Reaper II: Neophyte Read Free Page B

unforgiving ground, he had a clear advantage and was atop me in an instant, straddling me, pulling back a fist to strike at me.
    His advantage didn’t last long.
    In a swift assault, I buried the nine inches of my newly extended fingers knuckle deep into his belly. He froze mid swing, too shocked to follow through.
    I left my hands there, buried deep in his soft center, letting my second skin feed from him, from the blood that pulsed from his bowels in a steady deluge.
    “You crazy bitch,” Jason swore, trying desperately to pull my hands out of his bloodied belly, but to no avail.
    We both knew I had won.
    He was a dead man talking shit.
    This was his last show of bravado before his curtains closed for good.
    As the Dark Thing that covered me fed greedily from him, images of his victims filled my head, much as they had with his fat accomplice. The images were like flashes from the scenes of a movie, inside the recesses of my mind.
    I sat up, and with strength now superior to his, pushed him off me as he fell to the ground, clutching his abdomen.
    “It troubles me to think of how many more girls there might have been,” I told him. “If I - that is, we - hadn’t stopped you tonight.” I said we , treating this mysterious Dark Thing as a second entity.
    I couldn’t have done these things, exacted justice without it.
    Wherever it had come from, whatever it was, one thing was for certain.
    It was deadly.
    A pool of dark blood was forming around the fallen man and his breathing all but stopped. He was finished.
    Over the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears, I could hear the footfalls of my third attacker, the young one.
    He wasn’t far away.
    And…he had stopped running.
    The fool wouldn’t even see me coming.
    He must have felt safe in the street beyond the park, comforted by the lights and the people nearby. I rose from the side of his fallen companion and ran after Baby Boy, catching up to him with an uncanny, almost unfaltering sprint.
    I had never run so fast in my life as the Dark Thing helped me to make efficient use of my legs, arms, heart, lungs, conducting them like a symphony of anatomical instruments: blood, tendon, joints, and muscle.
    Baby Boy was in a dark alley, a few hundred yards away, his back turned toward me.
    Then he was a car’s length away…then an arm’s length.
    He must have heard me coming because he turned to face me as I took the last few steps, closing in the distance between us.
    Before I even saw his pale expression again, I lashed out at him clumsily, hungry for more bloodshed as my long unnatural new talons glanced off his neck, drawing blood in a shallow wound.
    This time, it was not a finishing blow.
    “Did you really believe your actions would go unpunished?” I asked, furious with him, wanting to tear him to pieces, now that I had the ability.
    He clutched his neck with his hand, trying to staunch the blood flow. Crimson poured between his fingers as he backed away from me, young eyes wide with fear.
    “Please don’t hurt me!” He cried.
    Looking at my right hand, I willed my claws to grow shorter and was pleased to see that the second skin seemed to respond to my wishes.
    My fingernails were again as long as fork tines, then cat’s claws…then much like my own fingers.
    “Your victims…did they beg for mercy?” I asked him, my smile one of pure menace. “Did their pleas fall on deaf ears?”
    Two long slender spikes of the glistening black organic material were now, at my will, growing from the back of my hands, like scalpels at first, then as long as bread knives.
    They looked like features found on a carnivorous insect and I knew they would be as sharp as razors since I willed them to be that way.
    I seemed able to transform through my willpower, through imagination alone.
    The Dark Thing seemed content to respond to my silent commands…
    “Tell me,” I demanded, “Did they beg for their lives just as you’re doing now?”
    I willed the weapon of my left hand