All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [214]
Mr. Ma looked back to the courtyard and continued his vigil.
Uncertain what else to do, Fiona turned and watched, too.
A mother and her child sneaked away from the others. They made a run for the church at the opposite side of the courtyard. Several others rushed though its doors, too, seeking refuge.
“This is no Ultima Thule,” Fiona declared. She heard the rising indignation in her voice and couldn’t stop it. “Those people will be slaughtered. Is that what you wanted to teach us today?”
Mr. Ma gripped the metal railing on the edge of the rooftop so tight, it creaked. “Perhaps,” he said.
Fiona’s jaw clenched. “I’m going down there and stopping them.”
“I have told you,” Mr. Ma said with strained patience, “I cannot permit school staff or students to—”
Fiona shrugged out to her Paxington jacket. “Then I’m ditching.”
Without waiting for him to tell her to stop, or some acknowledgment that she was doing the right thing from Dante or any of the other boys—Fiona jumped over the railing onto a fire escape.
She padded down and around the ladders and landings . . . pausing on the last.
She’d need a weapon. She unzipped her book bag.
What was she was doing?
She should have thought this through. These weren’t shadow creatures or Paxington students with swords. They were men with guns that could kill her before she got close to them.
Her hand closed about her wooden yo-yo. What good was that going to do?
She had to do something, though. What was the point of being a real goddess—of everything she’d learned at Paxington—all that training in gym class, if she couldn’t put it to use?
She touched cold metal and jerked her hand from the book bag.
Her father’s gift, the slightly rusted steel bracelet, had wrapped itself about her wrist. The bracelet had unclasped and grown to a heavy chain before, its links tapering to razor edges . . . it had lengthened a dozen feet and whipped through a Parisian lamppost.
It was magic. An Infernal thing. A thing to cut.
And precisely what she needed.
Okay. Mr. Ma was training them to fight. So she’d fight.
She squeezed the metal. It warmed, squirmed, and heated . . . just like her blood.
Infernal or Immortal rage, that didn’t matter, and it didn’t matter that the anger was the only emotion that seemed to come easily to her these days. Right now, she was going to use it to do some good.
Fiona slid down the last ladder and strode across the courtyard. She walked straight toward a soldier who watched the church. He shielded his eyes to see through its stained glass windows, raised his Kalashnikov machine gun, and shot at the shadows.
Part of Fiona knew not to be afraid. She was half goddess, and half . . . whatever her father was.
But she was afraid.
She was still the same old Fiona Post.
And yet, there was something else in her: a fighter. Something extraordinary. She clung to that—and strode forward to find which Fiona she would become.
She uncoiled the length of chain now in her hand and loosed a slur that would have never qualified for a round of vocabulary insult with Eliot. “Hey!” she called out. “Perro que come excremento!”56
The soldier wheeled.
Fiona lashed her chain at him.
Before the chain struck, however, he shot her.
A staccato burst: three rounds in her chest and gut.
The impact blasted her back; she spun and bounced and flipped and skidded along the cobblestones to a halt . . . facefirst.
The pain was beyond anything she’d felt. It was lightning that flashed and unfurled from her belly button to sternum to her spine—bone shattering, organ shredding—it ricocheted teeth to toes.
She lay still. Dead.
Boots on cobblestones approached.
She had to be dead . . . didn’t she? Of course.
So why then did she feel her heart thump—pumping, faster, until blood thundered through her veins?
She got up.
The man who’d shot her stood there, mouth open, blinking. He raised his Kalashnikov.
Fiona didn’t give him another chance. Chain wrapped about her fist, she slugged him.
His head snapped back, and he fell, and didn’t move.
Three holes smoldered in