A body slams into me from the side.
The impact knocks the air out of my lungs and sends me crashing to the pavement. My palms skid across wet grit. Pain rips through my knee. I try to scramble up, but fingers clamp around my ankle and drag me back. Panic finally breaks loose, wild and animal.
“No!” I kick, twist, claw at the pavement. “Get off me!”
A boot catches my ribs. Not full force, but enough to fold me around the pain. Someone grabs my hair and hauls my head back. Rain hits my face. Neon swims overhead in blurry purple and yellow strips.
“Mouthy girls should learn,” Neck Tattoo says, breathing hard.
I spit blood and rainwater toward his shoes. “You first.”
His face twists.
The blow lands against my temple.
The world flashes white, then gray. My body goes loose for half a second, and that half second terrifies me more than pain. I hear my own breath hitching, wet and shallow. Fingers paw at my coat, my bag, my arms. Someone says somethingabout teaching Kauss’s pet a lesson, though the words stretch strangely, as if heard underwater.
Kauss.
I do not know why his name flickers through me like a match in a dark room. He is not here. He cannot be here. Halo is full of shadows, and I am one more stupid woman who thought stubbornness counted as armor.
Then the alley changes.
The men stop laughing.
A sound rolls through the narrow space, low and deep enough to vibrate in the wet pavement beneath my cheek. It is not a shout. It is worse than a shout. It is the kind of sound old instincts understand before the mind can translate it.
The hand in my hair releases.
“What the hell is that?” someone whispers.
I try to lift my head, but the alley tilts violently. Rain runs into my eyes. My vision tunnels around the edges, closing in dark and slow.
A huge shape stands at the alley mouth, blocking the streetlamp behind him.
For one fractured instant, I see him as the gang must see him: enormous, black-scaled, red-shadowed, hood fallen back, scarred face carved into fury so cold it stops breath. Kauss does not look like a man stepping into a fight.
He looks like judgment given claws.
Neck Tattoo reaches for a weapon.
Kauss moves.
The first scream splits the alley before I can track what happens. Bone cracks with a wet, unmistakable sound. A body hits brick hard enough to shake loose drops of old rain from the fire escape above. Someone fires a weapon; the shot goes wild, burning a white scar across the wall. Kauss’s snarl fills the space, and another man shrieks as metal clatters away.
I try to push myself up. My arms fail.
“Kauss,” I whisper, though I do not know if any sound comes out.
The fight becomes fragments. A purple jacket flashing through rain. A fist striking flesh. Someone begging. Kauss’s massive hand closing around a throat and hurling a man into stacked crates. The smell of ozone from the missed shot. The sharp stink of fear. My own blood warm at the corner of my mouth.
The world narrows further. Sounds stretch and distort. One of the gang members sobs, “Please, man, please,” and Kauss answers in a voice I barely recognize.
“Run.”
Feet scramble. Someone trips. Someone else drags him up. The alley empties in a panicked rush of splashing boots and broken pride.
Then there is only rain.
