Page 151 of Light the Fire

Still, no matter how you looked at it, her death at my hand was still unnecessary, avoidable, and consequential. She wasn’t abadperson. She was simply a product of her environment.

The fact of the matter, though, was that she had to die.

She was corrupted, unreformable, and irredeemable. And if I let her go free, she wouldn’t stop until one of us died. That was how Kappas were trained. Kill or be killed.

My clear path to victory was imminent when she stopped to wipe the blood from her cut lip with the back of her wrist, her chest heaving, shoulders hunched.

Using her pause and exhaustion to my advantage, I bent down, scooped up a handful of dry dirt and needles and chucked them into her eyes.

She let out a piercing scream.

Now was my chance.

In an elaborate sequence of moves—moves the guys and I had been working on for the last seven days—I spun, kicked, faked to the left, ducked beneath her arm and came up behind her, ramming my Yakku blade into the side of her neck until I felt the clunk and vibration of my blade tip colliding with bone.

The fight dropped out of her body, and she crumpled to the ground.

I pulled my dagger free, causing the blood to shoot out of her like a geyser, landing on my feet and the pine needles decorating the ground.

She took one breath, then another, but not any more.

Her eyes were still open, her mouth slightly ajar.

“I’m really sorry that you were born a Kappa,” I whispered, bending down and closing her eyes with two of my fingers. “Even though we were enemies, I will avenge your death. You didn’t deserve this. None of us did.”

Then before I could let myself get swept up in a conversation with a dead woman, I took off at a sprint for the cabin, tuning back into the world around me and searching for my guys’ heartbeats and the scent of danger in the air.

The cabin wasn’t even in sight before I felt at least nine heartbeats.

My own heart pounded as I picked up speed and ran even faster. Three of those heartbeats were slow.

And then…

Oh God.

Now I only felt eight heartbeats.

I choked and nearly tripped.

No.

NO!

I waited to see if two more heartbeats would stop, but thankfully they didn’t.

The shed came into view, and I sprinted past it, glancing down the cliff to the dock, where Rix, Jorik and Zane were all engaged in brutal hand-to-hand combat with four super soldiers. One super soldier was floating facedown in the water.

That explained the extinguished heartbeat.

But that didn’t explain the other two pulses that I felt nearby.

Pausing at the top of the ramp, I pulled an arrow from the quiver on my back, notched it in my bow, aimed, and released.

It caught the super soldier fighting with Rix in the left eye, and he fell back into the water next to his floating buddy.

Everyone on the dock stopped and looked up at me.

I took their element of surprise as an opportunity to notch another arrow and fire, this time hitting one guy who had been on Zane in the neck. Zane pushed him into the water, then all hell broke loose again.

---