Chapter 2:

Chapter 2:

Adriana stood back from the falling rocks that littered the canyon floor. Somewhere under that fall of debris lay Jinx. Not certain how far back the building cut into the canyon wall, she was certain Jinx was dead. There was no way… she reached up and felt a tear partially run down her cheek. Strange, she never cried when her mother died. This must be something new. Maybe the dry of the desert made her eyes water. That must be it.

The dog sat between her and the rock-filled narrow gorge. It was just a dog, but Adriana felt it stared at her with a strange look for an animal.

The teen boy that she and Jinx had been commissioned to rescue sat slumped in a cleft of stones. The mayor offered to pay her well if she returned him safely. A large sum of coin would be needed to start a new workshop to replace her mother’s, the one bad men had burned down.

She desperately wanted to return to her simple life as a tinker. Traveling the back roads in these mountains, she felt highly unorganized and dirty.

The dog barked and wagged its tail. What a strange creature, it never seemed quite right in the head. One moment it would sit and stare at her, the next it would bark and run off chasing Potent only knew what.

“Let’s go, boy,” Adriana said to the young man she was dragging home to his mother, the mayor. The animal answered with a bark and ran down the path, not the drugged teen.

Adriana wanted to get back to the city. Instead, they’d traveled through a vast desert to the mountains, through a cave and mine system to reach the path she now stood on, and in reality, she wasn’t sure where here was in relation to the city.

Thinking back, she couldn’t even remember the name of the city. It hadn’t been a particularly pleasant visit, a burned down temple and a dead stone merchant. Jinx lost an eye in an attack and they escaped from the city to the open road.

Jinx had been the one to take care of the little details like names and people. She preferred to remain in her mind, thinking of how to make life easier for those around her. One thing her travels did provide was plenty of raw material for her mind to work on for new inventions.

Now there was little choice. Climb out via the vertical cliff walls or follow the path. There was only one viable choice, the path. The arm of the youth in hand, she started walking, sticking to the shade as much as possible.

The dog had disappeared again. She didn’t worry much about it; the animal had a knack for showing up when time came to eat. As far as Adriana could tell, the mutt hadn’t missed a meal yet.

<=OO=>

Jinx had been sitting there waiting for Adriana to cry, to break down over his heroics and the ultimate sacrifice he had just made. As far as he could tell, she shed a single tear. He would need to settle for that. He had followed the woman twice now, a few months as Jinx and now as Lucky… It was complicated, he didn’t fully understand the whole going back in time thing, so he decided not to think about the subject. Many things he didn’t understand he decided not to think about, he found life easier that way. His motto should be,

don’t think, act

.

He could’ve sat there waiting for her to cry until the world stopped turning or he was promoted to supervisor, it was a race to see which would happen first. More than a few people wagered on the outcome. He found the whole idea rather uncouth. However, he caught a scent, a feline scent, which in his world only meant one thing: Dacca.

The creature Dacca was a messenger of sorts. The supervisors or maybe Potent himself created the cat creatures of Dacca as messengers to the god, or at least the supervisors. Lucky thought of them as a big pain in the ass. Disrespectful and annoying, they walked about like they ruled the world, when in reality, they were little more than messengers, one of the lower jobs in the bureau, but they strutted around like they were Portent himself.

There was little choice, he needed to run ahead of Adriana to meet with the crazy cat woman to find out what message she might have. The sooner he met with her, the quicker he could ignore the orders from whoever sent them.

The stench of feline grew unbearable, yet he couldn’t find the dreaded creature. A hiss from above sent a cold shiver down his spine.

“Must you be so stupid all the time?” Contempt filled the hiss when Dacca spoke. Lucky looked up, and there sat a woman.

This was the strangest thing about the supernatural creatures that really made the world work. Mortals saw the fixers as animals as they went about their assignments. Supernatural creatures saw each other as human with strange animal features. Dacca appeared like a cat to any mortal that saw her. To Lucky, she looked like a tall, slender woman with feline features. He found her looks alluring but her personality loathsome.

“Listen, you foul creature, give me your message and be off with you. I have little time for your games,” Lucky barked.

Dacca cleaned her right hand, taunting Lucky. “Kampot gives this message: stop wasting your time with the woman. There are a number of items on your fix-it list. Your task with her is finished. Get back to work.”

Lucky growled back, “I can’t climb the cliff. I will get back to the list when I’ve cleared this damned chasm. If I had wings, I would fly out of here and get back to work. Please give Kampot the Crazy my message. I want wings and bolts of lightning to shoot from my eye.”

Only a hiss returned, “Be respectful or you might get shit to shoot from your ass.”

The damned cat creature laughed at its own joke. How bush league can you get.

“Very funny, did you kiss your mother with that foul mouth?” His barks were louder this time. He really wished he could catch the creature and choke her to death. However, as far as he knew, fixers couldn’t die.

“This coming from an animal that licks his own testicle for fun!” Dacca howled back in laughter.

Lucky bayed back, “Bitch, you would if you had any…” He recognized the error of his comment too late.

“Dog, what are you doing?” Adriana had come up behind the pair while they argued. She rarely talked to him like a person and never called him Lucky. That was a name Jinx gave him… he gave himself. The whole thing made his mind hurt. Again, he preferred not to think about things that made his brain hurt.

Adriana continued speaking but this time to the monster creature Dacca. “Oh, you went and cornered a cat. Poor little thing, did the monster dog scare you?”

Lucky faced Adriana and barked louder, “What the Torment? You treat me like a dog, and you talk to that creature like a long-lost friend?”

“Shush, you, or you will scare it away.” Adriana scolded Lucky.

Dacca bent forward and let Adriana pet her nose while she purred, “It looks like your human prefers felines… careful you follow directions or something bad might happen to her.”

“Bitch, you stay away from her. Kampot told me herself she has a place in this world. A place for great things. I am supposed to watch over her. I take my orders directly from Kampot, not some lackey the likes of you.” If Lucky caught the cat, fur would fly.

Dacca jumped three stones, higher well beyond Lucky’s or Adriana’s reach. She let out a hideous catcall. “You should know more than anyone in this land, accidents happen. Kampot isn’t around all the time. You can’t watch everything and everyone at once. If we want her dead, we will.”

Lucky barked a long list of obscenities at the cat as she bounded over the rocks. He would’ve kept barking, but Adriana kicked him in the butt.

“Shush, you scared it off,” she admonished him.

Lucky wanted to bite Adriana to try to get the message across to her, the cat thing was not to be trusted, but instead tucked his tail between his legs and slinked off in front of his woman.

If the woman doesn’t want my help, I don’t have to give it to her

, he whimpered to himself as he skittered away down the path in front of her.

His feelings hurt, he wasn’t entirely sure what that damned cat meant by implying

we

can kill her at any time. Besides the sentence not making grammatical sense, there was no

we

he knew of. She worked for the supervisors she was not a member of a

we

…

Lucky could’ve gone on overthinking the situation, or he could’ve been distracted by licking his ball, but something else gained his attention.

“Help!” a man’s voice called out from down the gorge path. The cry echoed down the walls high above Lucky.

Strange enough, I guess we aren’t as alone as I thought. Lucky headed down the ravine until he came upon a man fighting for his life, holding on to the thin root of a small tree. He fought to keep his head above the sand that steadily sucked him under.

Lucky jumped on a rock over the man, cocked his head to the right, and watched. This might pass some time.

<=OO=>

Adriana watched the cat disappear over the rocks as it ran away from the dog. She was never fond of animals. They seemed more a burden than she wanted to put up with, but she felt different about that one. There was something familiar about it that made her want to keep the creature around. Pity, the stupid dog scared it away.

If the animal hadn’t belonged to Jinx, she might have sent the thing packing, but she continued to remind herself if things grew bad, the dog would give her a meal or two in a pinch.

As the pair of animals quieted down and left Adriana alone, she heard a strange sound echoing down the canyon walls. Walking along behind the dog, the echoing noise began to make more sense. It sounded a bit like a man’s voice crying for help. Her pace changed little.

The last man Adriana met in the wilderness was Jinx. At this point in her life, she wasn’t sure she was ready to let another invade her sphere.

The voice cried out again. This time it was definitely a man crying for help. Adriana shook her head.

Why did so many men in the wilderness need her help?

Perhaps if she ignored the cry, he would simply go away.

Adriana came around a bend in the path, and she saw Lucky lying on a rock next to a dead tree, watching over a man who was nearly buried to his neck in sand. The man clutched a fibrous root of the dead tree, fighting desperately to keep his head above the sand.

As soon as the man spotted her, he cried out to Adriana, “Please, help me, I don’t want to die.”

Carefully she walked up to where the man floundered, inspecting her footing as she went. “We all die, it’s just a matter of when.”

Adriana had never been gifted at reading people’s expressions, she found it extremely perplexing. The man laughed. Not a fake laugh either. From exposure to Jinx, Adriana had learned the sound of a fake laugh. No, this was a heartfelt laugh from someone who found what she said funny. Tears rolled from the corners of his eyes, he laughed so hard. His convulsions caused him to slip closer to his death.

“I accept your premise. However, if it’s all the same to you, I would rather not die this day. I have many great things left to do with my life. To end, to cut short, or snuff my flame too soon would be the gravest of crimes against the population of this land.”

The dog barked, but he didn’t look at the man floundering in the sand but instead at nothing down the path in the direction they followed. She was thinking hard to make a decision.

The teen who Adriana and Jinx saved from the cult suddenly came out of his drug-induced stupor. With a yank, he freed his arm from Adriana’s grasp. He backed away from the young woman toward the man trapped in the sandpit.

“You may want to rethink where—” Before Adriana finished her sentence, the young man tripped and fell backward, his head nearly colliding with the man trapped in the sand.

Desperate, the man clinging to the root grabbed great handfuls of the blond teenager’s hair. This let him pull himself slightly higher while pulling the teen toward his death.

Given little choice, Adriana jumped and grabbed the teen’s feet, keeping her prize from being pulled to his death. At that moment, if she had a weapon, she might’ve killed them both. As an afterthought, she included the dog. Its incessant barking was beginning to grate on her nerves.