The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,456

simply wasn’t accurate enough. The shell was going to miss.

Then he and the immortal saw the same impossible thing: the flaming missile was curving—curving in midair—

Curving toward them.

Kip scrunched up into a fetal position, turtle-bear once more, one last time, hunching around Abaddon’s ankle—they had to be touching for the immortal to be stuck in Kip’s world and time.

Over him, Abaddon threw his arms up in defense.

The concussion rocked the world. Kip’s sight went black with a slap.

And then he became aware of shrapnel raining down on him. And—ow! shit!—it was really hot!

Kip scrambled to his knees, flicking burning pieces of metal and wood from his clothes and skin, little burn holes dotting his tunic and trousers. But he was too weak to stand.

Abaddon stood before him, above him still, knocked back five paces by the cannon shell still raining down around them. His coat and cloak had been ripped away in the blast.

His burned and blackened wings unfurled in a crack of rage, but whatever wounds had torn his wings, they weren’t new; they’d happened long ago, in millennia beyond counting. Abaddon was unhurt.

Kip’s deception and Gunner’s excellence and a curving, exploding cannonball had done nothing to this immortal except knock his clothes awry.

Abaddon bellowed in that voice that reverberated in tones above and below human ken. “You think any mortal weapon could kill me?”

He leaned over, pained by his long-ago-broken ankles, and picked up his sword, which he’d lost in the blast—now disguised as a cane once more.

“I don’t need to kill you,” Kip said, though his heart dropped.

“What? Are you hoping your father will arrive with the sword?” Abaddon asked, derisive. “He’s a league away, killing that idiot Koios. Do you think with the master cloak abroad that I’d actually lose track of the one blade that can hurt me in this world? No. He’ll not come in time for you. Now, where is my cloak?”

He lifted a foot and casually stomped on Kip’s head.

It felt like Kip had been kicked by a horse. But blubber bounces back. “Get out of here,” Kip said. “You bug me. Ha. Get it? You’re an insect?”

“You can die easy now or you can die over the course of ten thousand agonizing years. Last chance.” Stomping on Kip’s head with each word for emphasis, he said, “Where. Is. My. Cloak?”

That was the magic of the master cloak. Even the immortals couldn’t see it. No wonder Abaddon was a bit put out that Kip had taken it.

“I have a better question,” Kip said, nose streaming blood. “Keep firing as fast as you can. It reloads itself.”

“Enough of this,” Abaddon said. “As fast as—what?”

“A better question than ‘Where is my cloak?’ ” Kip said quickly, “would be ‘Where is my . . . pistol?’ ”

Abaddon reached for his holster to draw his revolving-chambered pistol, Comfort. It wasn’t there to be found.

Teia was fast. She’d always been fast.

A hole appeared through the middle of Abaddon’s left eye as a gush of gases and smoke jumped out of the empty air to Kip’s left. Only the pistol’s barrel protruded from the invisible master cloak. One report followed on another. Five shots. Ten shots. Fifteen. Twenty, as fast as she could fire them, perforating the immortal relentlessly.

Teia said nothing. She wasn’t the kind of assassin to give a lecture to announce her presence.

She also wasn’t usually the kind to miss with half of her shots, but then Kip saw why as she dislodged the master cloak and her head became visible: she was firing blind. She wore a scarf around her eyes and had also ducked her head into the crook of her elbow to shield her light-sensitive eyes from the muzzle flash of the pistol every time she pulled the trigger, only taking a quick, unsteady peek every few shots until Abaddon collapsed, hemorrhaging blood everywhere.

With a word to her, Kip took the pistol from her hand, then stood over the immortal, whose chest and arms were drenched with several shades of impossibly vivid green and black and red blood, the colors already fading in Kip’s sight as the immortal’s life faded and their realms separated once more.

“I know I can’t kill you without the Blinding Knife,” Kip said. “But I can banish you, can’t I?”

He shot Abaddon in his nasty insectoid head. Twelve times. Then his chest a few more. Then the joints of his flailing limbs. Then his stomach—who knew where this immortal kept his heart? No point taking any chances. “Get .