Crossroads Read Free Page A

person I’d come here to save, and I had more precise weapons to use than a gun. The slivergun’s plastic flechettes smacked against the ferrocrete wall with a loud crack as the dark figure on the other side waved his hand and called out in a harsh language of clicks and buzzes not mean to be spoken by a human tongue.
    I ducked behind the girder again and heard a spattering and a loud hiss. A terrible stench filled the air as the acid began to eat away at the corroded metal, dissolving it. I spun and took a couple of quick steps back to stay out of the small puddle of greenish-yellow liquid that dripped from the edge of the catwalk, taking the liquefying remains of the top of the girder with it as it began to quickly evaporate.
    “Give it up, Crosetti!” I called across the open space. “There’s nowhere for you to run. You’re trapped. Give up the girl and you might be able to walk away from this.” Fat chance. Like I was going to let a total wacko like this one actually walk away, but I had to try and reason with him. As long as he had the girl, he was dangerous. Mocking laughter, high and shrill, answered me.
    “You should be the one begging for mercy, Talon. You are in my domain here.” The two of them had reached a staircase leading down to the factory floor. Crosetti had the girl in front of him like a shield, clasped protectively to him, with one arm clamped over her mouth to keep her from screaming. The other hand was empty, but I knew that a mage as powerful as Victor Crosetti was never truly unarmed. He began guiding her down the stairs, keeping his eyes on me. I was running out of options. The girl looked up at me with pleading eyes and I considered the fate that awaited her down below.
    Victor Crosetti was a shaman, one of the people blessed (or cursed, maybe, in his case) with the Talent. Since the Awakening some fifty years ago, one out of every hundred people developed the ability to use magic. Crosetti was one of the unlucky few whose magic was more than his sanity could handle. Shamans had totem spirits that guided them, animals like Bear, Fox, and Raven. Crosetti’s totem was Ant, and contact with such an alien intelligence drove all insect shamans mad. But it also gave them great power. So, here was a lunatic with the power of a master wizard at his command and obsessed with Mary Beth Tyre, age fifteen.
    Mary Beth had disappeared from her home when she was only six. She had been through some of the worst horrors imaginable since then: neglect, abuse, even slavery. I'd just spent nearly three months in some of the worst hell-holes I could imagine all along the eastern seaboard helping to track her down, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to allow some nutcase to kill her when I was so close.
    “Just let the girl go.” I said in what I hoped was a firm, yet calm voice.
    Crosetti laughed at me again. His balding head and his big eyes, combined with his tall, gangly body, made him look like some kind of humanoid ant standing on two legs. His voice was high and nasal, touched with a bit of hysteria. He really was on the edge.
    “Oh, I don’t think so.” he said. “She’s to be my queen, you see, my beautiful, beautiful queen. I’ve been waiting for so, so long, but now the time is right. Together we will rule over our people, our loyal subjects... won’t we, my love?”
    Mary Beth flinched away from Crosetti’s touch and thrashed against him, but his grip was too strong and she was too weak. I had to do something.
    Narrowing my eyes, I focused my will on Crosetti’s misshapen head. I gathered my anger toward him like a physical thing, bright red strands of fury shot through with black threads of disgust. I plucked out any shreds of pity and wove that pure anger into a weapon. It became the image of a magical spear, the embodiment of the emotions that let us—let me—kill without remorse or mercy when necessary. I saw Crosetti’s leering face at the center of a reddish haze as I raised my