Free Death Blows: The Bloodhound Files-2 by DD Barant Page B

kill me and screwed up.

    The Blood Cross goes right through my wrist, the one just below the handgun. It hits so hard the only thing that stops it is the crossbar, and the impact jars the gun right out of my hand.

    I stare in shock at the two silver spikes jutting from my arm. Jutting through my arm.

    Then things get worse.

    “Well, well,” one of them says. Don’t know which one, but he sounds delighted. “That cross one hundred percent solid silver. You ain’t no bitch, after all—you nothin’ but an OR.”

    Great. I go for my gun, they rip me apart. They know I’m human, so they might decide to drink me or turn me, just for fun. Or maybe they’ll just sell me to a blood farm somewhere, and I can spend the rest of my existence being force-fed iron supplements and being bled once a day—

    And then—in the middle of the night, on a dark, rainy Seattle street—the sun comes out.

    Not out of the sky. No, the sun steps out from the shadows of a doorway, and it’s shaped like a man.

    A man dressed like a Roman soldier, to be exact: metal breastplate, leather skirt, sandals, tall crested helmet, metal greaves on his forearms and legs. Everything metal seems to be made of gold, and every inch of exposed skin shines with a brilliant white light, so bright it’s hard to look at for more than an instant.

    But an instant is more than enough. Pires wear smoked goggles or sunglasses during the day, but not at night; neither do the wrappers. A single glance at the newcomer is enough to provoke screams and six simultaneous See No Evil monkey responses; wisps of smoke from charred retinas seep between their fingers and curl into the damp air.

    Tair’s reaction is just as immediate. He leaps onto the hood of a parked truck, to the roof of a bus shelter, then onto the top of a two-story building, all within about two seconds. Then he’s gone.

    I’m holding on to my wounded arm with my other hand, squeezing the wrist as tightly as I can to keep from bleeding to death.

    I stare at the Solar Centurion. He stares back—or at least I think he does; I can’t actually look him full in the face without going temporarily blind myself. My skin feels like I just stepped onto the beach in Tahiti.

    And then, without a word, he turns ands walks away.

    “Hey!” I call out, stumbling after him. “You can’t just—”

    The light radiating from his body abruptly flares.

    When my vision clears, he’s gone. I grab my gun and get out of there myself before the pires recover—
    though I suspect most of them will be blind for at least a day or two. I’ve already got two punctures, and don’t really want to risk any more.

    I get half a block away, hesitate, then go back and shoot the skinny one in the hand. It seems like the least I can do.

    I go to the hospital. It’s my first exposure to this world’s brand of institutional medicine, and it’s an eye-opener.

    When I first got to this world, Dr. Pete took care of me in a little NSA clinic called the St. Francis Infirmary, and I’ve had checkups at his office since. I don’t want to go to either place now, not until I’ve had a chance to investigate some of the claims Tair made.

    The building’s a lot smaller than most of the hospitals I’ve been to—pires and thropes rarely need medical attention. The waiting room is tiny, and there are only two other people in it: a middle-aged, balding pire who seems to have a cold and a thrope in half-were form with his detached right arm sitting in his lap. It twitches spasmodically from time to time.

    They both study me curiously. “Why don’t you just pull it out?” the pire asks, his voice stuffy.

    “I don’t want to bleed to death.”

    “It doesn’t look that bad. Can’t be silver.”

    “It is silver,” I manage through gritted teeth. The thrope sniffs in my direction, then nods.

    “Can’t be,” the pire says reasonably. “If it were, you wouldn’t just be sitting there; the wound would be smoking