Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

couldn’t touch.
    Shane paused and looked over his shoulder at her. “Does it bother you that I can feel it, too?”
    “No. Should it?”
    “I just thought it might be part of what had you running in the other direction for such a long time.”
    “That was pure common sense. I didn’t want another job.”
    “That’s not what you said when you brought those offers to me and I had to match them.”
    “I didn’t say I was stupid. I just said I didn’t want another job.
    He smiled despite the tightening of his skin with every step up the trail. It wasn’t uneasiness exactly. It was more an awareness of difference, a sigh breathed across primitive nerve endings, the faint burned scent in the air after a nearby lightning strike.
    He rather liked it.
    “How are your goose bumps?” he asked after a bit.
    “A lot happier than I am. Why?”
    Something rustled in the brush about twenty feet off the trail. He looked, listened, saw only what might have been four-legged shadows sliding away into deeper shadows.
    “It can’t be much farther,” he said, turning back to the trail.
    “How do you know?”
    “Because O’Conner was an old man, and old men don’t climb cliffs.” Shane stopped walking. “Certainly not this one.”
    The pencil beam of the flashlight couldn’t begin to penetrate the darkness that concealed the top of the cliff.
    “It’s to the right,” Risa said.
    “What is?”
    “Whatever is whispering to a part of me I don’t even want to know about.”
    Despite her words, she stepped around him and walked along the lighter thread of darkness that was the trail at the face of the bluff. Shane was right. Ignoring what she was hadn’t made it go away. Besides, it was easier knowing that she wasn’t the only one who had odd wiring.
    Two odds make an even.
    She was smiling at the memory of Shane’s words when she stumbled over a rock in the dark, put out both her hands to catch herself, and came smack up against one of three leaning stones.
    Sensation poured through her, a rush of gold-masked faces, ritual blades of death and renewal, voices chanting sacred words, and all of it swirling through time and moonlight, through her, until her head spun and she would have cried out if she could have breathed at all.
    Then it was night again, just herself and Shane’s muscular warmth along her back, his hands over hers against the cold rock, his breath tangling softly, rapidly, in her hair, echoes of the chant retreating, common reality returning.
    “You okay?” Shane asked, his voice rough and low.
    “I think so.” She blew air out in a shaky sigh. “You?”
    “I’m working on it.”
    “You get the name of the train that ran over us?”
    The sound he made wasn’t quite a laugh. “No. And I don’t want it.”
    He pulled her hands away from the rock. Then, deliberately, he put his own hands back.
    She watched, waited. “Anything?”
    “Cold rock. And . . .”
    She didn’t want to ask. Couldn’t help it. “What?”
    “Time. Distance. Night. The kind of night that has no dawn.”
    “That’s why they marked the summer and winter solstice,” Risa said in a low voice, knowing what she couldn’t touch. “That’s why they cast their dreams and prayers in gold, gold that never corroded, never corrupted, never changed. Gold and ritual and blood sacrifice to all the gods named and unnamed who controlled life. The darkness that had no dawn, the cold that wasn’t followed by warmth, the death that had no afterlife, the end of all life, including the life of the gods. The Druids feared that.”
    “So does anyone with the intelligence to imagine it. Entropy by any other name is still, ultimately, extinction.”
    Risa hesitated, then put her hand back on the rock. All she sensed was a stirring of air, a fading murmur, trembling silence. Frowning, she lifted her hand and stepped through the opening until she stood in the center of the three stones.
    “Anything?” Shane asked.
    “Not anymore. It was here, though. The gold.”
    “And now it’s gone.”
    She nodded as she touched the cool, rough surface of each sandstone slab in turn and sensed the silent stirrings. “I can’t say I like what I sense, yet I’m not worried by it now.” She looked at him and admitted, “But I’m not volunteering to fall asleep here either.”
    “Yeah. C’mon.” He took her hand and urged her out of the shadows of the three rocks. “Let’s get to a place where there’s cell coverage. I want to