The Stone Warriors: Damian Read Free Page A

prey. Oh, yeah, and then feed.
    Someone else scurried down the alley, and she fired off another shot, hitting the brick wall where her target had been only seconds earlier. Damn. She couldn’t afford to waste ammo. Although, for a moment, she actually wondered why not. She didn’t see any resolution of this stand-off that didn’t include her dead body. She might as well take as many of them with her as she could.
    That didn’t include the hounds, unfortunately. To some, they might seem the obvious target. They weren’t protected, weren’t hiding in the shadows, or huddling behind a filthy garbage dumpster. The problem was that the hounds hunted in pairs, and she could only shoot one at a time. And once she shot the first one—assuming she managed a kill shot, which was no guarantee, since their skulls were like rock—the other would go a little nuts, breaking whatever hold his handler had on him, and freeing him to kill whoever struck his fancy. As the one who’d killed his partner, she’d be the first target. She wouldn’t be the only one, which she might have taken some comfort in, if she’d really thought there was no hope of survival. But she wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet.
    The scrape of a boot had her turning to discover two of her pursuers rappelling down the side of the building behind her. Their ropes weren’t twelve feet short, either. She caught movement in the corner of her eye and spun back around to find the ones in front had moved up while she was distracted. She couldn’t win this. She was one, and they were many. Damn, maybe she was going to die tonight.
    “Fuck,” she swore, not caring who heard. Fucking Nick Katsaros. This was all his fault. Instead of running around Kansas, consorting with vampires, he should have been verifying the intel that sent her after the damn Talisman in the first place. He’d have caught the inconsistencies, the tells that would have warned that something wasn’t quite right about this job. He had a real gift for it, a knowledge that exceeded her own, and she was a fucking expert. But it was too late. The only thing he could do for her now was to attend her damn funeral.
    A sudden scream had her jerking back around, just in time to see one of her pursuers seemingly plucked off the wall and sent flying through the air to hit the opposite building with a sickening crunch.
    What the hell?
    A huge blond man stepped out of the alley between the two buildings and walked over to the injured man who lay on the ground groaning. Picking him up by his obviously broken arm, the blond giant held him for only a second before running him through with a big-ass sword, stabbing in below his arm to avoid the ballistic vest and right into his heart. Yep, that was another thing no magic user could survive, having his heart sliced in two. The second climber jumped to the ground and spun to fire his weapon at the newcomer, but the blond held the body-armor-wearing dead guy in front of him to absorb the gunfire as he advanced, then threw the body at the shooter, grabbed his weapon, and turned it on him, shooting him expertly three times. Once in the head, twice in the heart.
    Casey stared. A triple tap. Who was this guy? But then she heard curses from the enemies still in front of her and decided it didn’t matter. Whoever he was, he was on her side—at least for the time being—and she might survive this night, after all.
    Bullets whizzed past her position as her enemies started firing at her erstwhile ally. Casey ducked back farther into the protection of the dumpster, taking advantage of the fact that they seemed to have forgotten about her. Slipping the backpack off her shoulder, she tucked it between the dumpster and the wall, then shuffled to the other end of the container, until her enemies were in sight. They weren’t paying much attention to her anymore; they were totally focused on taking out the blond, stepping into the open to gain a better vantage,