George Martin - Suicide Kings

But it was what was closer to them that was truly horrifying. Near the backhoe, the earth had been dug up and disturbed. Black and bloated flies hovered over the clods; white maggots wriggled in the soil; white-headed vultures crowded there. Here and there, horrific forms thrust out of the earth in a mockery of life: an arm, a leg, a hand with splayed fingers, to be picked at by the vultures’ hooked beaks. This was a mass grave, poorly covered, and the source of the stench. Jerusha felt her stomach heave, and she forced the bile back down.

Oh, God, this is worse than we imagined…

Even as they watched, a door opened in a walled building with a rusting tin roof. Two Leopard Men emerged, a man in a doctor’s white lab coat, and a boy of perhaps twelve accompanying them.

The boy looked frightened and uncertain. Jerusha felt Wally start as he saw them: one of the Leopard Men was the were-leopard they’d encountered on the river, with scabbed-over cuts on his face and arms. The doctor held a tray with several hypodermic needles on it. They went to the nearest of the structures holding the caged children.

“Let him do it,” Jerusha heard one of the Leopard Men say to the doctor in French, gesturing at the boy. “Go on,” he said to the boy. “Prove your loyalty. Prove you’re a man.”

The boy visibly gulped and plucked one of the hypodermics from the tray. He approached the nearest cage. One of the soldiers opened the lock, pulled at the rickety door, and reached toward the young girl inside, who was crouching as far away as possible. He grasped the girl’s arm and pulled her halfway from the cage. “Allez-y,” the Leopard Man said. “Do it.”

The boy plunged the hypodermic into the girl’s arm. She screamed as he pressed the plunger and yanked it out again. The soldier shoved her back in the cage and slammed the door shut again. And Wally…

Wally roared a wordless fury and sprang toward the Leopard Men. Vultures squawked and scattered out of his way. Jerusha didn’t have time to stop his charge; in a few seconds, Wally was in the middle of a firefight and she could only respond.

Automatic weapons were chattering from all directions. She could hear bullets shrilling and tearing chunks from the leaves to either side of her; a green rain was falling all around her. Someone screamed-not Wally-and she heard the sinister, low growling of a leopard. Taking a breath, Jerusha pushed through the screen of greenery and into the clearing, trying to make sense of the chaos.

Everyone’s attention seemed to be on Wally, who had closed on the Leopard Men. The doctor was running toward the lab building, his white coat flapping. The boy that had been with him was also retreating-toward the river. One of the Leopard Men was on the ground, his weapon gone to rust in his hands and his arms broken; the other had shifted to leopard form and was snarling at Wally, ready to leap. The guards were firing at him, and bullets were pinging and whining from his body, gouging shiny dings in the black iron.

Jerusha ran over the broken ground of the grave pit as the vultures scowled at her, not daring to look down and hoping that no one would see her. She plunged her hand into the seed belt, not caring what she brought out. She cast the seeds hard toward the soldiers. Green erupted around them-some were vines that she wrapped around the guards, tearing away their weapons from their grasp at the same time; a few were trees that she brought up thick between them and Wally, who had closed with the were-leopard. She half closed her eyes, trying to be the plants, to control as many of them at once as she could, as closely as she could. She heard the liquid snarl of a leopard.

Behind. Behind.

Jerusha turned even as the creature started its run toward her, lifting into the air with powerful legs, claws ready to rip and slice. She flung the seed in her hand toward it. It was a toss that would have made Curveball proud: into the beast’s open mouth. She tore at the seed with her mind, with the power the wild card had given her, ripping the growth out faster than she’d ever done it before. In mid-leap, greenery erupted from the leopard’s neck and mouth: even as the creature slammed into her, even as she fell and the Leopard Man rolled past her. Roots grabbed the earth and held; the leopard yowled, a terrifying scream, and the cat was suddenly a man again, writhing and tearing at the branches still growing longer and thicker, rupturing his neck and finally tearing his head entirely loose from his body. Arterial blood fountained from the body as the tree shot upward.

A mango, Jerusha realized belatedly.

Two of the buildings were on fire. Jerusha didn’t know why: perhaps stray bullets or ricochets had ignited the oil and gasoline cans scattered through the compound. Yards away, Wally slammed the other were-leopard to earth and stomped on it. The crack of its spine was audible even against the gunfire.

The nearest child soldier flung his weapon to the ground and ran screaming, and suddenly they were all fleeing. Strangely, she thought she saw blood running down Wally’s left leg, a long line of it, and he limped as he took a step and spun around.

Wally shouted, “Lucien! Where are you!” Jerusha could hear the sinister crackling of the fire, and the plaintive, alarmed shouts of the kids in their cages. Wally had already moved toward them, putting his hand on the wires and dissolving them into ruddy powder. He was pulling kids out, calling for Lucien as he did so.

Jerusha shuddered. The were-leopard’s head was staring at her, caught in the fork of a mango branch nearly at eye level. Mangoes were ripening around it, and Jerusha found herself shaking.

She went to help Wally.

Michelle Pond’s Apartment

Manhattan, New York

“You need to pay these bills,” Juliet said in a reproachful voice as she shuffled the piles of mail that covered Michelle’s kitchen table.

“You know, I started going through them, and I just couldn’t concentrate,” Michelle said. “I mean, I don’t really care right now. They aren’t stuck in a pit of corpses. You know?”

She felt Juliet kiss her hair. “They’ll still need to be paid,” she said softly.

“After I find Adesina.” Michelle glanced at Juliet and saw the pensive expression on her face. I am being the bad girlfriend again. And only a week out of her coma. It had to be a land-speed record.

“Sweetie,” she said, touching Juliet’s face. “You did more than anyone has ever done for me in my entire life. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to doing all that grown-up stuff like naming you the executor for my estate, making a will, and us getting, well… anyway.”

She pulled Juliet’s face close, lingering as their mouths met and tongues danced. When they were both dizzy and needed air, she continued. “What I need to do is get to Adesina. And there’s a way. It means asking Noel for a favor, which sucks. But beggars can’t be choosers.”

“What the hell is going on in here?” Joey said as she came into the room. Her hair was rumpled from sleep and there was a crease down one cheek where she’d slept on it. She flopped into Michelle’s overstuffed armchair. “I don’t s’ppose there’s any coffee? Fuck.”

“There’s coffee and breakfast on the stove,” Michelle said. “Eat fast because I’m calling Niobe in a few minutes to see if we can drop by.” It was almost nine o’clock. She could call at nine. Nine was a perfectly reasonable hour to phone.

Michelle had had another dream the night before. This one was a little different. Adesina wasn’t in the pit in this one. She was in a small room instead. The walls were painted a cold bluish white, and there were pictures pinned to the wall of storybook characters. Michelle didn’t recognize most of them-and the ones she did know looked out of place. Someone had tried to make this room less antiseptic and scary, but all they’d done was accentuate that this was not a fun place for a child to be.