James Axler – Starfall

No! Krysty screamed. She reached for Ryan again, more determined this time. Her hands and arms passed through her lover’s body as if he’d been made of smoke.

Ryan turned his attention back to the old woman. “Last chance,” he told her in a flat voice. “Let Krysty go, or I’ll chill you as you lay.”

See how sure he is of himself, Phlorin taunted. So brave, so demanding. Men are pathetic. And they have the gall to think that every problem can be answered with physical violence. She smiled in disdain, and Krysty didn’t know if the smile was meant for her or Ryan.

Then Ryan struck, as fast as any mountain cat back home in Harmony that Krysty had ever seen. Despite his harsh tactics, she knew her lover took no pride and no pleasure in death. He struck to kill, plunging the panga deep into the woman’s heart.

Krysty felt the blade as though it entered her own body, cold steel suddenly invading hot, pulsing flesh. She screamed, but the pain in her voice paled beside the screech that echoed in her mind from Phlorin.

The woman convulsed from the floor, grabbing at Ryan’s arm. Krysty watched, trapped by whatever bound her to the old woman, and felt her lover’s flesh through Phlorin’s hand.

Then the woman died, spitting blood onto Ryan as she fought to hang on to her existence and bite him at the same time. He caught her hair up in his free hand and shoved her head back. Gradually her muscles relaxed, and she fell away from him.

But Krysty felt the growth inside her own mind, more deeply entrenched than ever. She screamed, realizing that even though she’d escaped the cage she’d been confined in, she was more trapped now than ever.

Before she could move, before she could think, she felt something pulling at her. She turned to face it, then realized that she was being drawn to her own body. In an eye blink, she was back inside her own flesh. But she wasn’t alone. She also realized that she wasn’t breathing.

RYAN GAZED DOWN at the corpse, his hand still gripped around the panga thrust into her chest.

“You shouldn’t oughta done that,” Mary wailed from the side of the house. “You shouldn’t oughta done that to a witch.”

“Shut her up,” Ryan told the woman’s husband. In truth, in the moment before he’d killed the woman, he’d felt an eldrich chill thrill through him, seeming to come through the knife handle itself. He believed in Krysty’s premoni­tions, but he was no doomie himself. That feeling, though, had felt as close to any experience his lover had ever told him about.

“Ryan,” J.B. called.

Ryan yanked the panga free and glanced at his friend, grateful for the distraction.

“Got a man out here waving a white flag at the end of a stick,” the Armorer stated. “Want to hear him out, or do you want me to chill him where he’s standing?”

Chapter Ten

“Step him back,” Ryan said, gazing at the baron’s man waving a piece of white rag from a wag antenna. “Gets close enough, he could heave a gren through the window if he’s got one.”

J.B. rattled off a quick 3-round burst that ripped through the acid-laced mud at the man’s feet and threw clods back in the direction he’d come from.

Thinking he’d been shot, the man hurled himself to the side, dropping the makeshift white flag and himself into the mud. He started flopping and screaming at once as the acid residue from the chem storm ate into his flesh.

“Come get him if you want him alive,” Ryan yelled out.

“How do I know you won’t shoot them?” a man roared back.

“If I wanted you to think that,” Ryan growled, “I’d have shot this poor stupe bastard. Didn’t think he’d be fool enough to throw himself into the mud like that. And you’re only risking two men.”

“I got two men coming out,” the man replied.

“I see any more than that moving,” Ryan warned, “I’ll chill every one I see.”

Two men bolted from hiding among the wrecked wags. Neither carried weapons except for side arms. Both, how­ever, had canteens. Cursing the man on the ground, they emptied their canteens over his face and hands. His skin pinked up from the caustic acidity left trapped in the ground. Once the man had control over himself, his two companions dragged him back to shelter. He never quit moaning.