The Compassionate Assassin by Matt Cowper

Author:Matt Cowper [Cowper, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Matt Cowper
Published: 2019-01-28T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

A bright light shone on her. It was warm, tantalizing. What could it be? Some mystical shrine in the afterlife? The gates of heaven? A fiery mountain in hell? Deathrain knew hell was her likeliest destination after exiting the mortal plane, but then again, they said the Lord worked in mysterious ways....

Then a loud, irritating noise rattled her ears. What was...no, she knew: the blaring horn of a ship. That light was the sun. She was still alive, still somewhere near Jameson Bay.

Water exploded out of her mouth, jolting her to a sitting position. Hacking, she drained the bay water from her inflamed lungs. Only after she was done did she open her eyes.

Yes – there was Jameson Bay before her, ships sliding to and fro, fishing boats zipping by, Ironrock Island sitting there in the distance. Overhead, seagulls wheeled and screeched and laughed.

Something hard was burrowing into her side – a rock, stained with gull shit, its bottom portion covered in algae. Tiny waves lapped at her feet, and crabs cautiously moved across the pebbled shore.

She was on a rocky beach, to the west of Z City, just outside the city limits. The sleek towers of Midtown glimmered far away, and closer there were the mostly derelict buildings of Bootheel.

She tried to pinpoint where she'd fought Kain and Sergei, but couldn't. No matter where exactly she'd fallen into the bay, she knew she'd drifted through the waters for quite a distance, unconscious, her lungs filled with water, the cold water sapping her body's strength.

“And you're still alive,” she rasped. “Guess I shouldn't worry too much about drowning after all....”

She tried to stand up, but her legs felt strange. Of course: she hadn't removed any of the arrows before she passed out.

Her arms had healed, however. She remembered how grotesque they'd looked after she'd escaped Kain's grasp. She ran her hands through her mangy hair just to make sure her limbs were fully functioning.

Her hair! Her mask was gone! Yes, she remembered now: Sergei had removed it, said he wanted to look into her true face as she died.

But if they'd seen her face...then....

With a grunt, she snapped off the tips of the arrows in her legs, then slid the shafts through. She repeated this process until all the arrows sticking from her body had been removed and tossed into the bay.

It had hurt, but the wounds were already closing. Deathrain still felt a weakness pressing against her, though, probably aftereffects from the whole ordeal. But she gritted her teeth and climbed over the rocks, looking for a trail or road she could follow back to Z City.

If they knew what she looked like, they could figure out she was Emily Bell. Sergei especially was an expert tracker, and was rumored to have a photographic memory.

She'd of course tried to separate Emily Bell from Deathrain, but Emily needed a photo ID, Emily had been seen out in the world by hundreds of people, and by cameras of all types.

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