Read Online Downfall by Rob Thurman - Free Book Online

to see as her clothes were in tatters and rags on the floor as she’d shifted further into Wolf. She had spring grass green eyes and claws longer than her fingers. She was beautiful in the way nature alone can create beauty. The fact that she’d been trying to bury her claws in my throat was too bad. I shot her in the head, between those amazing pale green eyes.
    Dark dishwater blond had been the second one. Another All Wolf, capable of only partial shifting, most of them. She didn’t have claws, but her fangs angled toward me would’ve made a shark piss the Atlantic. I’d shot her in the mouth three times and finished her with a coup de grace to the back of her head when she’d turned to eitherrun or crawl inch by inch to breathe her last. Wolves weren’t my favorite monsters, but leaving one to skulk off to die in a corner, I wouldn’t do that.
    Monsters of almost any kind don’t deserve that.
    The last had hair the color of the darkest ink, eyes round and pale blue as barely bloomed flax. Except for her eyes, you’d have thought her human, not a Wolf or a member of the All Wolf cult at all. Nails, neat and tidy, the same color as her eyes, grew eight inches at least and had stabbed toward my own eyes. I’d kicked her back and aimed my gun at her chest. Her small but perfect breasts were covered by a silk shirt the same blue that she coveted elsewhere . . . as were her pants and her boots spangled with sky-colored topaz stones, and then there was her gun. It wasn’t every day you saw a Wolf with a gun. Even her gun had been blue. I knew some guns came in sunshine yellow or bright pink, Rugers, Walthers, Mossbergs, Colts, and Tauruses, but light blue? Not available. Custom job, I’d swear on it.
    “That must’ve cost big bucks,” I’d said to her as she stood over me while I lay on my back where the first Wolf had knocked me flat.
    “Money is money, but style is much more. How one represents one’s self.”
    I suppose that was why she hadn’t shifted any further. This chick loved her clothes, and destroying them if she didn’t have to . . . as in having a gun . . . wasn’t going to happen. That gun, by the way, was a Ruger. I’d recognized it in less time than she’d taken to aim at my chest.
    Mine, not as colorful, was aimed at her head—same as the first two. Practice, practice, practice. “Style doesn’t mean much to me.” I tightened my finger on the trigger. “And I represent myself with my aim, which means more than blue boots, shiny stones, and a custom-painted gun.”
    She could have shot me in the chest and I might have died; chances are I would’ve died, but not necessarily instantly depending on her aim. I also could have fired simultaneously, as practice was my life. That practice would’ve put a bullet in her brain. She’d die, no way out of that. I might live. I might not, but she wouldn’t know one way or the other—she wouldn’t have known if she’d done her Alpha Delilah proud or not, as she’d be dead.
    Disappointing Delilah was one thing. Disappointing Delilah and not living to inform her of the situation was worse. Delilah would want to know. Poor Delilah, too busy taking over the Kin and killing those she didn’t trust or think worthwhile, that wasn’t leaving her time to kill me herself. Just yet.
    “If I get you first,” I asked casually, “can I have your boots? My neighbor loves all that sparkly crap like that.”
    She snarled, a bizarrely upper-class snarl—I’d not seen an upper-class Wolf before, and I’d thought it was more over the thought of me looting her boots from her dead body than killing her.
    “You can always run?” As that would be one less body for me to clean up, and with the day I’d had, it would be worth it.
    She didn’t run. She retracted her claws, the fingernail polish a little worse for wear, tucked her gun in her boot, and then turned her back on me and walked away. Damn, she had balls. I hadn’t minded and not only