Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,37

the concrete bridge supports. Bone cracked, and when I dropped him, he didn’t get up.

A different guy ran at my flank. I pivoted and snapped a kick into his stomach. He flew backward.

But by then everybody else was spreading out to surround me. The torchlight gleamed on their knives. They all had one, and most of them held their elbows cocked and the blades in line with their forearms, just like my DI had taught me. They knew what they were doing.

I realized I wasn’t just juiced with Red’s superhealth. I’d let it make me overconfident. But it was too late for second thoughts.

As I backpedaled toward one of the bridge supports—to keep anybody from getting behind me—I spotted one of the Tiki torches out of the corner of my eye. I reached and jerked it out of the ground. It was just bamboo, and bent and bounced in my hands. But it was better than no weapon at all.

A finhead came at me. I shoved the flaming end of the torch at his face, and he stopped short. At the same moment, I glimpsed or heard or felt motion right beside me. I jumped away from it, and a knife thrust fell short by an inch.

Ezequiel snarled and scrambled after me. As his arm pulled back for another stab, I booted him in the face. That was one nice thing about fighting short creatures. It was actually practical to go all Bruce Lee on them and kick them in the head.

Ezequiel reeled backward. I turned to find the next threat. Unfortunately, it found me first.

Something shoved the back of my right knee, or at least that was how it felt. No pain, not yet, just pressure. As I pitched forward, I realized that one nice thing about being a short creature fighting a human being was that you’re in a good position to hamstring him.

Other finheads swarmed on me. Each stab or slash was a paralyzing shock. But then energy roared up from the center of me and burned the weakness away.

I had maybe half a second before the next thrust or cut would come. I screamed and flailed with the torch. It was clumsy to use such a long weapon at close quarters, but it either knocked the finheads away or made them scramble back. Maybe because they hadn’t thought I had any fight left in me.

I hadn’t thought so, either, until Red healed my wounds. But I was pretty sure he couldn’t keep doing it over and over again. I needed to put an end to this.

I’d at least changed the dream. Was that worth anything? As I scrambled back onto my feet, I risked a glance in Rufino’s direction. He was watching the fight, but he was still a dissected, bloody mess, and still staked to the sandy ground. There was no reason to think that the other finheads wouldn’t go right back to torturing him after they finished with me.

It occurred to me to try to run back to my physical body. I could take another crack at helping Rufino later on. But no, to hell with that. There had to be a way to turn this thing around.

Ezequiel’s little brother stalked toward me. His knife swept through horizontal figure eights. I jabbed with the torch and caught him in the chest. He yelped, and one of the grown-up finheads, a female with little rimless glasses on her face and skinny gold bracelets on her arms, rushed at my flank. I didn’t have time to swing the burning end of the torch around, so I thrust with the other one.

It thumped on her collarbone, stopped her cold, and skipped upward. It snagged on a fold of scaly skin and tugged it up and outward before whipping free.

Except that I realized it wasn’t really a fold of skin. It was the bottom of a head mask more lifelike than anything you can buy at Halloween.

I yelled and threw the torch like a spear. Startled, the finheads flinched, and I launched myself into the middle of them. That’s where Mrs. Rufino was.

At that moment, any of them could have cut me, except that I’d surprised them. I drove a punch into Mrs. Rufino’s face. It jabbed pain through my knuckles, but it knocked her off balance, too. I grabbed her and hauled her toward her husband, with everybody else and everybody else’s knife just a step or two behind me. When I was close enough for him