Rice Anne Spiaca Krolewna 1, Przebudzenie Spiacej Krolewny
Clayton Alice Nie dajesz mi spaćÂ
Ceuse
Miernicki Sebastian Pan Samochodzik i ... Gocki ksić śźćÂ
02 Destrukcja
Christian J. Bennett Galactic Messiah (pdf)
Hohlbein, Wolfgang Enwor 03 Das Tote Land
Andre Norton Wygnanka
Gordon Lucy Zareczyny w Monte Carlo
Garbera Katherine Gorć cy ukśÂad
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staggering backward, clutching his forehead.
A principle from his lessons in striking: the knee is better than the fist against the
stomach. Visualization became action as Ori trapped the man s nape in both hands and
pulled. Became force when he pivoted his body and drove his knee up into the man s
soft unprotected belly. When the man doubled over and wheezed at Ori s strike, he
earned a second one to the face. This blow wasn t soft at all. It came with the sickening
crunch of cartilage.
No elation, no fear, no surprise that either blow had landed. No time. Two more
men came at him now. One, reeking of salt and sweat and yeasty malt liquor, crashed
against him clumsily but Ori slipped under, shouldered upward, skittered away, kept
striking.
Kalani wasn t down, thank God; the fourth man grappled him, but Kalani had a
heel set in the sand to hold his ground.
Ori took another one of his two attackers down with a knee to the crotch and a
kick-stomp only slightly higher. Never mind ring rules, not with these odds. The man s
howl of pain only made Ori feel colder, more detached. When the second man landed a
sloppy-fast fist to the side of his head, Ori shook off the pain and threw himself into a
grapple. He bent the man s arm until he screamed. Flipped him onto his stomach
Let him go, Jackie Chan, said Kalani, setting a hand on Ori s shoulder. When Ori
looked up from his cold-rage hyperfocus, he realized the other men had fled. The last
one lay mouth-breathing and whining in the sand, twisting his arm uselessly against
Ori s grip. The cavalry s here. Let s see if he can race Lenny back to his car, huh?
Sure, said Ori. He let the last Australian scramble up. He limped off toward the
parking lot, looking back over his shoulder at the oncoming mob of angry, hulking
106 Heidi Belleau & Violetta Vane
Hawaiians, Lenny at the lead. He and Kalani stayed behind, standing in a shallow pit of
churned sand with the ocean sparking at Kalani s back. How s your head?
Kalani grinned breathlessly, knocking on the side of his own head with his
knuckles. This thick skull? It ll take more than that to bring me down!
A goose egg had started to form on one side of his forehead, round and red. Ori
reached out and covered it with his palm. He stroked the undamaged skin just to the
left of the injury with his thumb. Kalani s eyelids lowered, his big grin softening into a
quiet, trusting smile. Ori smiled back.
* * * *
2011
He woke up to a tugging sensation in his wrist. At first he thought it was the
doctors, giving him stitches to close the wound there, but then he opened his eyes. A
fishhook was caught in his open vein, pulling his skin up into an aching tent shape. He
hissed, swallowing down gorge at the grotesque sight of it, and tried to brush it away,
but it wouldn t come undone. He accepted that and swallowed down the pain as well.
Focus. This is not your body. There is no pain here. It's all in your head. It looks worse than it
feels.
He was still in Saul s car, but the pool of blood on the sidewalk was alive with
little minnows. The car was blanketed by a knot of writhing vines that seemed to grow
and twist even as Ori watched. They d pulled Saul into their tangle and absorbed him
until all Ori could see was his eyes.
Ori tumbled out of the car and staggered away, down the ghostworld street. The
freakish fishline made of blood didn t tug at him, but he wanted to leave; God how he
wanted to leave, because if he looked behind him he d see his body lying there, arm
flung out and running red.
The warehouses and asphalt and streetlights of the real world still surrounded
him, but they were faint, translucent, and had begun to soften at the corners like bread
Hawaiian Gothic 107
left out in the rain. The hulking cranes of the harbor skyline had gone half-organic, their
metal claws forming pincer shapes and waving slowly in arthropod distress.
He followed the fishline through the softening, empty streets of phantom
Honolulu.
No confusion, no horror, no fear. He held the line to Kalani, and whether he was
the fisherman or the fish at the end of that line& Well, it didn t matter. Focus. Don t look
aside to where the world s edges crumble into nightmare. Focus, follow, follow.
The pain in his wrist soon faded to a dull ache. As long as he didn t look down, it
wasn t too bad. The line drifted forward, not subject to gravity, and thinned to a
gossamer pinkness where it vanished into the horizon, leading him inland toward the
lush green volcanic mountains of the Ko olau Range.
His footsteps fell like feathers. The cityscape scrolled by at a tremendous speed, as
if an airport walkway carried him along.
The Pali Highway into the mountains that was his route, he realized at last.
Perhaps Kalani had gone back to Nanakuli, then onward to the tip of Ka ena Point,
where the souls of the dead were said to leap into the afterlife. Ori knew the local
legends, at least, and wished he d learned more, now that both their lives depended on
it.
But the Pali Highway stretched northeast, and Ka ena was far to the northwest.
He looked above him. There was no symmetry to the blazing, shifting thing in the
sky that should have been the sun; it (or was it a she or a he?) sent out shining darts that
flew like hummingbirds over the shifting land. Compasses and highway maps
wouldn t work here, Ori knew then. Kalani might be hopelessly lost on his search for
Ka ena Point, lost and in danger, and the thought was a thousand times more painful
than the wound at his wrist.
He followed faster.
The mountains weren t even real mountains. They were the water-worn remnants
of one single giant volcano that in an earlier age had blown itself apart and fallen into
108 Heidi Belleau & Violetta Vane
the ocean. When he d learned the history of the Ko olau Range in school, the awe and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
