Free Lore vs. The Summoning by Anya Breton Page A

forward.
    Sliding along the ground on my broken foot was one of the most painful things I'd ever had to do. But it got me to Chet. I used my fatty momentum to shove his flailing body over and then sat on his back with my tortured foot still placed firmly on the ground.
    "I can kill you with a touch, Chet," I informed him with a hand pressed firmly against the bare skin of his neck. His claws slashed toward me but he couldn't seem to bend his arms back far enough to get close. "You are going to tell me who you work for."
    "Kill me, bitch. I'll never talk."
    "Have you ever heard of the Bubonic Plague?" I grit out in pain and hoped it sounded menacing. He didn't answer but his flailing slowed. "That's what I gave to your goons. But for you, I'll infect you and Heal you so I can do it all over again. How does that sound?"
    At this point I was bluffing because I was pretty sure I didn't have enough power left in me to Heal him fast enough.
    "You're the Black Death?" Chet asked in an unreadable voice.
    "The who?" I said in faux confusion I hoped he wouldn't catch. I was the Black Death but I didn't want anyone to know about it. It wasn't a name I'd given myself. It was what the Underground had termed the mysterious person that had killed one of the more dangerous players in the city.
    He bucked powerfully enough that I was knocked back. All of the healing my poor tendon had done instantly snapped like an aging rubber band. I bit down on the pain to keep from crying out. Chet took advantage of my pause to roll over, hop onto four limbs and in the process shift into a great orange tiger faster than anything I'd ever seen. It had seemed like he'd imploded and then bam he'd been a tiger !
    I mouthed the words, "Oh shit," just as he pounced across the distance to me. Apollo's warning gave me a moment to summersault out of the way. I knew a tiger couldn't speak and that I had no way to get Chet back into human form. It was either kill or be killed.
    This was not supposed to happen. Chet was supposed to rat his boss out like a good little torture victim. Shapeshifters sucked.
    With my left hand I aimed the gun at his head and got off a single shot before he pounced atop me. The bullet slammed into his feline brain, which was a bit smaller than his usual brain, maybe. Less mass meant more damage. Though he was as good as dead when he'd landed on me, he'd still managed to slash gashes into either side of me just from the continuing momentum.
    I lay there on the laminate floor bleeding with a few hundred pounds of cat on me. The problem with this situation was that even though the shifter was good and dead, I hadn't killed him with my plague. He wasn't going to decompose into primordial ooze. I didn't know enough about his kind to know if they remained in their animal form when they died or...
    Oh, there went some fur. They didn't remain in animal form after they died after all. Well, at least that much was good.  
    Except now it meant I had nearly two hundred pounds of naked man atop me. I rolled him off with what was probably my last bit of energy then seriously contemplated falling asleep right where I was. The idea of slicing my Achilles' tendon again so that it could properly heal was enough of a deterrent to get me up. I shook from the pain of it for a half a minute before I could move again.
    The shreds of Chet's clothing were on the floor beside one of the puddles of primordial oozes. I shoved my hand in to pull out his wallet and anything else he might have of use. Later I'd go through it but right now I needed to look for signs of his boss because I had no intention of ever returning here.
    Shuffling out of the pound-for-women kept my broken foot flat against the ground. It hurt like hell but hopefully would allow for a clean heal. There didn't seem to be any papers with names, addresses, phone numbers or any sort of identifiers in the entire place. I combed for the brown paper packages that might contain desert rocks and even