Invincible (A Centennial City Novel) - By Fionn Jameson Page 0,90

know. There are people I have to protect. If I tell her no, she’ll find a way to make me pay.” His breath seemed to hitch. “I’ve got a son. In second grade and I swear, he looks just like his mother. She threatened his safety. Knew the name of his teacher and his best friend. You have to understand, I would do anything to keep him alive.”

Noir cleared his throat. “Including inciting a coup?”

I wished I could see the expression on the werewolf’s face. “You don’t know her.”

“Wrong,” replied Noir. Was that a pitying look on his face? “There is no one who knows her better than myself. She’s an idiot. A twit who doesn’t even know she’s being manipulated. And you’re playing right into her hands. Just as she’s playing into his.”

His hand twitched and a sharp, sudden pain ran down my back.

For one second, one breathlessly terrifying moment, I thought he’d broken my spine.

I screamed. Long. Loud. My voice cracked in the night.

“Jesus Christ!” Marcus let go of my neck in surprise and I fell on my hands, moisture pooling at the corners of my eyes.

No. I was okay.

I had used my arms.

I was alive.

Alive.

I turned on my knees, the bi-su's abrasive handle cutting deeply into my palms.

But not as deeply as it slashed across his Achilles tendon and brought him down to eye level.

He had healed, but not well, the scars puckered underneath his eyes like something was trying to burst out from underneath his skin.

Behind me, I heard thuds, the sound of a blade leaving its sheath, but all of that faded into little consequence when Marcus reared back, mouth open in a silent cry.

A flailing arm caught me on the left side of my face and pain burst across my vision, bringing forth fireworks of black and white.

“You have to die!” he howled, face raised to the moon. “My son is the only thing worth living for.”

I didn’t want to.

I did not want to kill.

With his Achilles tendon severed and blood pooling over his shoes and into the gravel, he was hobbled, crippled. It seemed more than a possibility he would never be able to walk on his own power again.

He howled again, the sound long and low, arms held up as though he thought he could reach out and embrace the moon.

I realized what he was doing too late.

Fur shone on his body and I watched in sick fascination as he fell on his hands and knees, the bones breaking and knitting underneath a skin stretched far too thin for it to stand the stress.

Noir shouted. “Kill him! Kill him now before he turns!”

I had no time to go for the sword; I turned the bi-su in my hand and stabbed downward, the point over the base of his neck.

I worried the blade would simply connect with a bone and deflect into his neck.

My worry was all for nothing because he swept his hand up and knocked the dagger out of my hand.

The force was enough to send reverberations through my body and I staggered back as my arms seemed to shake enough to be in grave danger of falling out of their sockets.

"You have to die," he said.

No.

Growled.

Werewolves were never my prey.

So this was what it felt like to be faced by a seven foot tall humanoid being with claws long enough, sharp enough to eviscerate me.

So this was what it felt like to be faced by a shifter whose eyes glowed red in the moonlight, whose body dripped some kind of strange fluid down the form that had gone completely furry.

There was nothing that looked remotely familiar about the monster in front of me.

There was nothing that looked remotely human about the monster in front of me.

And there was no way I was going to fight the monster with a three inch throwing dagger.

Well, fight and expect to live, in any case.

But that didn't mean I couldn't give it, forgive me, a stab.

And I did.

Give it a stab, I mean.

I scrabbled in the gravel for the dagger, knees digging deep, trying to gain the traction to cover the six feet that separated me and the thin but sturdy length of metal.

A paw the size of a dinner plate stepped in front of me.

I supposed I should have been gratefully it didn't step on me.

Perhaps there was honor in wolves, after all.

“Get up, worm.”

At least, that's what I thought he said. It was hard to make out a single word when being