Killing Rocks: Book 3 by D.D. Barant

Author:D.D. Barant [Barant, D.D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Urban Fantasy
ISBN: 9780312942601
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-12-28T06:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

He kills them all.

Six heavily armed mercenaries, veterans of wars and police actions from Africa to Afghanistan. Thropes the size of linebackers, each one a mass of muscle, claw, and fang capable of recovering from almost any wound short of decapitation.

It takes him under a minute.

When he’s done he leans down and picks up the gas grenade, still hissing out white smoke, and tosses it casually out the window it came in. Then he turns to me. I can’t see his face clearly through the fog.

I shoot him.

* * *

I remember the first time Charlie and I went out dancing.

It was in the middle of a case—my first case on this world—and I was basically being paraded around a small town as bait. That didn’t stop me from getting in a little entertainment when I found out this town had a thing for swing bands—especially when I found out my new partner liked to dance. Yeah, I gave him a hard time about it, but not so hard he wouldn’t hit the floor with me.

Did I find the idea of a dancing golem strange? Well, at the time I was so overwhelmed by strangeness that it was just one more thing to add to the recipe. When I had some time to think about it later, though, it seemed perfectly natural, like just a little sugar in really strong coffee. Not so much that it becomes sweet; just enough to cut the bitterness.

He was a wonderful dancer.

* * *

The bullet takes him at the base of the throat. He gets the shield up in time, but not high enough; it smashes through the wire mesh that rings the circumference about six inches from the killing edge.

In a way, that makes it worse. The slug, tipped with silver but carved from teak, shatters, turning what could have been a through-and-through into a blizzard of shrapnel. It does about as much damage as a load of buckshot would if fired into a plastic jug filled with sand.

* * *

“Charlie isn’t there to spy on you or keep you in line,” Cassius told me the first time I met my new partner. “He’s there to protect you, and inflict serious damage on anyone that gets in your way. He’s your enforcer, not your babysitter.”

That turned out to be only half true. Charlie was certainly capable of destroying just about anything that might pose a threat to me, from neo-Nazi thropes to ninja pires, but he did his fair share of babysitting, too. He was the one who hung out with me when I was feeling blue, the one who’d show up with a Bogey movie and a pizza on a lonely Friday night—even though he didn’t eat. I didn’t think of him as a friend, because on this planet he was the closest thing I had to family. I trusted him with my life.

* * *

Black sand sprays the air like fossilized blood. A golem’s life force is embedded in the substance that

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