Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,28
of anyone’s To-Do list in here?
She was looking around, trying to locate Emile’s kind-of-girlfriend’s hairstyle, while at the same time not get left behind, when the fight broke out.
At first, she didn’t notice the jostling because she was getting bumped into by all sorts of shoulders and elbows anyway, but then a body slammed into her and knocked her off her feet: One moment, she was upright and ambulatory; the next, she was on her ass.
After which there was a stampede’s worth of boots and stilettos within inches of her face, her hands, her internal organs.
It was amazing how fast you could move when you didn’t want to get hurt. As the crowd surged and retreated like a school of fish, all those humans swirling together as if they were choreographed, she jumped up—
Only to get knocked into again, this time by a human man who not only put her back on the dance floor but also used her as a cushion, his heavy weight landing on top of her. As the breath was knocked out of her lungs, she got fed up. Planting her palms on his shoulder blades, she shoved him off of her, sending him flying into the crowd, toast out of a toaster.
Therese did not mess around with vertical attempt number two. She punched herself up and stayed in a crouch, arms in front of herself, eyes sweeping around and looking for the next dodgeball.
That was when she saw the real trouble. Two human men were locked in a joint throat grab, and it looked like their posses had gotten involved—and not to peel them apart. There were spin-off fights around the center conflict, satellites of smackdown that agitated the crowd even more.
Meanwhile, Emile was not anywhere to be seen, especially as another one of those purple lasers nailed Therese right in the eye, the impact like being Three Stooges poked.
Cursing, she brought her hand up—
The gunshot was unmistakable, even with the music, a high, hot pop! that cut through the bass and the treble. And then there were screams, shrill and piercing.
In slow motion, Therese turned to the sound and held her arms up to shield herself. Although her right eye was uselessly blinded, she was able to focus her left one, and that was when she saw the muzzle of the weapon point in her direction.
The true target was a human man who had stumbled into her path, but it wasn’t as if a little nuance like that was going to matter to the bullet.
There was a flash out of the tip of the gun, and Therese jumped to the side, going full Superman on the lunge, arms out ahead, body straight in the air, feet pointed. She even turned her head to track that muzzle, just to make sure she was out of range.
So she saw the man get shot.
The impact wrenched his torso to the side, as the lead slug went into the meat of his shoulder, and she yelled for him to get down—which was stupid. The shooter was closing in on the victim and about to—
The salvation tackle came from the right, and whoever it was knew what they were doing. Somehow, they managed to get control of the weapon and take the shooter down to the floor at the same time. It was one in a million, unless, of course, they had been trained to do it.
Therese hit the floor hard, her teeth clapping together, the heels of her hands skidding on the wood. One of her knees burst open with pain, and so did her left elbow, and she was worried she’d been shot.
Rolling over, she curled into a ball as the trampling feet she had tried to avoid in the first place came in what seemed to be a fleet of thousands, the size of the crowd geometrically increasing now that she was at the mercy of their panic. If she stayed like this, she was going to get seriously hurt, assuming she wasn’t already, so she forced herself up, rising to all fours and scrambling as fast as she could in what she hoped was a straight line. She kept her head down to protect it as much as possible, and she prayed she could just get the hell out of the way—
Without warning, her body levitated.
She was on the floor, paddling with her hands and feet like she was in choppy water, and then she was in the air, nothing under her.