Beautiful Beasts by Nicholas Knight

Author:Nicholas Knight [Knight, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Gegenteil

Loretta wasn’t sure how she knew to angle herself so that she spiraled toward the wall of pipes and machinery rushing by them. Everything seemed to be happening in a state of paradox. Blurred with speed and processed slowly. She nearly crashed into the wall, but twisted at the last instant, getting her feet under her and sprinting several yards down a thick pipe, and then using the momentum to propel her over onto one of the enormous rising gear mechanisms. She landed with something akin to grace, only for the gear to rumble beneath her so that her footing was compromised and her momentum carried her forward over the edge.

She caught herself on the side of the gear. The shock of the impact made her feel as if her arm was about to be ripped off. She shouted in pain and let go, dropping the rest of the way to the ground and landing in a crouch, the impact jarring every bone in her body.

Her limbs shook. Her shoulder ached. Her breathing was hard and coming too fast. What the hell had just happened?

Loretta remembered. She’d tried to kill the wizard. Gegenteil had intercepted her and sent them both crashing through the window. A window overlooking Kerkenhal’s engine room. Was the beast insane?

At least she couldn’t have fared any better from the fall. Some instinct made Loretta jerk her head up, and her eyes found the form of Gegenteil, standing tall and proud directly below the broken window they’d come out of. Her silk tunic had several tears from the shattered glass, which now littered the ground around her like the world’s sharpest garden, but otherwise she was unharmed. She didn’t even seem particularly disturbed to have dropped… however far that had been. Loretta could not have said.

Those golden eyes set in her pale face bore into Loretta with an intensity that made the fur of her tail and the hair on the back of her neck rise.

“Are you insane?” Loretta demanded. “You could have killed us both!”

One of Gegenteil’s rounded ears twitched. “You assault my keeper, the wizard of The Company of Golden Swords, the same company your keeper is newly accepted to, and you ask me if I am insane for stopping you?”

“He’s not a wizard,” Loretta spat. “He’s a fraud. That examination was a sham—” She cut off as Gegenteil leapt the distance between them in a single bound. There was no warning that she would attack. One instant she was stationary, the next she was all but upon her.

A combination of instinct and reflex was all that saved Loretta. She threw herself to the side as black claws extended from the beast’s fingers like obsidian hooks, swiping right through where her head had been a fraction of a second before. Loretta never saw the follow up spin kick that caught her across the temple hard enough to make the world flash and sent her tumbling across the engine room, bursting through the clouds of steam.

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