Page 273 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
“Run, love, run!” her mother gasped.
A sob escaped her lips, but Clara did.
She sprinted toward the open right, clutching her baby to her chest. Footsteps pounded behind her. The man’s leg had been a ruse or he simply didn’t care about pain. Maybe there’d been another assailant waiting in the shadows. It didn’t matter.
She was too slow. She was too slow.She was too slow.
Her body screamed with the effort of sprinting, but she didn’t stop.
Whipping to the right at the first opportunity, she careened down the other lane. More debris lay strewn across it, but people were ahead, cleaning it up.
Her throat was tight with tears and exertion, but she managed to scream, “Help!”
One young man nearby, his warm bronze skin lighter than her own, looked up. His dark eyes, one of which had been recently blackened—probably in one of the numerous fights that had broken out in the Catacombs with all the feelings running high—found her, hand going to his waistband.
Clara sprinted toward him. Footsteps still pounded behind her, and a hand grabbed her shoulder, tugging on the wrap holding Samuel to her. She screamed, but the young man flew past her, flash pistol out and pointed at the man behind her.
A sharp, deafening crack shattered the air, the burning smell of metal hot and heavy. The hand left her shoulder. Clara hunched over her screaming son.
Her ears ached with the echoes of the pistolshot. Tears cascaded down her face. Her hands and legs shook.
The young man came back, a hand out to help her up. “He’s…”
His wrist. Black veins.
Clara shook her head, scrambling backward only for her hand to fall into the hot puddle of blood from her earlier assailant. She staggered to her feet, scrubbing her hand frantically on her trousers.
She turned and ran.
The city burst open with a roar, thundering chaos in the form of amorphous gray forms shuttering into existence to her right and left. Maybe she’d left the realm of the living and entered some sort of horrible nightmare, but she didn’t stop.Each pounding footstep she took, she prayed harder. Her body obeyed, its primal instinct to flee overtaking any thought of stopping.
She needed Jove.
Her mother was dying or dead.
She couldn’t get out of the city.
Her ankle twinged, the one that she’d twisted the night of the attack, and it sent her listing sideways into the nearest wall. She twisted just in time to keep Samuel from slamming into the charred whitewashed stone.
Her ankle throbbed, and her shoulder screamed, but she steadied herself against the wall. She couldn’t stop. A flash of metal underneath an overturned crate caught her eye.
There were no gray shapes or people in the alley with her. She still limped toward the metal. It might be a weapon, and she prayed it was a flashpistol, something she could use if forced.
Her fingers clasped the handle. Blue. The metal was blue.
She aimed for the sky and fired it.
Blue fire, and immense cold flowed over her.
She dropped the Cerl weapon, her hand blazing from its icy touch.
Samuel wailed, and Clara thrust herself against the wall, but no one came around the corner. No one seemed to care that she’d foolishly given her position away. She breathed heavily as she assessed where she might be. She wasn’t sure just how far she’d run, nor was she sure how many turns she’d taken.
No street signs were posted on the buildings, but a few of the shops still had their own signs hanging from doorways—those that had survived. There were a few with only a door, no sign. Most had neither.
The nearest one was missing half of it, but she read,Beckh—Boo—
For some reason, the name sounded familiar, though she wasn’t certain as to why. She looked around some more. She looked inside the store only to find ashes and a few scattered book pages. She looked further down the street. A row of townhouses and apartments, most missing walls or roofs, lay tucked around the bend.
