Blood Rock Read Free Page B

against the gravel as I punched forward, step by step, shoving myself to the heart of the barbed wire rose. Twenty, ten, five—then the wires parted, I stretched my arm out, my fingers brushed Revy’s coat—
    Then the rose reared back and struck me square on the chest, hurling me thirty feet backwards onto the street. It would have knocked me on my ass, but as I saw my feet flying into the air, something inside me clicked, and I coiled my back and turned the impact into a roll that flipped me clear over, tumbled me roughly back into a crouch—then back to standing.
    I mean, holy shit . Karate really works.
    But the end effect was that I was back where I started, knee throbbing, arms scraped, back covered in gravel, watching Revenance screaming in pain as the tag coiled back inward. Sure, I was standing, but it felt like I had been knocked flat on my ass.
    “If you’re so damn strong,” I muttered, glaring at the tag, “why haven’t you killed him yet? What the hell are you waiting for?”
    “Good try, Dakota,” Rand said, handing off a tarp to Gibbs. Behind him other officers were running up with blankets, tarps, ropes, and poles. “We’ve got enough to cover him, but we need something tall to … what the hell?”
    I turned to see Cinnamon and Horscht running up with a … a portable basketball goal? Where had they gotten that? Big beefy Horscht struggled to keep his grip on the backboard while little old Cinnamon easily carried the concrete-filled tire that was its base, and when he slipped, she kept going, backing towards the rosette of wires before I could speak.
    The graffiti surged and pounced, but Cinnamon leapt up with werekin speed, kicking off the edge of the weighted tire so the goal flipped upright into the barbs. The graffiti caught the metal pole and shoved back against it; but the goal stayed upright, weighted by its base.
    “Hah!” Cinnamon said, head snapping in her funny sneeze as the graffiti battered against it, more weakly now. “That’s not alive. It’s got nothing to trigger on now. Now we makes a tent—makes an X with the poles, so we can run a top pole from the goal to the wall—”
    “Pretty damn smart,” Rand said, waving to his men.
    “That’s my girl,” I replied, taking the other end of the tarp from him.
    We crossed two poles against the backboard, making a rough triangle in front of the tag, which had given up whacking at the goal and had curled back around Revenance. Two officers climbed the wall and fed another pole up over the top. The vines snapped at it halfheartedly, but they were near the end of their reach, and the improvised framework was holding—for now.
    “Dakota, give me a hand with this,” Gibbs said, trying to unroll the tarp and getting himself tangled in it. “The wind is a bitch—”
    No single tarp was large enough to cover Revenance, but we patched together a piece as big as a sail by joining eyelets and tie straps, slid it up over the back of the wall, over the tag, so it draped down over the top pole to make the sides of the tent. The tag still snapped at it, but lethargically now, and we started to nail it down, three to a side, fighting the wind.
    But then the sun burst forth and Revenance screamed as light reflected off cars burned him with a thousand pinpricks. “More tarps!” Cinnamon said. “We covers the front—”
    But the sun wasn’t our only problem. The wind actually started whistling, then singing, eerie cries timed with vicious surges that tore at our tent. I grabbed my end of a tarp and stood on it, looking around for a stake, a rock, anything to nail it down—and then I saw him.
    He was far away, halfway across the cemetery, a dark figure leaning against a tombstone, hand extended towards us as if he were controlling the wind. He was small, no larger than a kid, and dressed the part down to baggy pants and a skateboard, but even from this distance I was struck by his horribly oversized cap, a cross between Cat-in-the-Hat