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a row, and finding nothing amiss, Bryan had become convinced of his invulnerability and had concentrated all of his attention on monitoring Kyna's life force via the crystal. |
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Two more strands, and I'm out of here, Paula decided. One! Two! Adios, asshole! |
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As Paula's mind raced back to rejoin her body, she noticed that the green thread was now the size of a coaxial cable and it was glowing like a neon sign. |
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As the echoes of Kyna's screams were drowned out by the roar of the waves, Cyrus flicked out a casual paw and crushed the old man's skull. Before the corpse hit the sand, Cyrus was a brown blur streaking through the night. In the few brief seconds it took him to sprint from the high grass to the tree, he finally grasped the diabolical ingenuity of the Dark Man's trap: The four rotting corpses had been a diversionthe main attack had come from the sea. |
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He covered the last half-dozen yards in one massive leap, landing in the soft sand on the ocean side of the tree and spinning around all in one motion. Kyna was sitting with her back pressed up against the tree trunk, screaming hysterically as she used her legs to try to fend off the waterlogged corpse of a woman in a tattered bathing suit. The woman's brief slumber in the cold sea had left her a mass of gray wrinkled flesh and torn tissue. Her left leg was little more than strips of masticated flesh and bone and there was a gaping hole in her right side where a passing shark's scissorlike teeth had taken out about a pound of flesh; a host of tiny white crabs could be seen feasting on mushy pieces of the woman's lung. |
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The hackles on the back of Cyrus's neck rose like rows of spikes. He growled deep in his throat and dug his claws into the sand. The woman's movements appeared sluggish, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing. She whirled around, bared green, scummy teeth and hissed like a snake as her washed-out, dead eyes suddenly blazed with malicious intelligence. |
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Cyrus faked right, then moved left, hoping for a quick kill, |
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