Page 11 of Only Cold Depths
Rina loomed over me, her blaster leveled at my chest. “Why couldn’t you just come along quietly?” she snarled. “This should have been the biggest, easiest score of my life, and youruinedit.”
“Yeah,” I rasped. “I tend to ruin things for people.”
Fury flared in her dark eyes, although it quickly gave way to a cold, calculating look. “I get ten million credits if I bring you in alive. Only a million if you’re dead.” She paused. “But I’ll take the million.”
Once again, my seer magic roared to life, and everything slowed down. Rina’s eyes narrowing in concentration, her lips drawing back into a feral grin, her index finger curling around the blaster trigger.
Even worse, I also felt likeIwas moving in slow motion and doing everything at half speed. Once again, I reached for Kyrion’s telekinesis to toss Rina aside or rip the blaster out of her hand, but my arm kept burning, and I couldn’t quite grasp the silky threads of Kyrion’s power.
“Vesper? Vesper!” This time, Kyrion’s voice cut through the air instead of sounding in my mind, and everything snapped back to its normal speed.
I quit reaching for the truebond. Instead, I curled my fingers even tighter around the stormsword’s hilt, then heaved it up and slashed it forward.
It was a desperate, awkward blow, but the lunarium blade clipped Rina’s right leg and sliced a deep gash across her shin. She screamed and pulled the blaster trigger.
Pew!
I jerked to the side. The bolt zipped past my head and smacked into the dirt, so close the acrid stench made my eyes water.
“Vesper!” Kyrion yelled again. “Vesper!”
He was using his stormsword to cut down and deflect blaster bolts at the remaining bounty hunters, but he was too far away to help me. Kyrion’s worry surged through the bond and clawed against my skin like razor-sharp talons, but I shut the sensation—shut him—out of my mind.
Rina was cursing and staggering around, so I surged up onto my knees and lashed out with my stormsword again. This time, the blade sliced across her left knee. She screamed again and tumbled to the ground beside me.
She was still clutching her blaster, and she lifted her arm to aim the weapon. I tightened my grip on my stormsword, raised the blade, and propelled myself forward.
For the third time, everything slowed down. Rina’s blaster arcing toward my body. My stormsword zooming toward her chest. The glint of her silver weapon mirroring the gleam of the opalescent lunarium blade . . .
Crunch.
Time snapped back to its normal flow. My sword punched into Rina’s chest, and one of her ribs cracked under the sharp blade. She screamed and tried to aim her blaster at me again, so I shoved the sword deeper into her chest.
Rina’s gaze locked with mine. She opened her mouth, but this time, no sound escaped. She stared at me for a heartbeat longer, then slumped to the ground, still clutching her blaster.
I yanked my sword out of her chest, then got to my feet. Sweat rolled down my face, and my breath puffed out in ragged gasps, despite my O2 enhancement. My stormsword was as heavy as an anvil, and I couldn’t hold it upright. The tip dug into the dirt, and I leaned on it like a walking stick to keep from toppling over. All the while, my right arm kept burning and burning.
Pew! Pew! Pew!
A few more blaster bolts zinged through the air behind me. A man screamed, and then everything was still and quiet.
Footsteps smacked into the dirt, and a tall shadow engulfed me. I forced myself to straighten up and hook my stormsword to my belt.
Kyrion’s gaze flicked over me. Concern creased his forehead, and his hand tightened around the hilt of his blood-covered stormsword. “You’re wounded.”
“Just a few bumps and bruises.” I rasped out the lie. “I hardly feel them.”
“Well,Ican feel them too, remember?”
Drat. I’d forgotten that Kyrion could sense my injuries through the truebond, the same way I could sense when he was wounded. Sometimes our injuries would even physically appear on each other’s bodies, like a few days ago, when I’d cut my hand on a piece of metal, and a smaller, shallower slice had popped up in the same spot on Kyrion’s hand.
I scanned Kyrion from head to toe, but he didn’t seem to be in any pain or mirroring my injuries this time. Good. Although some wounds appearing while others didn’t was another mercurial quirk of truebonds that aggravated my scientific, results-based, lab-rat heart to no end.
Kyrion slid the sword onto his belt. He started to take hold of my injured arm, then grimaced and dropped his hand. More of his worry surged through the bond, and the sticky cobweb in my mind vibrated with a mixture of icy fury and chest-tightening fear.
I glanced down. The blaster bolt had obliterated most of the right side of my jacket and my shirtsleeve and severely burned my skin underneath. Mountains of blisters had already formed around the deep hole the bolt had punched into my bicep, and my entire arm felt tight, like it would burst open if I so much as breathed on it. Electricity was still burning through my muscles, and my heart throbbed out a painful rhythm I could sense all the way down in my fingertips. My stomach roiled at the gruesome injury, and I swallowed a mouthful of hot, bitter bile.
“I’m fine.” I repeated my earlier lie. “Just a little charred.”
