could use his hunting skills to neutralize the numerical superiority of his heavily armed opponents.
Brennan flung himself through the back door, dodging left and rolling on the ground. Another assassin was waiting for him, but Brennan went through the door too quickly for the killer to draw an accurate aim.
Brennan gritted his teeth against the pain lancing through his leg as he sprinted across his meticulously raked sand garden, ruining the serenity of the gravel-sculpted waves with footprints and bloodspatters. The assassin was too slow to track him, and a fusillade of shots ripped into the ground at Brennan's heels as he dove into the thick brush surrounding his isolated country home.
The cold night air frosted Brennan's breath as he stood naked on the frigid ground. His bare feet burned in the snow, and his thigh throbbed as it dripped blood, but he scarcely felt the pain as he crouched low in the snow-laden bushes. A second black-garbed figure joined the one who'd been lying in ambush in the backyard. They conversed in low unintelligible voices, and one of them gestured toward the forest in Brennan's general direction. Neither seemed eager to go into the darkness.
Brennan grimaced, forcing his mind into dispassionate rationality. His biggest problem was time. His assailants could afford to wait him out. He was crouched naked in a frigid winter night that was already sapping all the warmth from his bones. He had to get to the shed behind the greenhouse before he became an immobile hunk of frozen meat.
Just as Brennan convinced himself to move, the assassins were joined by a third figure, who thumbed on a powerful flashlight and aimed it into the woods just to Brennan *s left. Brennan's hopes sank even lower. Now it would be almost impossible to get away. The hit men could jacklight him and shoot him down the moment he moved. But if he stayed put, he'd freeze and save them the effort of pulling the triggers. He scrabbled through the snow with fingers stiffened by the cold and found a fist-size rock that was slick with ice. It was a poor excuse for a weapon, but it would have to do. He shifted silently as the beam from the flashlight swept closer. He stood to throw the rock; then suddenly something fell from the loft window overlooking the backyard.
A tiny figure, no more than ten inches high, landed on the shoulders of one of the assassins with a thin high-pitched scream. There was the gleam of metal flashing in the light of a slivered moon, and the figure screamed again and stuck what looked like a fork into the back of the assassin's neck. The hit man yelled in pain mixed with fear and swatted at the creature. It fell to the cold ground in a pitiful little heap and lay unmoving.
Brennan's heart fell as he realized that it was Pumpkinhead, one of the manikins he'd rescued from the tunnels under the Crystal Palace. There were about thirty of them, children of a strange joker they'd called Mother. They'd been Chrysalis's eyes and ears through the city, but with Chrysalis dead and the Palace destroyed, Brennan had brought them to the country to live with him and Jennifer.
And now they were supplying the diversion Brennan had prayed for. They leapt screaming from the loft window, falling upon the assassins like living rain. They were armed with whatever feeble weapons they could find about the houseforks, kitchen knives, even sharpened pencils. They outnumbered the assassins ten to one, but they were all small and weak. Brennan watched with horror as the killers got over their initial surprise and swatted them down like kittens.
Curly Joe was the first to follow Pumpkinhead out of the loft window, and quickly into oblivion. He'd missed his intended target, who stomped him into the ground with bone-crunching force, quickly silencing his thin reedy cries. Kitty Kat managed to sink a kitchen knife into her target's ankle before she was smashed by his flashlight. Lizardo jabbed his foe in the shoulder with a pencil but was too weak to do much more than break the hit man's skin before the thug broke his scaly neck.
Brennan clamped down on his anger and pity and moved as quickly as he could, ignoring the pain running through his injured leg, ignoring the stones, sticks, and sharp slivers of ice that tore at his bare feet.
He flitted through the snow-shrouded trees like a ghost, circling around the A-frame