Love on the Run by Katharine Kerr

Author:Katharine Kerr [Kerr, Katharine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780756407629
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

WE STARTED TO WALK the couple of blocks to the exorbitantly priced parking lot where we’d left the Saturn. We were passing through a neighborhood of warehouses and semi-industrial businesses. Large, faceless buildings, most white or gray, sprawled on either side of the wide streets. Loading docks and trucks filled the alleys that crossed the middle of the blocks. By then, rush hour had clogged the approach to the Bay Bridge which, in that location, around Third and Brannan, ran over the street on huge concrete pylons. I could smell the traffic jam in the drift of exhaust from the trapped cars above us. A good many drivers had given up and managed to return to ground level at the last exits. Honking, snarling traffic crawled along beside us.

We’d just turned off Brannan onto Third—I could see the baseball park looming in the distance ahead—when I heard an animal growl directly behind us. It sounded like a mix of lion and bear, loud and threatening. I glanced at Ari, who smiled at me. He’d heard nothing.

“I need to look behind us,” I said. “Let’s stop for a minute.”

He obliged. I swirled around and saw a monster. A large green reptile, red eyes, slavering mouth, huge teeth, and about the size of an SUV, crouched ready to spring. With another roar, it raised a nasty-looking clawed paw. I drew a Chaos ward and threw. It exploded in a rain of green crystals.

“Was anything there?” Ari said.

“Yes and no. An illusion or a Chaos critter. I don’t know which, but it’s gone now. Y’know, if I weren’t used to crud like this, I might have screamed and run right into the traffic.” I looked at the street, where large metal machines streamed by us at about fifteen miles an hour. “Squashed Nola all over the street would have been the result.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t joke about it.” Ari fixed me with a mournful stare. “And I also wish these apparitions were something I could shoot.”

“That’s one reason why I love you.” I slipped my arm through his. “Let’s go redeem the car from bondage. I want to go home.”

As we drove back to our flat, I tried to apply some logic to these illusions that kept threatening my life in their oddly indirect manner. Thinking helped me ignore Ari’s driving, which threatened my life directly. I finally decided that of my list of suspects, the psychic squid criminals from the alternate Venus were the most likely candidates. Ash and the Axeman would have come right after me with a knife. The Maculate leopard-woman from Terra Two had good reason to hate me but great difficulty in traveling in our world. She had three pairs of breasts, skin marked with rosettes like leopard spots, and ears at the top of her head. Other than at science fiction conventions, she would stand out too much in any crowd to be an effective assassin.

Could she have hired the cephalopods, that evolved mixed race of squid and cuttlefish, to take me out? An ugly possibility, but a real one.

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