Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [166]
“Murid!”
She kept firing.
Kaldar jerked his shotgun and fired. The shot bit into the creature.
The abomination hovered on the edge of the cliff and plunged down. Murid vanished beneath the squirming mass.
Kaldar screamed.
His legs carried him to the creature, and he hacked into the writhing mass with his knife and kept screaming and screaming as blood and tissue flew in a salty spray from his blade. Tentacles raked his back but he kept slicing, oblivious to the pain. He carved his way to the torso and plunged his blade into the human stomach. Tentacles flailed, and the monster’s human mouth hissed. Kaldar jerked his knife free and stabbed again and again and again . . .
CERISE kicked a body off her blade. All around her the fight raged: reanimated corpses jerky on their feet, huge dogs, the Hand’s freaks, furry, scaled, armored, clawed, fanged, feathered, and the family, all clawing at each other in an insane race to kill. Blood spilled into the sludge, and lives were torn from the still-warm bodies.
She’d killed and killed and killed, slashing again and again. Now she was tired, and the fight wasn’t anywhere near over.
In front of her a scaled clay paused in his killing spree and raised his arm with a shout. She followed his gesture and saw William on the hill.
Her heart skipped a beat.
He clashed with a lean blond man—Spider, she realized. They moved so fast, it took her breath away.
She had to get to that hill.
Cerise dashed forward, slicing at the scaled clay in passing. Her flash-blade severed his thigh, cleaving through the bone. He crashed down. She didn’t pause. Someone else would finish him.
A red-skinned woman broke from a mound of torn thoas corpses and ran toward the cliff and the two men fighting on it. Veisan, Cerise’s memory supplied. Spider’s assassin.
Cerise sprinted across the muddy ground. Veisan squeezed out a burst of speed, but Cerise was closer to the cliff. She reached the pond and spun about it.
Veisan saw her. Her hands balanced two wide curved blades, thin and sharpened to razor precision. They would slice a limb in a single strike. A grimace raked Veisan’s face. Her mouth gaped, her eyes turned wide.
She was afraid for Spider.
Cerise rubbed the ground with her foot to gauge the slickness.
Veisan looked at her.
“No,” Cerise told her.
Veisan flipped her blades and charged.
SOMETHING steel-hard clamped onto Kaldar’s leg and pulled. He fell forward into the bloody mass. The force dragged him away from the body. He clawed at the slick ground, but the thing that held his leg was too strong. It pulled him free. Kaldar squirmed onto his back and found dog jaws on his leg. Erian loomed in the rain.
“They’re dead,” Erian said. His voice was dull. Pain contorted his face. “They’re both dead.”
He turned and hurled himself at the nearest freak. Kaldar sat up. A tangled mass of flesh lay on the hillside. The rain diluted the blood spilling from the severed tentacles, and it spread in a pale red across the sludge. Kaldar rushed to his feet and dove at the gory mess, hurling the severed pieces of flesh out of the way. He dug in through the corpse until a human arm emerged. He grabbed it and pulled, slid on the mud, fell clumsily, scrambled to his feet, and pulled again. The twisted mound of flesh shifted and Murid’s shoulder and then her head came free. He grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her out.
Murid stared at the sky. The raindrops fell into her eyes and bounced off her bloodless cheeks.
Kaldar shook her. He clasped her shoulders and shook, sending her black braid flapping, willing her to live. “Don’t. Don’t!”
She lay limp in his arms.
He shook her one more time and then set her gently down on the ground. His knife lay in the mud a few inches away. It was still sharp and there were still freaks to kill.
VEISAN cried out, spinning wildly,