Page 142 of Sky Song
The Tarai made a move toward Ren, but Ren pulled out a gun, dampening the brute’s impulse. “Step any closer and you’re ash.”
“Not at the club!” Zaron squeaked.
“Really, is that all you’ve got to say?” Paloma laid into him, bursting on the scene like a valkyrie. “Let her fucking go and you’ll live, you dickheaded cretins! She’s done nothing wrong,” she screamed at Gus.
“You wanna go tell that to the magistrate? Learn your lesson here, girlie. Shit goes down when you live in a hoetown. Let’s go.” Gus gave Cricket a hard yank and she gagged.
Lyle appeared among them silently. She sensed him near even though he remained invisible to her. She knew how his all-seeing eyes were sweeping around, stacking people and surroundings in one neat organized grid, assessing strengths and weaknesses of the situation as fast as the sensory input filled him. And then, in a blink of an eye, his energy left the building. Only an Arctic-cold taut strum of hunt remained - focused, precise, and curiously impersonal.
This was how Lyle snapped.
My love. My love…
Gus jerked and released her, and in the next moment fell sideways at her feet. Four legs of a bar stool that squaredhim times-four from behind protruded from his chest in a grotesquely accurate square. He choked on his own blood and twitched, bleeding out, leaving Cricket to stand over him like some violent goddess of war, feet bathed in fallen enemy’s blood. Literally.
Someone screamed, and turning as if in a fog, Cricket saw others huddling in the corner. Paloma’s deep eyes made a stark contrast to her white face as she stared at Gus before she gagged.
Shock muted the explosion of noise and action. In slo-mo, she observed Mark and the Tarai, a tag-team duo with guns at the ready, jump at Lyle from both sides. Mark shot at Lyle while Ren shot at Mark. Both shots went wild. Zaron ducked and pushed Paloma to the floor. And then Lyle dove toward Mark, graceful as a dancer, bursting through the blocks Mark put out by smashing his arm bones because he was that much stronger, and slashed his Rix nails against Mark’s eyes, popping both clean out. Mark’s mouth opened wide in a scream that Cricket couldn't hear for the pounding in her head, and the man fell to his knees, arms hanging down useless, eye sockets oozing bloody goo.
Zaron was also on his knees, walking on them toward Lyle, begging for something with arms extended, but her lover had already twisted Mark’s head like a cap off a bottle.
The Tarai kept shooting willy-nilly in a mad scramble toward the door. In an out-of-body experience, Cricket wanted to tell him it wouldn't help. And it didn’t. Lyle threw a stool at him, the impact forcing the Tarai to stumble and lower down his gun. He was still recovering his balance when Lyle caught up with him - it took only a second.
True to his word, Lyle wasn’t a show fighter. He was a dirty one. He shackled the Tarai's gun hand and kicked him in the nuts. The Tarai flinched, and he was done, felled but a well-aimed hit into the neck. He wasn’t yet dead when Lyle slammed his head on the floor, busting it like a watermelon. Now he was dead.
Lyle turned around, his eyes scanning constantly.
Ren dove for Paloma and covered her with his body. And Cricket knew: Lyle was going to kill everybody. He blinked, that lazy merry blink, but nobody was home. Cricket wanted to howl.
Busting out of her deep-freeze, she launched herself at him, skidding on the blood covering the floor. She slammed hard against the arm he put out in defense, as if she were an adversary like Gus or Mark. She clung to that arm.
“I see you. Please, see me. Please…” He pushed her away and she fell hard, her injured wrist sending a jolt of pain. She cried out, from the pain, but more from helplessness. “Then kill me if you must! If that’s what you feel like doing, go ahead, I allow you. Just me. Please…”
He blinked again, lazy and almost… sexy. His steps measured, he approached and lowered in a crouch. “Cricket?” He sounded surprised as finding her writhing in a puddle of blood between the overturned tables.
She threw herself against his chest, and this time, he caught her, held her fast. He was trembling, and his chest visibly vibrated from the speed of his heartbeats. Cricked pressed her face into his tattoos, noting how the hearts were giving a barely perceptible dissonance, like a smooth system starting to go out of whack.
“Lyle, are you here?”
“Yes, my hearts, I’m here.”
“You killed those men.”
He looked around, noted the bodies and the blood. Showed no reaction. “They were going to take you away.”
Someone retched in the corner.
“It’s brutal,” Cricket said.
“Most fights are.”
“You were going to finish off everybody in this room.”
“No, of course I wasn’t…” He cut himself off and gave the room another scan. “Was I?”
“Man, you blacked out.” Ren rose and came over but stopped a respectable distance away. “Not good.”
Cricket felt like she was being torn apart. They had just had sex, and he had said he was worse off after it. Oh, God, it was her fault.
