Read Online Slashback by Rob Thurman - Free Book Online Page A

between the sounds of the breaking glass. The window was gone, but impossibly the sound went on and on all around me—an endlessly flowing, then crashing, waterfall of fracturing crystal. Amidst that were the gunshots of the Glock I kept under my pillow. The gun had a silencer, but they’re not as quiet as they make out on TV. The shots did get louder as I neared the end of the clip. Nothing happened other than my running out of ammunition. He didn’t move except to keep cutting me and slamming my head up and down by my hair. With my left hand, I pulled the combat knife from under my mattress and took a swing. Other than a shimmer running through blackness, I would’ve sworn he didn’t move, but the knife didn’t connect. He was quick, too damn quick for me and that was quicker than most.
    Son of a bitch .
    The thing wasn’t made of mist, no matter first appearances—more like surrounded by it, concealed by it. The pounding in my head and the pain in my stomach would’ve made the inner solidity clear alone, but I could see, as well. The room was dark, and what squatted on top of me almost as dark, but inside of the smoke I could see serrated razors of midnight obsidian slicing through the haze. A multitude of overlapping angles, sharp and deadly, just barely visible, but they were there.
    Hell’s own geometry.
    There were shards upon shards stabbing out from the core, each two to three feet long. Hundreds of pieces of volcanic glass come to life. Jagged pieces of . . . what? How had my knife missed him, a hunchbacked creature practically made of primitive blades?
    Then there was a hint of movement, a shadow growing within the shadow, as if the crystalline daggers shifted in unison, spread, and fanned out above me like wings. There was a sound that set my teeth on edge, the hollow chime of shattered glass pieces scraping and breaking as they ground ominously against one another. It had me gripping my own useless knife even tighter against the threat of the phantom blades articulating in the murk above me.
    A clot of the shadowed mist came up and electric blue-white eyes flared to life, studying the blood, my blood, that dripped out of the sharp-edged darkness. There was a hiss and if hisses could be disappointed, this one was. “You are not mine to save. Not of my keeping. You are not of the Flock.”
    I was a lot of things, but this shithead was right—part of a flock wasn’t one of them. Not a sheep for a monster to prey on and damn sure not a pelt to be saved and nailed to a supernatural whackjob’s wall.
    I couldn’t gate him away. Hell, we were a little too attached at the moment for that. I was about to gate myself out to the hall instead and hope not to take the most dangerous part of him with me when I heard the explosion of my door being kicked open. The weight disappeared from on top of me, taking its sharp blade or talon and what felt like a handful of my hair. I was out of bed in an instant to see Niko knocked backward out of the doorway and against the hallway wall with his katana flung to one side but remaining in his grip. My brother didn’t lose his weapons. But what happened next was quick enough that he didn’t have a chance to use his sword. It was also quick enough that I barely saw it.
    There was an impression of a long-fingered hand . . . no . . . the shadow of an impression wrapped around my brother’s neck, a ripple of the darkest of shades and then nothing. It was gone. If I wasn’t bleeding, head aching from the vicious jerking of my hair and mild whiplash, and Nik didn’t have a bright red handprint around his neck, I wouldn’t have been able to swear anything had been there at all.
    “You’re bleeding.”
    The cut, a familiarly clean surgical slice, the same kind Niko had pictures of on his phone from the body that had fallen into the stairwell, was about six inches long. It started a good four to five inches to the left side and barely above my navel and ran in a