Shadow Ops 3: Breach Zone Read Free

them, stabbing down with a spear wherever one of them twitched or cried out.
    At last, one of the wolfriders raised a horn to its lips and sounded a long, low note. It was answered by a shriek from inside the gate. The sound cut through the crowd, they surged with even greater fervor, running frantically. The first of them reached Swift, and he stepped out of their path, numb with horror.
    Then the first new creatures came through.
    They towered twelve feet in the air, their skins liquid black and cut only by a slash of white smile, showing dagger teeth. Their humanoid bodies were topped with long horns, their hands dragging longer claws. They flashed through the gate, moving across the street in discrete blinks, one second in one place, another in the next. They lit among the stragglers streaming around the building, cutting them down with great sweeps of their clawed hands. The goblins drew back from them, shivering at the cold they exuded.
    Gahe , the Mountain Gods of the Apache. Relentless, vicious monsters that froze with a touch or killed with a swipe of their dagger claws.
    Swift’s eyes widened as a woman stepped through the curtain, the giant black creatures parting respectfully around her.
    She wore a suit of black leather armor, edges crudely stitched with strings of hanging beads, dotted with white patterns much like the skin of the goblins around her. Her own skin was milk pale, her black hair cut in a severe bob, almost jutting to points along her jawbone. Her eyes were wide, dark, and hauntingly beautiful. She surveyed the scene, the corner of her mouth quirked in satisfaction. A shimmering pulse passed through the air from her head to one of the huge black creatures surrounding her. It nodded, more pulses passed, and they began to fan out into the street, now eerily quiet.
    She nodded back at the monster, then turned to the curtain behind her, extending her hands. The air pulsed and the curtain’s edges began to rot once more, faster now, fading from green to purple to black in rapid succession, tearing ever wider, until the ragged hole in the air stretched beyond the edges of the buildings, easily admitting more of the slick black monsters, horned heads tossing, dagger smiles grinning, fanning out into the charnel-house corridor that had once been Wall Street. Training or no training, the panic won out then, and Swift was airborne, streaking through the sky back to his safe house.
    Because he knew that woman. Because he knew what she could do.
    What she would do.
    She could have had a roc carry her the forty stories up. One of the goblin Aeromancers would have been happy to oblige. But this was a homecoming, and Scylla wanted to walk in the front door, just like old times.
    For the most part, it was. Naeem, the doorman, showed no sign of recognizing her as she strode in, one of the tall Gahe beside her, a small cluster of goblins coming behind. He backed up behind the counter, mouth agape, eyes dinner-plate wide.
    The building was just as she remembered it, wide-beamed hardwood floors and cast-iron sconces giving the lobby a stately splendor that served as a reminder: This wasn’t a building for everyone. Only the greatest of the great lived here. The ceiling was hand-painted in rococo style, pompous and overblown, replete with gold leaf. Fortunately, this was one of the few buildings in the city with ceilings so high that even a Gahe ’s horns wouldn’t scrape them.
    ‘Hello, Naeem,’ Scylla said, ‘any mail for me?’
    Naeem blinked, recognition dawning on his face. ‘You’re . . . You’re dead.’
    Scylla laughed. ‘Yes, well. Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.’
    He snatched up a phone, punched three digits, held it to his ear for a moment before pulling it away and looking at it.
    ‘I think you’ll find the lines tied up, old friend,’ Scylla said. She looked at her feet. He had been an old friend, after a fashion. It was all gone now. Ruined. She shrugged off the