Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 6-10 - Laurell K. Hamilton [386]
Jason and I moved back, sliding a little away from each other. You need room to fight. The thought occurred that I’d never really seen Jason fight. He could have thrown the pickup truck they came in across the street, but I didn’t know if he knew how to fight. If you throw human beings around like toys, people can get badly hurt. I didn’t want Jason in jail, either.
“Don’t kill anyone,” I said.
Jason smiled, but it was just a baring of teeth. “Gee, you’re no fun.” That first prickle of energy that said shapeshifter breathed along my body.
Mel had been moving forward in a flat-footed, untrained movement. No martial arts, no boxing, just big. The other guy was in a stance. He knew what he was doing. Jason could heal a broken jaw in less than a day; I couldn’t. I wanted Mel. But he’d stopped moving forward. There were goose bumps on his hairy arms. “What the hell was that?”
He was big and stupid, but he was psychic enough to feel a shapeshifter. Interesting.
“Who the hell are we? What the hell was that? Mel, you need better questions,” I said.
“Fuck you,” he said.
I smiled and motioned him forward with both hands. “Come and get it, Mel, if you think you’re man enough.”
He let out a roar and ran at me. He literally ran at me with his beefy arms wide like he was going to do a bear hug. The bigger guy with him rushed Jason. I had a sense of movement and knew Shang-Da wasn’t on the porch anymore. There was no time to be afraid. No time to think. Just to move. To do what I’d done a thousand times in practice in the dojo, but never in real life. Never for real.
I ducked Mel’s outstretched arms and did two things almost simultaneously: I caught his left arm as he went past and swept his legs out from under him. He fell heavily to his knees, and I got a joint lock on his arm. I really hadn’t decided to break the arm. A joint lock on an elbow hurts enough that most people will negotiate after you prove just how much it hurts. Mel didn’t give me time. I caught a flash of the blade. I broke his arm. It made a thick wet sound, flopping loose like a chicken wing bent backwards.
He shrieked. Screaming didn’t cover the sound. The blade was in his other hand, but he seemed to have forgotten it for the moment.
“Drop the knife, Mel,” I said.
He tried to get to his feet, one knee hyperextended to the side. I kicked the knee and heard it give a deep, low pop. A bone breaking is a crisp, sharp sound. A joint doesn’t break as clean, but it breaks easier.
He fell on the ground, writhing, screaming.
“Throw the knife away, Mel!” I was yelling at him.
The knife went airborne, lost across the fence into the next yard. I stepped away from Mel, just in case he had another surprise. Everybody else had been busy, too.
The big one that had attacked Jason was lying in a heap by the pickup truck. There was a fresh dent in the side of the truck, as if he’d been thrown into the side of it. He probably had.
A third man lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of the porch steps. He wasn’t moving. Another man was trying to crawl away, one leg dangling behind him like a broken tail. He was crying.
Shang-Da was trying to break through the man with the baseball bat’s defenses. Jason was fighting a tall, thin man with muscles corded along his bare arms. He was in a low fighting stance, Tae Kwon Do or jujitsu.
Shang-Da took two blows on each arm from the baseball bat, then he took the bat away from him. He broke the bat into two large pieces. The man turned to run. Shang-Da started to stab him in the back with the broken end of the bat.
I yelled, “Don’t kill him.”
Shang-Da flipped the broken wood in his hand and smashed the unbroken end against the man’s skull. He went to his knees so suddenly it was startling.
The tall man fighting Jason crept forward in a fast crab movement that looked sort of silly,