Broken Crescent Read Free Page A

ten feet away. Nate swung his backpack behind him, at the guy’s feet. The suit tried to jump it, but he got a foot tangled in a shoulder strap. Nate turned his head away when he saw the guy falling. He heard him plow face first into the linoleum as the stairway door hissed shut behind him.
    Nate headed up, because that wouldn’t be the way they’d expect him to run.
    Only because it’s idiotic not to head for an exit right now.
    Nate couldn’t fool himself. The cops probably had the exits pretty well covered right now. Paranoia gripped him. He knew they’d have a helicopter watching the escape routes. The Feds would be here. Any moment now they’d start lobbing tear gas at him.
    Two floors up, he slammed though the door.
    “It was just one guy.” Nate said, panting. “He’s spitting teeth out on the second floor. You’re away . . .”
    Right.
    If there weren’t dozens of cops here now, there would be in three minutes. And if anyone knew anything about what they were doing, every guy on campus security was converging on this building.
    And on top of everything else, they had him on assault of a police officer. They weren’t going to be gentle when they caught up with him.
    His thoughts were running as wild and spastic as he was. He turned corners on the corridors, heading toward the opposite end of the building, and the exits farthest from the guy in the brown suit.
    His feet pounded along the corridor. His breath burned as he sucked in lungful after lungful of air. His head and his side throbbed in time to his machine-gun pulse.
    Uncontrolled and frantic, he couldn’t quite stop when the world went black.
    One moment he was running down the hall, the stairway and the glowing red exit sign tantalizingly within reach—then it all was gone. Classrooms, exit sign, fluorescent lights, linoleum. Everything was replaced by a flat unbroken blackness as if he was suddenly struck completely blind.
    The shock made him lock his legs, but momentum carried him forward to fall . . .
    And fall.
    And fall.
    Eventually he stopped falling. At least, it seemed as if he stopped falling. There was no impact. No ground as far as he could tell.
    Oh, my God, something’s just gone seriously wrong in my brain.
    He could picture it all too well—a vein balloon swelling between pieces of thinking meat, waiting for the stress of the moment to blow like a hand grenade buried in a cow’s dead carcass. Tearing away vision, touch, even the sense that there was a world around him . . .
    For a few moments he kept hyperventilating and his pulse raced even faster. By increments he calmed down, his gasping breath slowing, pulse easing.
    There was absolutely no sense of motion, no breeze, no sense of where up or down might be. He could move his arms and legs freely; they met no resistance, no ground or wall. It was almost as if he floated in water, but his breathing was unaffected. He touched his body with his hands and everything seemed intact, including his sense of touch. He sat up, though in this strange void he couldn’t tell if it was his head and shoulders, or his legs that actually moved.
    “What the hell’s happening to me?” he whispered into the darkness. The words were flat and perfectly audible.
    He reached down and pressed the light on his digital watch.
    He could see the milky green glow of the watch’s face. It read one-fifteen. Beyond where the glow touched his hands and wrist, the world was darkness.
    From out of the void came a voice. Deep and wet, the tone was ugly and disturbing, unclean in a way that Nate couldn’t name.
    “Azrael. It is time.”

CHAPTER THREE

    IT WAS THE first time that Nate had ever heard anyone call him by that name. It made his bowels shrink and become water.
    “Who are you?” Nate yelled into the darkness at the voice. The sound seemed to die as it left his mouth, to vanish without an echo.
    Something had changed in the darkness around him. It wasn’t a void any longer, there was a thick