Silver - By Kailin Gow Page 0,3
to recede as Briony clung to Kevin’s back, the silver sword she had used in the fight kept careful y away from his fur. The long strides of Kevin’s wolf form were taking them further from the fight at a rate Briony could never have managed on her own. Relief that he had been there to help her get clear from the carnage of the vampires’ ambush blended itself with guilt at running. Guilt at abandoning others to fend for themselves once it became clear that she could not help them.
Who had died? Even as Briony thought it, the sound of running feet came to her, and she caught sight of flashes of fur speeding through the woods not far from her. Which of the werewolves would it be? Her brother, Jake? Josh, the werewolf king? One of his family?
Briony ducked her head to avoid a low branch. They were moving quickly now. Too quickly to stop and think. Yet flashes of memory came to her. Of Josh ordering the retreat, and then fleeing with as many of his family as he could find. Of Jake helping Josh’s irritating sister, Carol, buying her time. What had she seen since then?
From the back of a moving wolf, it had been hard to tel exactly. Briony had thought that she had spotted Josh and his brother Brian changing and sprinting off, and that looked like the color of their fur out in the forest. She hadn’t seen anything more of Carol though, or of her twin, Channing.
Then there was Jake. The last Briony had seen of her little brother; he had been leaping into the safety of the forest canopy after helping Carol. Had he managed to get clear of the violence? Briony wanted to believe that he had.
After al , he was part vampire and part werewolf, so no single vampire should have been able to stop him. Yet they weren’t talking about single vampires, were they? What if there had been half a dozen of them? What if…
Briony found herself snapped from her thoughts by a flash of movement above her. A vampire, a young man dressed in casual clothes, his fangs bared in anticipation of the kil , was already in mid-leap as she looked up. He obviously intended to knock her from Kevin’s back and finish Briony while she was stil stunned.
Briony reacted on instinct, bringing the sword around in an arc that caught the vampire halfway. The momentum of Kevin’s forward motion only added to the stroke, and the blade sliced through the creature so neatly that Briony barely had to grip with her legs to keep her seat.
Looking back as Kevin ran on, she saw the two halves of the vampire hit the ground, already burning with the cold, blue fire that would consume him.
Briony shuddered, yet she was careful to keep a firm grip on Kevin’s fur. She knew that in a battle like the one she was fleeing it was kil or be kil ed, yet somehow, she felt that it shouldn’t be so easy. Taking a life shouldn’t be something you did on instinct. Yet what else could she do?
It was almost a minute before the next vampire leapt out. Kevin’s speed took the pair of them past the initial leap, but the creature succeeded in snagging a hand in Briony’s sleeve as it tumbled past. Briony found herself spinning from her spot on Kevin’s back, having to tuck and rol to avoid the worst effects of the fal .
Even so, it rocked her. At the speed she had been travel ing, she lost her grip on Kevin’s back and fel hard, smacking the ground that jarred her entire body. She forced herself to her feet, knowing that the vampire would not be slowed by a fal like that, and that she would be easy prey lying down.
This creature was a brunette woman who appeared to be in her early twenties. She was dressed more for a night at the opera than an ambush, in a long dress slit up one side. She even wore high heels.
“You did n o t just land safely in those,” Briony managed to gasp out. She looked around for the sword.
Had it fal en into one of the nearby bushes?
“Looking for this?” the vampire woman asked. She picked up the sword from a patch of undergrowth, holding it gingerly, with just her fingertips on the pommel. Without changing her grip, she flung it so that it lodged