Pulling the edge of the knife toward me dragged the sharp edge across his armpit, I was rewarded by another gush of blood when the blade sliced through his axillary artery.
Something, a boot maybe, slammed into the back of my head and I released the man’s arm and my newly acquired knife.
I collapsed; face down, to the hot gravel.
Fireworks blasted across my vision. Getting my hands under me, I pushed up. I coughed, and frothy blood hit the rocks beneath me.
Someone grabbed the blade still in my back and pulled it free.
It hurt almost as much coming out as it had going in.
I rolled onto my back as a shadow covered the low sun. I squinted at the men standing around me. One was glaring down from near my feet. What do you know? It was Paul. He raised a foot to stomp on me, and I drew back my own leg and kicked out with all the strength I had left. My bare foot contacted the knee supporting his weight, and I heard a soft pop as the kneecap went.
The look on his face was priceless. I laughed, coughing out blood as I did.
Someone beside me brought a hand down and hit me in the chest, hard.
Hell. That was going to leave a bruise.
Then I felt the cold steel that had penetrated my ribcage.
I spasmed and felt my heart quiver as my vision darkened.
I coughed one last time before I died.
Chapter 2
Therese
The first couple of weeks after the fight between every sonofabitch–and his cousin–in the Garden of the Gods were hectic, even more so than my first couple of weeks as Raphael’s Apprentice Wanderer. It wasn’t enough that Rafe needed time to heal from his grievous injuries. No, we also had to round up all the escapees from the battle. Some were easy to find, the lower intelligence creatures that had been herded through the portal into our world made no active effort to hide as the sapient ones did. I don’t mean to imply they just stood around waiting for us to send them back to where they belonged, but at least they weren’t using magic and tricks to try and stay in our world.
It also wasn’t just a matter of location and pushing them through a portal. No, that would have been too easy. Some were dead set against leaving and were quite violent in their desires.
I knew it’d take at least a week to regrow the legs Rafe had lost to Rowle’s dragon, but he was too restless to wait. He used the spectral appendage spell to generate energy shells that served as temporary legs and then on the second night after the big fight–when we (mostly Raphael) had defeated Rowle and stopped his attempt at bringing Ragnarök into being–we started hunting all of the escaped critters down. Some had already been captured by the authorities and were being held in portions of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It had the only nearby facilities for holding some of the large creatures. Rafe decided that those could wait until we tracked down the ones on the loose. The zoo had wanted to let the public view the bizarre menagerie, but too many government agencies nixed that idea. Ostensibly, it was to protect the public from violent creatures of unknown capabilities.
That gave Rafe and me a good laugh.
During this period, a week, or so after the battle, we arrived at the conclusion that we should recover the three crossbow broadheads I’d lost in the black dragon that had cost Rafe his legs. The government had moved the carcass for study and apparently, there was only one place the government owned that was large enough to refrigerate a body larger than an elephant.
We reached Ft Walton Beach, Florida, on a cool night in early December. We had flown, via familiars, and made good time but the flight still took all day. Manticores and hippogriffs can fly fast, but they aren’t jets. It was after dark and Eglin AFB was easy to spot. Most of its 450 thousand plus acres was undeveloped pine forest and the sudden shift from normal inhabited land was abrupt. Passing Pensacola and Interstate 10, the lights of buildings, homes, businesses and the such, just stopped at the border of the vast Eglin range. While I didn’t know much about the Air Force or this particular base, I did know it was the largest USAF base in the world. Huge tracts of land were set up for various weapons testing and, of course, there were no inhabited buildings in those areas. Ergo, the dark forest we flew over. The night was cool, nowhere near as cool as the day had been when we left Colorado Springs, and the humid air bore smells of both marshy dampness and salty bayous.
Rafe pointed toward bright lights in the distance. I could make out the runways from several miles away, even at just a thousand feet of altitude–we’d stayed low to avoid fast moving aircraft. On the other side of the runways, the surface became even darker than the land. We’d gone over a map of the area and I understood that the darkest areas were the large bay and the Gulf of Mexico in the distance.
“We’ll fly lower from here,” Rafe called. “I don’t want to interfere with any aircraft coming or goings.”
“Sounds smart. How low will we have to go?” I called back.
“Treetop level. Any antennas or such
