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The blood Serone throws on them is still hot. What it came from was alive until they got here. That’s how fast everything escalates with him in the picture.
Blood runs down Terri’s face and throat, slides under the neckline of her shirt and soaks into her bra.
“What the fuck, what the fuck,” Danny is saying. He’s not as gore-splattered as she is; for whatever reason, Serone targeted her, just like he’s done from the start.
Even now, his focus on her is so intense it’s almost blinding, like he’s the spotlight and she’s his goddamn hypnotized snake.
Well, it got the better of him once. She can too.
She lifts her chin, and the blood runs down, down. Serone, who watches everything for the slightest trace of movement, who has the grandiose paranoia you’d expect from someone with his great white hunter bullshit, doesn’t watch the blood and where it’s going, even when it’s headed straight for her tits. He watches her instead.
Nobody’s ever watched her like that. Not like she’s a woman, and not like she’s prey. Like she’s a fellow hunter.
“What would a man like you do with a million dollars?” Terri says.
He actually chuckles.
“Yeah,” Danny says, not sure where she’s going but, thank God, willing to play along. “You don’t seem like you’re just one beach house away from happiness, man. Some things giant snake money can’t buy.”
“It isn’t about the money.” Serone spreads out his hands. “It never was. I just needed a reason your crew would understand.”
“What’s the real reason?” Terri says softly.
“I want what the snake will lead me to.” He smiles a reptilian smile, like he picked it out just for today, and something in Terri’s stomach lurches in an unsteady combination of nausea and lust she doesn’t even want to think about. “What men have carved into stone and bled for, all for centuries now. You’ll see when it comes. The revelation, the shadow of a god cast across its eyes.”
Terri forces herself to swallow even though her throat is agonizingly dry. “I thought you wanted to be a priest.”
Serone’s smile only widens. “I never said of what religion.”
He leans down, taking Terri’s chin in his hand, and he covers his mouth with hers. It’s barely a kiss—more like a stamp of his body heat against hers, like he’s trying to make her warmer to draw in the snake. And God, she is warmer; she flushes underneath him.
“You’ll see,” he whispers against her mouth.
She wants to slam her head into his—or maybe she just wants to want to.
It wouldn’t matter, in the end. A few Tae Bo courses didn’t make her a fighter, and she has other weapons a lot more useful than her skull—even if they’re just as likely to leave her fractured and dizzy.
“Let Danny go,” she says back. They’re so close that the words make their lips brush together. “You don’t need two pieces of bait on the same hook. I’ve seen you fish. You take the direct approach and spear the damn thing right through.”
“I fish like I hunt,” Serone says, indifferent but still smiling. His breath is warm and a little sour, and she wishes she’d bitten his lip while she had the chance; she might as well be dressed in all kinds of blood.
“Good. Then that means you won’t fuck it up if this snake comes for us.”
“When.”
Terri keeps her voice steady. “When this snake comes for us. So you don’t need two of us to have one for a do-over. There’s only one snake anymore, so there only has to be one of us.”
“Don’t do this,” Danny said. He rolls his head back against hers, and she can’t afford to focus on how familiar and normal he feels, how she can still catch the light scent of sweat and aftershave underneath all the blood on him. He’s talking to her, not Serone—he’s acting like she’s the one with the power here. The woman who snake charmed the snake hunter. “We need to stick together.”
“I need you to get Steven out of here. Take the gas and go.”
She doesn’t take her attention off Serone. He’s too dangerous to look away from. With his face—both dangerous and somehow disintegrating, like a wax sculpture melting to show a hornet’s nest underneath—it’s hard to know what he’s thinking. She can read his dick, not his mind.
His eyes; she can read his eyes. The drawback is that he can read hers too.
“You think there’s going to be a happy ending,” he says. Serone draws his broad thumb across her lip, almost like he’s wiping away a drop of blood, but there’s nothing there—nothing but her body twitching underneath him, her nerve endings responding despite herself. “Like you’re still in that movie you’re making, and you’re the brave and plucky adventurer. That little distraction you planned back on the boat—”
“This isn’t like that.”
“No?”
“This time I don’t think I’ll get out alive.” That was the part she planned on saying, but somehow, she keeps going, like that’s what he does to her—pushes her past where common sense says she should stop. “And I don’t think I’m the star of some movie. That was Westridge’s job, being in front of the camera. I’m the one who makes things happen, and I choose what movie I’m making. If I want to see a snake again, and the shadow of some god, then I make it happen. Now let Danny go.”
“Little miss director,” he says mockingly—but he takes out his knife. The next words he says, he aims at Danny: “I would hurry if I were you. You still stink of monkey blood, and my snake is coming. It wouldn’t be nice to not get back to your boat with that gas before it comes and finds you.”
He cuts through the ropes.
Danny moves a little, making sure they fall all the way off him, and then he takes a swing at Serone. He’s almost quick enough, but almost isn’t good enough.
Serone gets his arm around Danny’s throat and squeezes, choking the air out of him.
“We don’t have time for this,” Terri says, grabbing at Serone’s forearm and doing her best to ease the pressure on Danny’s windpipe. It’s like trying to bend steel rebar with nothing but her bare hands. “Let him go.”
“I was letting him go. What’s happening now—” Serone shrugs philosophically even as sweat runs down his brow with the effort of holding Danny in place. “He has no one but himself to blame.”
“Yeah, but I do.”
She half-thinks he’ll laugh at her. Why should he care what she blames him for? He’s killed people she cares about, he put that wasp in Steven’s scuba gear, he’s led her into a wilderness she can’t get out of and is maybe going to feed her to a goddamn snake. He has to know she already blames him for plenty, and there’s still plenty of daylight left. It could be more.
But he studies her expression and then relaxes his arm and lets Danny go. Danny staggers, and Terri catches him.
“You need to get the gas and get out of here,” she says, and this time, she makes sure he knows she means it; she leans hard on all those years of history between them, all the times they got each other in and out of trouble.
She was always the one who knew how to get away with it, the one who knew when to bail out.
She guesses those days are gone now. This is one choice she’s never going to get away with.
Danny hugs her, and neither of them says anything. There aren’t words for a situation this crazy. Well, maybe for Serone, who’s always ready to talk, but not for them. Danny spits in Serone’s direction and stomps off to get the gas.
“You should wipe off some of the blood,” Serone calls after him. “You’ll live longer.”
***
The snake doesn’t come until it’s close to nightfall.
Terri sits with her back against a dilapidated table. An hour ago, all the blood on her turned stickily dry, and she washed it off whether Serone wanted her to or not. The stink of some scabbed-over monkey wasn’t going to draw in an anaconda, she said.
He touched the soft underside of her chin. “Then maybe I get another monkey, huh, and I decorate you all over again? You look good in red.”
“I look good in everything,” Terri said.
And somehow it was like him letting Danny go all over again. He let her have her own way.
She’s sitting here, Serone way up above her with a tranquilizer gun, and she’s anaconda bait who smells like swamp water and half a bottle of Palmolive she found in the little kitchen of this place. She’s not a maximum lure, but for right now, he’s willing to take a chance on it.
She can’t decide if that means she has some power over him after all, or if he’s just giving her crumbs because he thinks it’s funny.
Whichever it is, it doesn’t mean much right now. She can’t imagine any hold on him lasting longer than it would take for him to get bored of all this waiting; if it comes down to her or the snake, he won’t even blink. He’ll bloody her up and bind her again, leave her helpless, if that’s what it takes. Maybe the only reason he hasn’t is that if he’s giving her crumbs, she’s giving him the whole damn buffet. She’s the one sitting in the net. She’s the one without a gun.
But they have one thing in common. They both want to see.
She doesn’t believe in whatever mystic bullshit he’s bought into, but she wants to see what would motivate a man more than a million dollars.
She wants an ending to her movie.
The snake comes down through a hole in the roof, making a dark, moving slash against the gray-purple shadows inside. It’s nothing but hungry muscle, head to tail; the kind of strength it must take to suspend itself, to descend like this, with this horrible acrobatic grace—she can’t even imagine it, and it’s right in front of her. She’s come to her feet, like she wants to welcome it in.
Anytime Serone wants to shoot it, that’s just fine with her. But she feels the webbing of the net beneath her boots, the uneven surface of it, and she knows he’s not going to risk firing until it’s already in the bag.
She wants off this fucking net. She steps back, and the snake strikes, its whole body lashing at her like a whip.
Terri stumbles on the edge of the net and falls, and just when she knows that this is it, that she’s going to feel it wrap around her tight enough to shatter bone, her leg kicks up, her shoe yanked into the air until it’s tugged off her foot. Serone’s triggered the net. He’s scooped up the snake, and it’s writhing and enraged and shrieking up above her.
She can’t seem to move. She just stays there, craning her neck to watch this monster twist in midair.
“It’s like writing,” Serone says.
She was so hypnotized she didn’t even realize he had come up beside her. He’s leaning the tranq rifle against his shoulder, waiting to fire like he has all the time in the world.
“Shoot the damn thing.”
“Like ink flowing off a fountain pen,” he says, “making patterns we can’t read.”
“I use ballpoints,” Terri says. “Fucking shoot it.”
Serone smiles his lipless smile, raises the rifle, and embeds a dart in the snake’s pink and screaming mouth.
It takes three before it stops moving.
“Powerful creatures,” he says.
This is where she should try to get the rifle out of his hands. There has to be at least one more dart in it; she could shoot him in the neck and get out of here. It doesn’t matter that there’s no boat and no hope, doesn’t matter that she barely knows the first thing about surviving in the jungle. It’s the one sane choice left to her. Anybody with her head screwed on right would take it.
And here she never thought she had an artistic temperament.
“I don’t see any god,” she says.
“Just wait.”
He cuts the net down, and the snake falls to the floor, its massive body stirring up a cloud of dust. With nothing else holding it together, the sagging net droops down all around it. It’s more or less free already.
“How long will it stay under?”
Serone drags his finger down the puckered scar on his cheek. “Well, it’s so hard to say. I’ve gotten it wrong before. Your pretty face—it wouldn’t be improved by looking like mine. But a faint heart never got anyone anywhere, did it?”
You’re so full of shit, Terri thinks, but she crouches down anyway, getting herself off-balance right in front of an apex predator that could kill her in the blink of an eye. She’s been doing a lot without her own permission lately.
“Lift its head.” All the mockery has drained out of Serone’s voice now. He sounds almost hungry, and the words scissor between her legs, like his voice is pushing right up against her cunt. “You don’t want to see, you turn around and go right now. But if you want to know what the world is, what none of your cameras can ever catch, then look in its eyes. It’s dazed right now—a little safer for you. Like looking at an eclipse through smoked glass.”
She’s looked at an eclipse before, and she’s still here. This can’t be too different.
And he’s out of his mind, she tells herself. It’s nothing but a snake.
But as she takes its huge spade-shaped head in her hands and starts to lift it, she thinks how Serone walked through all those wriggling snakes that rained down on them, how he talked to them. If the anacondas are his fucked-up prophets, what were those, the welcoming committee? Serone waded through the river and never got bit. He twitched his fingers and called that wasp to him and then cut Steven’s throat open. Blood and water and air. And now this hot, dry weight against her palms, this moment where she can either risk being like him or risk being a coward.
Terri looks in its eyes.
***
What she sees there, in the black marbles, isn’t what Westridge or Gary saw before they died, what must have shredded their minds even before their bones started to break.
What she sees is the snakeskin, not the living thing itself.
She thinks of Serone unrolling that endless runner of raspy, translucent skin—Whatever shed it has grown since then.
These great snakes, the ones that could make a man a million dollars if they were captured alive—they’re nothing but signs of something so much bigger. Pale and small in comparison. That legend Steven and Serone both knew, wherever it came from, it was the closest to the truth. There are paths in the world that will lead people out of the snakeskin and into the beating blood of the real thing—some serpent that, if it wakes, will choke the life out of reality itself. It will swallow them down whole.
“You’ll get over it shaking you up,” Serone says. “Or you’ll feed yourself to them, to try to hide from the end. But not you, I think. You’re like me.”
He doesn’t even pause in his butchering. He killed the anaconda after they both took their revelation from its eyes; he’s not sentimental about these little relics of the god he almost serves. The meat will last them for months, he said. He takes it for granted that she’s staying with him. He should, because now there’s nowhere else she can go.
Her old life is just so much snakeskin too. She’s crawled out of it.
Every time she breathes in, every molecule of air she displaces, she feels the entropy of it now. Every little bit of disintegration and chaos brings the snake a little closer to stirring.
She wonders how long Serone’s known.
“We want to be the kind of prey it wants to taste a second time, understand?” He cuts off another long strip of meat. “Not weak. Try to get it to honor its kill by vomiting us back up again, taking us a second time. Who knows? There could be an eon or two before that second swallow.”
***
They fuck by his cookfire, with the smell of ashes and blood and charred meat still in the air. There’s so much dust on the floor that afterwards, her naked body is silvered with it. She thinks of a dress made of clinging snakeskin, gauzy like a wedding gown.
She used to be the girl who grew up with Danny, and she used to be Steven’s lover, and now she’s someone else. High priestess of a new faith, chasing after monstrous reliquaries so some indifferent god will want to kill her twice. She doesn’t know what the universe will be like, squeezed almost lifeless, swallowed whole, sicked back up. She doesn’t know if they’ll know when the bones of reality start to crack.
That’s why you have to look in their eyes, if you can stand it. You have to have the revelation. He’s already taught her that, and she’s a fast learner.
She can’t sleep, so she stays outside until dawn, lying on her back and looking up at the stars. The only constellations she can find anymore all look like scales. Terri watches until her eyes burn, trying to see something else, but she’s still looking when morning comes.