Page 55 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
The person with the baseball bat, a guy, snorted. “Get this. The little prince’s kitten thinks it can take us.”
The tiny growl continued as he spoke, but as it continued, it also deepened.
Strengthened.
Only instinct told me that the creature who stepped out of the shadows at my side was Twist, because my tiny two pound kitten was bigger than me. She was...was she a panther? She looked like she weighed a couple hundred pounds easily, and she had fangs almost as big as her legs had been as a kitten.
She turned and looked at me with eyes that now literally glowed through the darkness. “Should we eat them?”
The guy’s voice had gone up an octave when he spoke again. “What the fuck is that?”
I grinned, and realized this was one of those few times in my life that my excellent memory was going to give me exactly what I needed. I looked up at him. “Oh this? This is That Which Stalks the Darkest of Nights. Shatterer of Peace. Haunter ofNightmares. She Whose Name Shall Never Be Spoken.” I looked back up at her. “You can feel free to eat them if you want. Just don’t let them give you indigestion.”
She gave me a grin that showed all her teeth, probably modeled on the one I was giving her at that moment, then she turned and leaped at baseball bat guy.
I pushed up to my feet as fast as I could, because even if Twist was a badass, I wasn’t going to leave her to fight alone. Especially not when one of them had a knife. They might hurt her.
The other attacker snarled at the scene before them—her? They were slenderer than the man, and it was hard to be sure in the shadows, but I thought there had been a hint of feminine shape—and turned back to me. They didn’t say a word, though, so I couldn’t have hoped to say who it was without a better look at them.
A better look they were apparently going to give me. Maybe not on purpose, but they had at least decided to come at me with that knife.
Yay?
They slashed out, aiming at my chest, but not with precision. With a wild swing that used their whole arm.
This person was not a fighter.
Oh, they were dangerous as hell, that I didn’t doubt at all when their wide swing hit the wall and buried the knife four inches into the corrugated metal next to me.
Vampire.
No human could punch a knife through steel, even when it was a little worn and rusty.
On the other hand, while I could fight, I was no black belt myself, so it wasn’t as though I was able to disarm someone and put them down.
Twist gave a yowl, and I tensed, ready to turn from the knife-wielding maniac and rush to her side, but it was almost instantly followed by an ear-splitting scream that was definitely not her.
The person with the knife gave an angry grunt and ignored their companion likely being gutted, turning back to me and lunging once more with the knife. I pulled back again, but there was only so far I could go. Only so many swings I could successfully dodge, even if my attacker wasn’t incredibly skilled with their weapon.
The next wild slash hit the wall again, making a horrific screech as it punched into steel. But the knife’s cross-guard caught on the wall and my attacker lost their grip on the hilt.
I took the opportunity to brace myself, plant a foot in their belly, and shove as hard as I could, trying to separate them from their weapon as much as I could.
The only way to keep them away from it, though, was to either pull it free or push the fight back in the direction we’d come from. I didn’t have faith in my ability to pull a knife out of corrugated steel—King Arthur I was not—so I tried to move the fight backward.
The problem was that I had to go on the offensive for that, which wasn’t a wise way to fight someone who was stronger than you.
Still, I wanted to get back and check on Twist anyway, so I needed to do it. Had to help her if she needed me. I’d taken on the responsibility, after all. I was Father.
So I kicked out at my attacker again, and they fell back a few more steps. Then they dropped low, all their weight on one leg, sweeping out with the other to try to knock me down. It’s always so simple in movies for the action hero to jump over that, but in real life? I can jump just about a foot in the air, two if I’m super lucky, and my attacker’s leg was higher than that.
So they knocked me off kilter and I fell against the wall. They took that opening to jump forward at me, striking like a snake, punching me in the gut, then even harder in the ribs.
The crack and sharp pain from the second blow did not bode well, but I managed to grab them by the neck and shove them away from me once again. My hands hit cold skin under the balaclava they were wearing. Definitely a vampire, if I hadn’t already reached that conclusion.
This time, thank fuck, it was their turn to trip over something and go sprawling onto their back.
Then the shadows moved around us. They poured in from all sides, the darkness writhing and boiling like a mass of tentacles.
