Bitterly, Fernando turned away from the fallen shack, in pursuit of his grandmother. The flashlight’s wavering beam proved next to useless, scattering wanly in the turbulence of the downpour. Attempting to follow his grandmother’s tracks proved vain from the outset. Whatever shallow depressions her doe feet had left in the mud had been swept away about as soon as she’d laid them. Even the route he’d seen her take before she’d faded from sight had been largely flooded out.
Head bowed against the whipping wind, the blinding rain that bit at him like buckshot, Fernando sloshed onward toward the bluffs, guided more by an internal sense of direction than anything else, praying that the battered branches he heard cracking all around him wouldn’t come smashing down on his skull.
His harrowing journey to the bluffs ended abruptly, only to be replaced by a new trial as Fernando scaled the treacherous wet crags, scouting for his missing grandmother in mounting fear and frustration. He called out to her, only to have his words snatched up by the scouring winds. The flashlight proved scarcely more useful here, as he picked his way along weedy goat paths of shifting scree and slipping shadow. The pummeling tumult jeered at him, howling in his ears, whistling high-pitched through crevices in the rock.
Under an overhang, he paused to get his bearings and catch his breath. He was settling back into the dark recess when a sudden sharp strike made him tense in alarm. He glanced aside to see the painted, feathered warstaff jutting out into the penumbra of the shadows. The staff had fallen about where he’d been poised to place his hand—severing the spine of a small viper which had been slithering past.
“You musn’t drop your guard, nieto,” his grandmother said as she materialized from the darkness. She looked wilder than ever, wilder even than the ferocious elements with her frazzled gauze of hair and her darkly flashing eyes. “Not even here. Not for a moment.”
“Abuela.” Fernando sighed. “Thank God.”
Though in truth he couldn’t imagine by what devilry the old woman had managed to scrabble up to this precipitous hideaway unassisted. Picking up the broken body of the dead snake by its tail, she pitched it out into the tempest. In the scant, silver-flecked light Fernando looked her over as she glared ahead. Like him she was drenched down to the bone. Her woolen poncho had shielded her about as well as a wet blanket.
Fernando stripped off his shoes and clothes. He poured them out, wrung them out. He raked his plastered hair back from his face and shook the wet clumps dry as best he could. In the chill and the damp, he was most concerned for her, old and slight as she was.
He tugged away her sodden poncho so he could see to it, though she was loath to let him. He peeled off her clinging nightdress while she writhed and complained like a child. But there was nothing she could do about it. She sat sulking in her vigil while he rubbed warmth back into her clammy flesh. Her slack brown skin was so soft and thin under his hands he half-feared he would tear it. The delicate bones beneath felt fragile as a bird’s.
Leaning back against the cold rock wall, he drew her into him, her back to his chest, caging her in against him. The balmy heat of his body bled into her, skin to skin. Though her neck still craned toward the yawning dark, she had given up resisting him. Adhered to her, he felt her thready pulse thrum in tandem with his own. Lulled by the cadence of their shared blood, Fernando felt his eyes grow heavy. He pressed his lips to her smooth temple. He nestled his nose into her gossamer hair.
“Go to sleep, Abuelita,” he murmured against her. “I have you now.”
In his arms she shivered.
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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy