Stalking a time traveler is hard work, even if you are one.
Especially when said traveler totally has you made. “Can
we talk?” I screamed as I dodged behind a column to avoid
a spray of bullets.
The woman hunting me through the cellar slung her
flashlight beam in my direction. “Sure,” she said amiably. “Hold still for a second.”
Yeah, right.
My name is Cassie Palmer and a lot of people think I’m
not the sharpest pencil in the box. My strawberry blond hair,
which usually resembles Shirley Temple’s in a windstorm, is
part of the reason. My blue eyes, slightly pudgy cheeks and
tip-tilted nose might be another, except that most men’s
gazes never make it up that far. But dumb blonde or not,
even I wasn’t buying that one.
My own weapon—a new 9 mm Beretta—was crowding
the waistband of my jeans and poking me insistently in the
hipbone. I ignored it. Years from now, the woman with the
gun would leave a little message that would save my life. I
kind of wanted her to be around to write it. Not to mention
that shooting people is a good way to ensure that they don’t
want to talk to you, and we really needed to have a chat.
“When did the Guild start employing women?” she de
manded, getting warmer.
I stayed utterly still, pressed against the back of one of
the wooden columns holding up the roof. As hiding places
go, it pretty much sucked, but there weren’t a lot of alternatives. The cellar’s walls were stone, except for areas that
had been patched with brick. The ceiling was wood and flat,
I guess because it served as the floor of the building above.
And that was it, except for a few old barrels, some mildew
and a lot of dark.
Even empty, the place was big enough that she’d have
trouble finding me if I stayed silent. On the other hand,
it was going to be tough for us to have a conversation if I
never said anything. “Look, you’ve obviously mistaken me
for”
I began, only to have the wall behind me peppered
with bullets.
Stinging particles of brick and old mortar exploded out
at me, and a few must have grazed my cheek because I felt
a trickle of blood start to slide down my neck. The stillness
after the gunfire made my ears ring and my nerves jump,
and my hand instinctively closed over my gun. I dragged it
back. I wasn’t here to shoot her, I reminded myself sternly.
Although the idea was growing on me.
“I thought you guys were a bunch of misogynistic assholes with delusions of grandeur,” she taunted.
I stayed stubbornly silent, which seemed to piss her off. A
couple bullets thwacked into the wood at my back, shaking
the column. I bit my lip to stay quiet until I felt something
like a firm pinch on my left butt cheek. A second later, the
pinch blossomed into white-hot
pain.
My searching hand came back damp and sticky with
streaks that looked black in the almost nonexistent light.
I stared at it incredulously. I hadn’t been here ten minutes
yet, and I’d already been shot in the ass.
“You shot me!”
“Come out and I’ll make the pain stop.”
Yeah permanently.
She paused to reload and I scurried behind a nearby
barrel. As cover went, it wasn’t much of an improvement,
forcing me to hunker down against the cold, filthy floor to
stay out of sight. But at least vulnerable bits of my anatomy
weren’t poking out past the sides.
I explored the gash in the back of my jeans. The bullet
had only grazed me what Pritkin, my war mage partner,
would call a flesh wound. He’d probably slap a Band-Aid
on it and tell me to stop whinging whatever that meant after
he finished shouting at me for getting shot in the first
place. But it hurt.
Of course, it would hurt a lot more if she shot me again.
I peered over the top of the barrel, hoping to talk some
sense into her while she was temporarily unable to kill me.
Instead, my attention was caught by movement near the
stairs. The dim glow of her flashlight gleamed off the barrel
of a semiautomatic that had reached out of the dark. That
was a problem since we were currently in 1605 and that
type of gun hadn’t been invented yet.
Even worse, it was aimed at her head.
“Behind you!”
She didn’t hesitate. The flashlight went skittering across
the stones, distracting the shooter, who blasted the hell out
of it while she disappeared into shadow. One of the bullets
went astray and hit a small wooden cask. It looked harmless, but it must have contained the equivalent of a few
sticks of TNT. Because a deafening explosion was followed
by a ball of orange flame smashing against the ceiling.
Fire rained down everywhere, including onto the shooter’s hand and arm. The gun hit the floor and a man danced
out of the stairwell, beating at the flames with his bare
hands and shrieking. He also dropped a lantern that spun
across the stones in lazy parabolas, lighting him up intermittently, like a strobe.
He was a tall, lanky blond, with horsey features half hidden by a floppy hat. He wore a long dark vest, knee pants
and a puffy shirt that was quickly going up in smoke. He
managed to get the flames out by flinging off the vest and
ripping open the shirt, revealing a pale torso and some
singed chest hair. He bent to retrieve his fallen gun, and a
bullet sheared off more hair, this time from the top of his
head.