Born of Treasure (Treasure Chronicles Book 2) (30 page)

“I’m… alive?” The ghost spoke in a hoarse voice. No, not a ghost anymore. Somehow, that energy had made her live again.

“I don’t know,” Amethyst whispered.

“Judy,” Eric yelled.

“Judy?” Amethyst repeated. The world spun and more shouts exploded near her. A bullet tore up the ground.

“I’m Clark’s mother,” the woman said as a tear fell down her cheek.

methyst’s world narrowed to a speck, a tornado, a vortex that wanted to drag her into the ground. Clark’s mother was dead. He’d described to Amethyst how he’d seen her body in her bedroom, all the blood and the soaked mattress, the reddened pillows, how he’d fled in panic and never stopped running.

The corseted woman cupped her hands around Eric’s face, more tears slipping from her eyes. This woman… Clark had witnessed her corpse.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” Eric’s form flickered for a moment before his tangible essence regained strength.

“Death is such a strange place,” she murmured. Gunshots sounded around them. Amethyst knew she would have been shocked frozen by those noises the year before.

Clark’s mother leaned against Eric, her lips pressed to his chin. “I was so happy. I mourned for our son, but I was free, Eric. I didn’t have to worry anymore. I trusted our son.”

Trust had made her neglectful. Amethyst flared her nostrils. “You could’ve comforted him! Both of you.” They’d been selfish to ignore him as he ran. He’d needed support. What would she have done without her uncle? What if her parents had placed her in a city boarding school? She would have felt forgotten, not free.

Eric turned toward her as if he’d forgotten her presence. “Drudging the dead won’t fix problems in life.” A fresh round of gunshots hid his inflection.

“What does that even mean?” A bullet struck near Amethyst’s foot and she jumped. Army men and gang members slumped by in a blur. She should get back into the grotto. She should finish what they’d set out to do. People thrust themselves at each other, weapons clashing, voices shouting. It almost reminded her of a night club, only more feral.

“How can I be alive?” Judy lifted her hand and splayed her fingers. “Am I truly alive, Eric?”

“Yeah, how is that possible?” The “yeah” slang slipped off Amethyst’s tongue. After this, she really needed to get back to civilized people. A man tumbled in between them, half of his skull missing, blood washing into the ground. Bile rose in Amethyst’s throat and she slapped her knuckles to her mouth.

“There’s a lot to my potion I don’t understand,” Eric murmured as if the fighting didn’t make a ruckus. “It must be part of that. What did you do last, Amethyst?”

“I… killed someone. I thought about him dying and he did it. I didn’t save a life first.” It shouldn’t have worked, according to Eric’s rules. It had been longer than five minutes…more like ten.

“Your panic, all your troubles. Somehow you combined that, and when you killed someone, you got to save someone else. You saved my Judith.”

Clark wouldn’t have to mourn his mother any longer; Amethyst had brought her back. After they finished the senator, Clark could give his mother everything he’d always wanted to, and they could be a family, with Amethyst, of course. She’d given her husband the greatest gift.

“I can bring you back.” She lifted her hand toward Eric. “Clark can have both of his parents. I can bring back so many people.”

Eric narrowed his blackened eyes. “Playing with death too much can upset balance and life. I don’t know why I created the potion. I shouldn’t get to play a god’s role.”

“You were a foolish inventor,” Judy teased.

How could they joke? People
died
around them. That poor man had lost most of his head, and his leg still twitched where he sprawled nearby.

“Right now, I’m going to go save some gang members.” Amethyst headed away from them as they kissed. Disgusting. They were worse than fresh teens.

She would revive the gang as she’d promised. That would be it. Yet, her fingers tingled and that burn started in her chest, as though her body ached to kill someone else.

Amethyst adjusted herself on the seat of Eric’s sleek silver steamcycle, narrower than the others, with the front angled downward. A shield Eric had created out of his own special “unbreakable glass” covered the front, to protect the rider from wind and bugs.

She turned her head to study the other rides. Eric’s grotto had contained twenty of those steamcycles, so the others used the older cycles and a few had horses.

Below their hill lay the fort of cut logs. Somewhere within, Clark suffered. The fortress had to be the size of a city block, or a bit bigger. It could contain whipping posts and torture racks and—

Amethyst squeezed her eyes shut against an image of Clark bleeding beneath a cat o’ nine tails, and a new image drifted into her subconscious.

She lay on a bed with a mattress that crunched, hard things inside poking her back. The air smelled of cigar smoke and body odor, the gagging kind, not the sweetness
Clark got when they were traveling. His stench should have offended her, but it had excited instead.

A man stood over her, his fist raised, the tiny black hairs dark despite his sunburn. “Kiss it, bitch!”

Amethyst wanted to shrink against her pillows, to tell him no, order him to leave, but different words left her mouth. “How long?”

How long for what?

He grinned, showing off his rotting teeth. “Until I tell you to stop.”

Amethyst climbed off the bed and sashayed toward him even though she wanted to flee to the door, to throw it open and run yelling into the hallway. What kind of room was it, the whitewashed walls stained and the chair in the corner broken? She sent her gaze toward the door, and a little boy stood in it, a child with Clark’s blond hair and blue eyes.

He
was
Clark. Amethyst shuddered as she knelt before the man and bent over to kiss his muddy, scuffed boots.

“You’re name ain’t Judy no more,” he snarled. “It’s Sarah. Ya hear?”

Amethyst jerked free and clutched her steamcycle’s handlebars tighter. That had been one of his mother’s memories. How had it gotten to her? Was it because she’d brought the woman back to life.

“Whenever you’re ready.” Jack Three’s voice came over the speaker in her helmet.

All of those people waited for her to tell them to attack. Who was she to lead them? Gang members weren’t like surly maids.

With the sun still rising, painting the sky with a magical palette, it might be a good time to attack, before everyone was prepared… or, it might be the worst possible moment. Clark would know.

All of it was for Clark.

She could ask Eric. He could see if the army was prepared. Or, they could just go for it. When had she ever been a girl who planned things?

“Attack,” Amethyst shouted into her helmet’s microphone. They roared their vehicles forward, so she followed. Staying behind wouldn’t help anything.

Clark sat on his cot in the darkness, rubbing his wrists. His calluses massaged the soreness. If he could see better, he knew his hands would look red, chafed, bruised. At least Captain Greenwood had released him for the night.

“Don’t want you helpless during training,” the kind man had growled. Clark snorted. He’d love to cuff that man to the wall and see how he endured.

Today, he’d get to eat his gruel by himself and not have a soldier ram it down his throat.

Something rumbled in the fort. What would training be like? No doubt Captain Greenwood would shove a gun to his head and threaten to blow up the Treasures. Didn’t anyone understand how much the vial made a man suffer?

Something else crashed. Shouts permeated the walls and Clark rubbed his forehead. Wouldn’t it be grand if his personal army barged into the closet to drag him out to the training grounds as their glorious, forced leader?

Someone kicked open the door and light from the hallway flooded the space. He leaned back, blinking, as pain tingled along his nerves.

“You Clark Treasure?” The light outlined a man in a black leather jacket, a red bandana tied across his forehead. Patches covered the knees of his denim slacks.

He couldn’t be part of the army. Captain Greenwood didn’t allow anyone to go without a uniform—he’d even forced Clark into one.

“Um, yeah.” He braced himself, and realized his muscles tingled. He hadn’t gotten to move enough. His body sloshed like jam. Whoever this was, if he attacked, Clark might not be able to fight him off.

“Come on,” the newcomer growled. “Once you’re out, we’ll blow this place to rubble.”

“Blow it up.” Clark’s lips stuck together from dryness.

“Top Hat Terry knows just what to do. We’ll rig the whole contraption and it’ll explode.”

Clark blinked again. He must have passed out and dreamt. Top Hat Terry was a gang member out in the desert, not someone at the fort.

The man grabbed his arm to pull him into the hallway. Gunshots sounded down the antechambers. Army men slumped along the walls, blood dripping onto the floor.

“Got him,” his captor shouted. “I got Treasure!” They burst through a door into a training courtyard. “Got Treasure!”

Two steamcycles zoomed over to them, skidding in the dirt to park. Clark leaned back, but the newcomer shoved him forward. The rider closest bounded off the back of the cycle and pulled off her helmet.