Page 43 of Deathless
I opened the final bedroom at the end of the hall, expecting it to be empty, but stopped dead at the sight before me.
Rori held a fighter with an arm around his neck, her gun barrel pressed directly into his crotch. He struggled like hell, grabbing at her forearm to pull it away from his throat, while his lower body jerked and spasmed as he tried to get away from that gun. Apparently, possession came with superhuman strength.
The thing wearing Rori’s body grinned at me, wild and maniacal. “I was hoping for an audience,” it said in that strange voice.
Her finger curled around the trigger, and it went off before I could so much as say, “Stop.”
The fighter’s scream hit my ears painfully. Rori released him, leaving him slumped over to bleed out as she went out the open window. I heard scratching on the exterior walls, the groaning of the gutters and siding as she climbed.
She’s getting on the fucking roof?I could barely process anything, not the possession that just happened or the poor, bleeding man on the floor.
I dropped to my knees, crouching over him as I withdrew a knife and cradled the back of his head with my free.
“I’m sorry,” I told his wide-eyed, shocked face. “I’m so sorry. Go peacefully, friend.” Fuck, what had he been called again? The Iron. I hadn’t known him well, but he was a solid man, as far as I knew.
I brought my knife around the back of his head, and with a few quick motions, severed his spinal cord just below his skull. He went limp and quiet, and I closed his eyelids as I released him.
Severing his brainstem was the most painless, swift death I could give him. I hated that that was the last kindness he ever got, and right after something so horrible. He trusted Rori, believed in her and chose to follow her. Now that he was no longer confined to his body, I hoped he understood.
“I’m sorry,” I said for a final time before getting up from the floor and heading back downstairs.
Hudson had successfully cleared out the lower part of the house, and I heard the distinct sounds of multiple engines running in front of the detached garage.
I burst out of the front door, sprinting toward the fleet of vehicles. “She’s on the roof!” I yelled. “Fucking go now!”
Three shots rained down, making everyone duck and scramble. Several people were in the bed of Val’s truck, whichtore off down the road with a roar of the engine. I saw a riderless motorcycle and went for it, throwing my leg over and gripping the handlebars like my life depended on it.
“Hudson!” I called. “Where’s Hudson?”
A weight settled behind me as a pair of arms squeezed around my waist. “Go, go, go!” he yelled in my ear.
I started down the gravel road with a jerk forward and could only hope everyone else was making it out too.
Some nagging impulse told me to look back, and in my mirror I spotted Rori on the roof of the fighter’s house, her gun trained not on anyone escaping on the ground, but on the horizon.
I wrenched the bike over, turning it to the side. Ignoring Hudson’s screaming at me, I followed Rori’s line of sight to the white dove, flying away like a ghostly apparition.
I tapped into all my instincts, my practice, my muscle memory, because something told me I had never needed it more than this moment right now.
I let a knife fly at a distance I’d never thrown before. I put all my strength into that throw, hoping my force would resist gravity just long enough to...
The blade stabbed Rori through the hand, forcing her to drop the gun just as the shot fired. Hudson was now silent as Rori locked eyes, pure black soulless eyes, with us. She pulled the knife from where it stuck her, squarely in the back of her palm, and the wound instantly seemed to close back up.
Like waking from a dream, I jerked us into motion again, turned onto the road and sped to catch up with the evacuating fleet of vehicles. It wasn’t long before I came up on a bunch of red brake lights stopped on the road.
“What’s the hold up?” Hudson demanded, his grip tightening on my waist.
“They’re talking to the guard at the checkpoint.” I had to stand on the footpegs and crane my neck over Val’s giant-ass truck to see. “They’re basically dragging him into the truck.”
“They need to hurry up.”
It would almost be funny if the situation wasn’t so dire. We were escaping for our lives from a sadistic deity set to enslave or kill half of the human population, and we were caught in a traffic jam.
The vehicles finally started moving just as a thought hit me. Where could we even go? It was the only coherent question in my mind as we drove through the night.
Near dawn,our fleet of vehicles drove up to what looked like a warehouse and a few trailers in the middle of nowhere. I was bleary-eyed and exhausted beyond belief but managed to follow the flow of traffic into the warehouse and park the motorcycle in the available spot.
Engines shut off and the large space was filled with the echoing shuffle of people getting off bikes and the low murmurings of conversation. The guy who had been at the checkpoint, he went by Slick or something, broke away from the crowd to address everyone.
