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The girls trembled in their heels, and they looked as scared of Levka and his friends as they were of the thugs. Levka tried to diffuse the situation without bloodshed because he knew if it came to that, the league would come down harder on them. “Go. Leave. There are four of us now, and you’re well out-matched.”
“Ha! Well, you won’t be any match for this!” The big guy yanked out a gun hidden in his denim jacket.
“That’s the way to show him, Joey!” the lanky boy said, and lunged at Ruric with his knife.
Ruric smiled, the look pure evil, and swung his ghostly light sabers at the guy. He moved quicker than the mortal’s eye could see, grabbed the boy’s arm, and twisted hard. Snap.
Screaming in pain, the teen dropped the knife. He grabbed his arm and ran several paces backward. “He…he broke my damned arm!”
“Better that than your scrawny neck, eh, cockroach?” Ruric asked, the humor sparkling in his green eyes.
One of the other thugs stalked toward Arman, probably figuring he was a wimp because he didn’t want to fight.
Stasio slipped in closer to the blond. “Hey, he looks kinda like Johanne Von Kruger, eh? German Nazi, killer extraordinaire? Even has the butch that looks like his, only the blue streak down the middle kinda destroys the tough guy image.”
Levka rolled his eyes. Everywhere he went, Stasio had to give a living history lesson.
Ignoring Stasio and concentrating on Arman, the Nazi-looking kid waved a blade inches from his face.
Arman straightened his back and towered over all of them by a couple of inches, his willowy appearance deceiving others into believing he had little strength. “No good will come of this, I say.”
“Afraid?” the boy asked, baring his yellowed teeth.
“Yes, of what I might do to you.”
The guy leapt at Arman, thrusting with his knife into the misty gloom. From behind the creep with the curly black hair, Arman said, “What about you? Want to fight?”
The guy let out a frightened cry and bolted down the deserted street.
“Don’t run with a knife,” Arman said under his breath. “My mother always told me that.”
The boy tripped on his own two feet. He fell to the asphalt, jabbing the knife into his chest.
“Guess my mother was right.”
The big teen shoved the gun in one of the girl’s faces. “I’m going to kill her, if you don’t leave, now!”
With his finger squeezing the trigger, he was shaking so hard, it was only a matter of seconds before he fired the bullet. At this close range, he couldn’t miss, and the girl could very well die.
Without hesitation, Levka faded into nothingness, then reappeared between the gun and the girl. The bulky guy fired the gun, though whether it was because he wanted to or because Levka’s sudden action scared him, Levka would never know. The bullet ripped into Levka’s chest, tearing a hole through his shirt, skin, and blood vessels. The pain traveled through his nerve endings, clouding his mind, blurring his vision. Even the girls’ screams behind him quickly faded.
His movement sluggish, Levka leapt toward the gun-toting teen. A second bullet shattered one of Levka’s ribs, and a third lodged in his liver, or at least he thought it had. The fourth and fifth went heavenward when Stasio grabbed the guy’s neck and yanked his gun arm upward.
The gloom closed in on Levka. The pain filled his entire chest, burning, sharp, excruciating. For a second, he wondered why he had taken another bullet for a mortal. Every time hurt as much as the first.
The gray mist faded to black, and he was semi-aware of falling hard on his knees.
“Get the girls to somewhere safe, Arman,” Ruric ordered.
“What about Levka?”
“Levka? He’ll live, if the league members don’t have us staked. And remember to wipe the mortals’ minds.”
Stasio snorted. “It would serve them right to remember.”
Levka felt his body lift off the ground. Opening his eyes, he saw Stasio holding him and tried to give an order.
Arman did instead. “Wipe only enough of the experience to make them remember what is safe for us. Maybe they’ll learn.”
