Night Terrors Read Free Page B

him. It flew past him, missing my head only by inches. It struck the building behind us, shattering the window of a pawnbroker’s shop.
    “How about a little warning next time?” I scolded him.
    “My bad,” Jinx said, and then gave a soft giggle. “Emphasis on bad .”
    By this time, most of the pedestrians had cleared the street, although a few idiots remained, unable to stop watching the action. I wanted to shout, This isn’t a TV show, dumbasses! But I knew it wouldn’t do any good.
    Still using Jinx as a shield, I said, “I don’t get it. Since when does Quietus start attacking random people on the street?”
    Quietus was an assassin for hire, and he had a reputation for working quick, neat, and – you guessed it – quiet. It wasn’t like him to be wasteful with his weapons, either. One shard, one strike, one kill. That had been his MO up to this point. Something had happened to change that, but what?
    “Maybe he decided he needed a change of pace,” Jinx said. “Every Incubus needs to cut loose now and then.”
    “Emphasis on cut, ” I said as another shard streaked past. This one hit the side of the building, bounced, and clattered to the sidewalk.
    Jinx started to chuckle, but then he stopped. “There he is.”
    I looked past Jinx and saw a slash of darkness in one of the third-floor windows across the street. The window was open, and a shadow emerged and fell silently through the air – to land just as silently on the sidewalk below. Quietus looked like a tall, thin man garbed from head to toe in midnight-black spandex. He had no visible facial features – for all I knew, he didn’t have any – but his head was pointed at us, and I had the impression that whatever sense he might’ve possessed in place of sight, he was using it to “look” straight at us.
    And then he turned and began sprinting eastward down the sidewalk.
    Why was he fleeing? It wasn’t as if Jinx and I had had a bead on him. Was there a limit to how many dark shards Quietus could create from his body in a short amount of time? If so, that could mean – for the moment, at least – that he was weaponless. But I didn’t have time to strategize. Jinx and I needed to haul ass if we didn’t want to lose him.
    The dark shards in Jinx’s back were gone now, as were those that had struck him in the front. His clothes were blood-stained and had vertical cuts in the fabric where the shards had hit, but his wounds were already in the process of healing. I have to admit that there are certain advantages to being a nightmare made flesh.
    “Let’s go,” I said.
    Jinx started running east down the sidewalk, his huge shoes beating a rapid slap-slap-slap cadence as he went. I cast a quick look back at the unlucky trio. Randy lay on the sidewalk, his skin ashen. If he was still alive – and that was a big if – I knew he wouldn’t be for much longer. Dale knelt next to his friend, both hands pressed to Randy’s throat wound now, not that it would do much good. Cubs-Cap – whose name I still didn’t know – lay flat on his belly, unaware that he didn’t have to worry about being hit by flying daggers anymore.
    I wanted to say something, apologize for not capturing Quietus before he’d lodged one of his dark shards in Randy’s neck. But I knew nothing I could say would help, so I turned and ran after Jinx, once more grateful that I value function over fashion when it comes to footwear. Flats may not be stylish, but you try chasing down a homicidal nightmare in heels.
    Quietus headed eastward toward the lake, moving as swiftly as the shadows he resembled. He wove between pedestrians without knocking them down – which is more than I can say for Jinx. If someone didn’t get out of his way fast enough, he’d shove them to the side, or jam an elbow in their ribs. Sometimes he’d leap over them, as if his legs were made of coiled springs. There was no way I could keep up with Jinx at his full speed, so I ran as hard as I could