Bulls Rush In (Pax Arcana) by Elliott James

Author:Elliott James [James, Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2015-04-28T03:00:00+00:00

The most important step had been making a poor man’s version of liquid nitrogen. It had turned out to be surprisingly easy. All I’d needed was two big plastic bottles—one smaller than the other—a sharp pair of scissors, 99% isopropyl alcohol, and some dry ice. Making a bucket of the stuff hadn’t taken long, but I’d had to be very careful about not making physical contact with the liquid. The guy who made the how-to video on YouTube, a Wbeatty, described the stuff as cryogenic napalm.

I had placed the bucket behind a tree at the edge of a small clearing. The area around the tree was filled with punji traps, small pits with sharp wooden stakes at their base. They wouldn’t stop Samuel, but they would slow him down. About thirty feet in the woods beyond the tree was a deep grave, maybe six feet wide by nine feet long. The grave was filling with rain.

I looted through my truck cab and removed a Japanese long sword, a Japanese short sword, and a Ruger Blackhawk, respectively. The fourteen-inch silver steel knife was already sheathed on my hip. Then I stripped down to my jeans and sneakers. I needed to be elusive, a dancer, and if the rain was cold, it was better than having loose clothing that huge hands could grab or horns could snag. I fixed my sheathed swords crosswise over my shoulders and the smaller weapons at my hips.

Then I waited. Would Samuel come? I thought he would. I knew his secret. He was angry and scared and out of his depth, and if the beer bottles in his house were any indication, he had started drinking to self-medicate. The alcohol might numb his anxiety, but it wouldn’t help Samuel with all of those predatory instincts that he had no idea what to do with. He hadn’t even waited for rainfall or night to find Ben and Colton, and all the old stories agreed that this was when fire elementals should hunt.

It took four hours for Samuel to appear, but I didn’t mind. I’m patient when I have to be.

Samuel had stopped by his house, and maybe picking up my scent there was what finally set him off. He was carrying Luis’s shotgun in any case, and he leveled the weapon at me. His face was contorted with rage, and he hadn’t bothered to put on a raincoat or bring an umbrella. His cheap green T-shirt was suctioned to his skin, his long black hair plastered to the side of his skull. Little red lights flared in his nostrils at the sight of me.

I started moving when the muscles in Samuel’s left shoulder tensed, but it wasn’t necessary. His finger pulled the trigger, but there was no gunpowder in the shotgun shells.

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