Damien was probably halfway to hell by then and she was alone in the cloudy mountains making like a fish at the air. She opened one eye to sneak a peek and make sure that she hadn't gone off the deep end and was imagining it all. She wasn't.
It was as real as she was breathless and Damien freaking Leoni had finally kissed her. Her hands pulled on his shirt as she felt him start to break the embrace again. She kissed him with renewed passion.
Kennedy never wanted to let him go. She knew that their sad love story had ended before it ever began.
“I have to go.” He murmured between kisses.
She nodded wordlessly, but never ceased her actions. He moved his lips to kiss along the line of her jaw. It made her sigh.
“I will come back for you.” He whispered in her ear. She pulled back to look into his eyes, those deep blue eyes that always enraptured her and that now burned a hole into her soul.
“Promise?” Her voice broke as she finished the word.
“I promise.” The way that he looked at her made her want to die inside.
He would come back for her if he lived. The coldness of dread at his unknown fate made a permanent home in her stomach after that. She took off the chain that held Teresa's mystery key and placed it in his hand.
“So you'll have another reason to return, because I will definitely be wanting that back.” She explained. He gave it back to her.
“Will you put it on for me?” He lowered his head to give her access. Kennedy stood on her tip toes and clasped the chain around his neck. Damien took advantage of the situation by placing one final kiss on her forehead. Her hands grazed his chest as she let go and forced herself to take a step back.
“Go.” He told her. It reminded her of what he'd told Puck about wanting to see her safely into the Golden Archer.
“Be safe.” She pleaded. He gave an assuring nod.
Kennedy walked towards the big tree as Puck had instructed. She found the stone trail that he'd told her about just after the tree line.
The Charger's door gave it's usual loud creak as it closed. It was followed quickly by the loud roar of its engine coming to life. Kennedy took a deep breath and dared to look back once more, only to see as the black outline of the monster car disappeared in the distance.
Damien was really gone.
14. To Live is to Hide
“Crap!” Kennedy yelled out in frustration as she dusted off some dirt from her green pajama pants. She stumbled on a pebble for the sixth time since she had started to climb up the steep hill.
The path was covered with fallen leaves that made it hard for her to spot the sharp rocks that stood out from the ground underneath. Fifteen minutes into the trail that senile Puck had told her about and she still didn't see anything that barely resembled human life.
She thought that she had seen an little green man a while back, but it had turned out to be a mossy tree stump. Kennedy was begining to think that maybe it would have been better if she had asked the looney old man to escort her. Then again, it didn't look like his body could survive the strain. She didn't even know if she could survive the sodden trail. Her lungs burned every time she tried to draw in some air. There was such a dense humidity all around her that she felt like she could hardly breathe. It also made the unleveled ground squishy and slippery, which was not good for her uncoordinated feet.
No work her ass!
Kennedy hummed to herself as she often did when she was nervous. She tried hard not to think about all of the news reports that she had heard along the years about people getting lost in the Cloud Forest.
Tourists would stray from their groups and get lost all the time. The problem was that most of them had never been found and those that had, were found floating face first down stream of the raging river that pushed its way through the middle of the mountain. It was always chalked to alien abductions by the more sensationalist public.
Now that she knew the truth about what went bump in the night, it didn't show a very promising outlook for her. Plus, she was getting hungry and she had to pee. She should have gone to the bathroom back at Puck's, slimy lizard or not.
The aching in her leg muscles lessend and she gratefully noticed that the path seemed to reach a point where it started going forward at a level plain. She finally relaxed a little. Her breath evened out. Walking didn't feel like such an impossible thing anymore.
“Ooh, guayaba!” She sppoted an almost ripe guava fruit hanging from a tree at the edge of the trail.
There was a green one closer to her, but she wanted the yellow one that she knew would be sweeter. Her stomach roared at her to take it.
She stood on the tip of her toes and tried to reach it. Her right arm stretched so tight that it nearly popped out of its socket. A satisfying feeling of victory filled her as her fingertips brushed against the rough surface of the fruit. She almost had it. She only needed to lean a little more to the right.
Her feet moved an inch and she slid on her chest. She had slipped on some wet leaves and lost her footing. She panicked as her face met the wet leaves on the ground. They were cold and the weird smelling slime that coated them made them stick to her cheeks in a grossly uncomfortable way.
Her arms flailed blindly, grasping at the first solid thing that they could find. Her hands found something, it was long, rough and kind of brittle and she didn't think twice about closing her fingers around it, whatever it was.
She swung on the thing, her hands kept their painful hold on it as her body continued it's fast descent until the weight of her body encountered the resistance and bounced back up with momentum. Her legs clashed against each other painfully and she was left dangling in the air.
Kennedy waited for her stomach to settle and her heart to go back to its proper place inside her chest cavity instead of its current spot near her feet before she opened her eyes. She looked up to see that she had ended up hanging from a flimsy tree branch on the verge of a very long fall.
The tree had grown sideways on the edge of the mountain. Her limbs went stiff, her stomach plumetted again as she tried to think of how she could reach the edge of the ravine withouth plunging to her death in the savage body of water that awaited below.
The upside? She looked to the right and saw that one of the tree's yellowing fruits hung right besides her head.
Kennedy explored her options.
She could either fight to survive or try to take the fruit by snapping her mouth around to see if she could actually get a bite out of it and probably die trying.
She found herself thinking again about how she should have agreed to the University's offer of early admission instead of deciding to spend the summer with her parents and what a wonderful summer it had been so far. Now she was surely going be turned into another number in the statistics of the people lost in that foggy place.
She was scared that she might fall off completely if she tried to swing her body towards the ground – relatively speaking – that stood in front of her. Maybe she'd have a better chance if she managed to grasp onto one of the tree's sturdier roots.
“Oh, God!” She let out a final prayer as her fingers began to slip off the branch one by one. Her right pinky was the first to go.
The worst of it all was that Damien was currently on his way to play the sacrificial lamb for the Brethren to buy her some time while she was about to die there and all because she had to get the prettiest fruit on the sideways tree.
In one last attempt for survival, she swinged her body forward and managed to secure her grasp on the branch again. But, it seemed that the reaper wanted her badly, because the sudden movement was too much for the weak branch and it broke off with a loud crack.
She shut her eyes tightly and accepted her tragic fate. Perhaps she would meet her mother on the other side.
The air rushed fast by her ringing ears as she fell. Her spine tingled and her skin became
hot. It burned in contrast to the cool temperature of the wind that brushed past it. Kennedy waited for the blow as she met the jagged edges of the river's rocks under her.
Then she crashed to the bottom of the– leaves?
She hit the ground on her back with a terrible thud that took out all the oxygen from her lungs. She coughed desperately to regain the breath she had lost.
Was she dead? No, she couldn't be. Everything hurt too much for her to be dead and if she was, then being dead sucked.
She dared to open her eyes and saw that she was lying on the cold wet ground of the stony trail she had been transiting before. Her throat tickled as laughter bubbled up inside her.
Kennedy began laughing like a crazy person. Either she had lost the final screw that held her mind together or the Cougar Lady's words where true and she was a witch.
Whichever way she looked at it, none of it made any logical sense. If she really was a witch, then she should be able to get that damned fruit without having to die while doing it. Her eyes sought out the yellowing guava fruit again and stared it down.
“Come to me fruit.” She said in a deep mysterious voice.
Nothing happened. She burst out laughing again. It was official, Kennedy Elizabeth Riser had gone insane. At least she didn't have to pee anymore. No, she hadn't peed on herself. Well, almost.
A cold drop of water landed on the tip of her nose and it was all the warning that she got. The skies opened a second later and poured down all