. I, for once, wasn’t hungry.

Looking down at the snow, I searched for my footprints, intending to simply follow them back to the cabin. I can’t even begin to explain my shock when I realized there weren’t any. Instead of deep shoeprints, only the white snow, pristine and trackless, lay before me. I must have stood there staring for a few a minutes, wondering if my eyes were deceiving me. The snow had to have been three or so inches deep, but there wasn’t a track anywhere in sight. It seemed like I’d been airlifted and dropped into the place I now stood. What amazed me even more was that it hadn’t snowed during my walk—which would’ve explained everything.

You didn’t walk very far, Lily,
I told myself.
Just continue walking straight and you should find Tallis’s cabin.

I started forward, listening to the rustling in the bushes all around me—it was the sounds of creatures, moving through the branches. What said creatures were, I had no idea, but it also wasn’t a thought that cheered me up, so I ignored it.

“The whole secret of existence is to have no fear,” I whispered out loud, reciting the words of Buddha, hoping they might make me feel better. They didn’t.

The bushes continued to crackle and crunch beside me, their leaves shaking with agitation by whatever was moving through them.

Have no fear.

I hurried my steps as an icy wind blasted me. Squinting my eyes, I dropped my face down to shield myself against the relentless battery of wind. As soon as I did, a tree branch lashed across my cheek, the bitterness of the sting almost as sharp as the cold air. Suddenly, it sounded like a large animal was scampering alongside me. I could hear its footfalls in the snow as if it were only a few feet away. With my heart dropping, I nonchalantly glanced to my right, already sensing my fight or flight defenses taking control. But, to my surprise, there was nothing beside me but the pure white snow and endless trees.

No fear.

I didn’t know how long I retraced my steps. Maybe two minutes? Ten? It didn’t matter, I was lost. There was no sign of Tallis’s cabin, not even a spire of smoke to indicate the way to Bill’s fire pit. There was nothing but the endless line of trees ahead of me. And something was not quite right about that too. I knew I hadn’t walked more than five or ten minutes from the cabin, and now I was walking in the same direction from whence I’d come, with no sign of the cabin anywhere!

My heart continued pounding in my chest as panic began spiraling within my gut.

Thwack!

I stopped dead in my tracks. It sounded like a loud slap. Whatever it was, it definitely sounded like something hard like a book connecting with something soft like skin. I craned my neck, listening for it again. All I could hear was the lonely call of a bird somewhere nearby. As the darkness continued to grow, I had to refocus my concentration on returning to Tallis’s cabin. I started forward and that was when I heard it again. This time, it repeated itself within seconds and I realized it was coming from my right. Turning that direction, I noticed a hill, all the scenery beyond which was eclipsed by the hill’s crest. I wasn’t sure why, but I decided to follow the sound—as if something inside me wanted to prevent me from searching for the cabin, at least until I figured out what was making the sound.

I heard it again—the definite sound of slapping. My feet sunk into the snow as I struggled up the slope, trying to be as quiet as I could, and not alert whatever was making the sound on the other side. When I reached the top, my breath caught in my throat.

There, maybe ten feet in front of me, was Tallis. He was sitting on his haunches, his black kilt covering his legs. His bare back was towards me, the black ink of tattoos in direct contrast to the olive tones of his skin. But it wasn’t his tattoos that captured my interest, it was the crimson blood which nearly painted his entire back.

I felt like I was suddenly frozen, and couldn’t move my legs even if I wanted to. Instead, I just stood there, rooted to the spot, unable to pull my attention from the pumping of Tallis’s blood as it gushed down his back, seemingly following the lines of the branches and roots of the tattoo of the tree on his back. His blood stained the snow beneath him.

A small creek flowed in front of him, and his broad sword lay still beside him on the white snow. On his other side a narrow rivulet of blood, fed by the multiple lesions on his back. It looked as if it flowed into one channel, inexplicably drawn together by an invisible force. It continued down his back, looking like a crimson braid, before leaking into the snow. What struck me as completely odd, and even impossible, was that the snow didn’t absorb his blood at all, but appeared to reject it. It looked like the snow was sealed or something because his blood simply ran down the face of it like water in a funnel, before being carried away by the creek.

I didn’t move. I don’t even think I breathed as I watched Tallis pick up what looked like a cat o’ nine tails. He held the black leather handle above his head and pulled his hand back toward me before coming down, flogging the multiple braided leather ropes against the skin of his back. As soon as they made contact, fresh blood from the lacerations poured freely. Looking closer at the weapon he held above him, I noticed that there were small, silver blades attached to the ends of each individual braid.

When the cat made contact with Tallis’s back again, he didn’t so much as flinch, but continued sitting there, as if it was no physical discomfort at all. I had no idea what to do. Should I stop him from further harming himself? Should I walk away and pretend I hadn’t seen him … what? Punishing himself, for lack of a better word?

Before I could decide, I heard his voice. It took me a few seconds to realize he was speaking in a tongue I didn’t recognize. The sounds that came from him were like chanting of some sort—delivered in a low-pitched monotone. Hoisting the cat above his head again, he brought it down harder this time. Blood splattered off the ends of it, staining the white snow behind him. The snow again rejected the beads of blood, while the creek eagerly swallowed them. Meanwhile, the lacerations he’d gouged into his back continued to bleed. Watching the rivulets of blood running down his back, into the snow and eventually the creek made me snap. When he brought the cat up over his head again, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Stop!” I yelled, emerging from the top of the small hill and nearly tripping down the other side. I stopped short when I found the tip of a blade aimed at my nose with Tallis at the other end of it. It happened so suddenly, I didn’t even get a chance to blink. We stared at one another for a few agonizing seconds while I wondered if he intended to run me through.

“Lass!” he finally stammered, his voice on the verge
of outrage. “Dinnae ever sneak oop behin’ meh agin!” he railed against me, dropping the blade in the snow. His eyebrows knotted in the middle as he glared at me. “Ah coods hae kilt ye!”

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, looking from the blade, to the wrath in his eyes. “I, just … just wanted to stop you from …” I glanced at the cat o’ nine tails lying against the bank of the creek, deceptively innocent from disuse. I glanced up at Tallis again, frowning as I tried to make sense of what I’d just seen. “I wanted to stop you from hurting yourself.”

He narrowed his eyes, but kept staring at me. His expression was unreadable. I expected some shock or embarrassment at being discovered doing something so hideous to himself, but he showed neither. He wore the same stoic expression he always did.

“Ye shoods myne yer ain b
usiness.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, not knowing what more to say. Looking at the snow, I saw the last of his blood running into the creek, which eagerly embraced it. Looking up at Tallis again, I found his eyes still fastened on mine.

“Whit weir ye daein' oot hair anyway?” he demanded.

I took a deep breath and tried to remember the answer to his question. I was still so shocked by seeing him abusing himself that every other thought completely vanished from my mind.

“Ansa me, lass!” he insisted.

“Um, I, uh,” I started, but grew suddenly nervous, and felt clumsy and awkward with words.
What in the heck … no, what in the hell was I doing out here?
Then I remembered. “Bill was hungry and we didn’t know what your plan was for, uh, dinner, so I offered to look for you.”

Perhaps it was my imagination, but I could have sworn Tallis’s dark blue eyes suddenly turned black. “Ye shoods ken betta. Hoo mony times m
oost Ah teel ye hoo dangerous thess forest is?”

I didn’t say anything but simply nodded, suddenly consumed by an irrational fear of the man standing before me. His eyes seemed like bottomless pits of nothing and his jaw was clenched so tightly, it illustrated perfectly what he thought about me traipsing around the forest and spying on him. I suddenly
hated the silence between us, and my mouth dropped open of its own accord. “I tried to find my way back to your cabin, but I couldn’t find my footprints to follow. The snow swallowed them up.”

Tallis nodded. “Aye. The woods war tryin’ tae meck ye lose yer way.”

“You make it sound like the forest can think, or that it has a brain,” I said softly.

“Och aye, it
does.”

I didn’t say anything as I swallowed down the fear that was climbing up my throat. I wasn’t sure who scared me more: the haunted forest or the man standing in front of me. Actually it wasn’t much of a contest: Tallis did.

He suddenly made a sound in his throat and started forward, grabbing me by my upper arm to let me know in no uncertain terms that I was to follow him. Shrugging out of his almost painful grip, it made me angry that I couldn’t do anything right as far as this man was concerned. After basically saving him from self-inflicted torture, all I got was a lecture. But even worse, I didn’t like being afraid of him. 

“What were you doing back there?” I demanded
then I stopped walking. Tallis didn’t pause for one second, and after realizing he probably wouldn’t hesitate to leave me out here, I hurried forward to catch up with him.