Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(46)

I am moving. My own gun is free, gripped two-handed as I run forward. I must scream, because he turns toward me. His jaw slack and his eyes wide with surprise.

I am Living Arrow and I don’t hesitate. I don’t second-guess myself. I don’t worry about being a monster.

I pull the trigger. Once, twice, five times altogether.

Each time putting a bullet into Longarm’s face.





Chapter 20


Shaking. My hands are shaking.

With adrenaline and rage. But fear, too. The suffocating fear that I am too late.

I slide to my knees at his side. Rest trembling fingers on his neck. His skin is painted red with blood, and my hand comes away sticky with it. But his pulse is strong.

“Kai.” I shake him gently. I dab at his face with the edge of my sleeve, trying to clear away the bloody mess around his nose and mouth in order to ease his breathing. He’s got something stuck in his mouth, and I ease his lips apart to remove his tie. Silvery blue stripes. Longarm had stuffed it down his throat.

I shudder. I work to hold on to some of the clarity and fury of Living Arrow, but my clan power has fled.

“You’ve got to wake up, Kai. We’ve got to move.” I shake him again, this time harder. He makes a sound. Heaves and coughs as he pulls air into his deprived lungs, and then instinctively tries to curl his knees up to his body, huddling into himself.

“No, no.” I pull at his shoulders, try to straighten him out. He’s too weak to fight me. I use the tip of my knife to break open the handcuffs and try to lift him by his arms. But he’s dead weight, and the loss of adrenaline has left me without the strength I need to move him. I freeze, sure I hear footsteps. Nothing. But I know it’s only a matter of time before someone finds us.

Bile rises in my throat and panic threatens to crest over and drown me. I force it down. Focus on the here and now.

I need to move Kai. Get us both out of sight before more Law Dogs come to see why Longarm hasn’t come back. Longarm. I spare a glance over my shoulder. What’s left of the Law Dog lies crumpled in a heap a few feet away, his face little more than raw meat.

I expect to feel some emotion at seeing him like that, seeing what I’ve done, but I don’t expect to feel satisfaction. Longarm’s words from yesterday fill my ears. Maybe you shouldn’t be hunting monsters. Maybe someone should be hunting you.

“Mags?” Kai’s eyes are open, bare slits.

I swallow, school the grin of relief trying to break across my face. “Can you move?” I ask him.

He nods, small and weak, but it’s a nod. Together we get him to his feet.

“We’ve got to get back to the truck,” I say. “You need a doctor, and we need to get as far away from here as possible.”

He makes a grunting sound that I take for a “yes.”

“If I can get you out of town, I know a place we can lay low for a while. Get you looked at. Figure out what happened to Tah, if he’s okay. But we—” I stop. Kai’s looking behind me. I know what he sees. I wait for him to recoil in horror. To demand to know how I could have done such a thing. To look at me and see the monster.

His eyes are wide, his face ghost-pale and blood-smeared. He swallows big. “Go,” he says, gingerly lifting his arm so I can slip under to hold him up.

We make it ten feet before he turns his head and vomits. I hold him while he heaves, again and again, until his stomach is empty and he’s reduced to a wet painful panting. I wait as long as I think is safe, conscious that every second we stand here is another second we’re exposed.

“We’ve got to move, Kai.”

He nods again and immediately shudders. “My head,” he slurs, his tongue thick and clumsy.

“You probably have a concussion,” I say, pushing him forward on shuffling feet. “Nausea is common, dizziness, memory loss.” I tick off the symptoms. “Totally normal.”

“Not the dead guy’s face making me sick?” he says, laughing weakly. A laugh that turns into a harsh cough and ends in a gagging noise. He works to catch his breath.

I grin, irrationally grateful for his morbid joke. “Just keep your feet moving, okay?”

We start up our awkward shuffling again. I catch a glimpse of my truck parked on the side of the road just two hundred yards away. Two hundred yards that stretch before us like two thousand.



I’ve opened the passenger’s side door and am helping Kai in when I hear the first shouts. Every muscle twitches, wanting me to look up, to confirm that they’ve found Longarm’s body and that they have noticed us. But I keep my head down and hurry over to slide into the driver’s side, mindful of not drawing attention.

I start up the engine and pull onto the road. Safely behind the wheel and moving, I allow myself to glance back at the scene we left only minutes ago. I can make out figures in khaki uniforms. There is noise and movement and a sense of alarm as they hover over Longarm’s body. I don’t allow myself to rubberneck, but instead face forward and try to blend in with the traffic on the road. I turn onto Highway 264 and drive past the northbound turn that goes back to Crystal, instead heading east into the Checkerboard Zone, the one place in Dinétah where Law Dogs don’t have any jurisdiction.

Kai’s slumped against the door. His eyes are shut, mouth slack, breathing shallow. I shake him to wake him up. “No sleeping with a head injury,” I warn him.