Shadow Knight's Mate Read Online Free Page A

farther.
    â€œIt must be hard looking over your shoulder all the time like this. See people even when they’re not there. Actually, though, it’s a good mind-set for a game designer, if you think about it. Have you thought about coming up with a game based on your own situation?”
    At some point, Jack realized he was talking to himself.
    He hadn’t had much time to formulate a plan when he’d felt followed, but now enlisting Chun seemed not to have been as brilliant as he’d thought. The little gamer was so beset by genuine dangers that he would bolt at a sign like this, as he had done. His bodyguards had proven useless, too. Jack continued to walk, armed now only with a cell phone, and no one he knew could reach him in time.
    He passed a work table and quickly picked up a dowel rod, about an inch in diameter and two feet long. Jack slipped it up the sleeve of his coat. The rod was lightweight wood, but better than nothing.
    At first he had heard rustling around him. Now that sound was gone, as was much of the noise of the convention. Curtains that closed off this backstage area absorbed much of it. There were the sounds of moving footsteps and murmuring voices, and Jack even saw a handful of people, but all flitting so fast they didn’t seem to see him. He would have welcomed being challenged for a backstage pass and kicked out of here, but of course that didn’t happen, since he wanted it.
    He thought he heard the sound of a body falling, but that could have been only panic beginning to sing in his ears, painting its own scenario out of random noise.
    He turned a corner and suddenly there was the woman, right in front of him. Tall, blonde, slender, with a thin face and dark eyes focused laserlike on Jack. She wore a white business suit, the legs of which tightly wrapped her own. It would be made of some fabric that allowed her to move fast. Her hands were out in front of her in what, for all Jack knew, was the killing position of lao-tze.
    A person could have been caught in her gaze. Jack, though, immediately leaped to the side in the confined area. Sure enough, a foot shot through the space he had occupied a moment before. A bare foot in a blue pants leg. The man who’d been following Jack earlier had doffed his shoes and any pretense of being a member of the convention. When his kick missed its target he pivoted quickly, leg still upraised, bringing the same foot rapidly toward Jack’s nose.
    Six inches from its target, the foot hit the dowel rod Jack had slipped out of his sleeve. Jack cracked it smartly just where he had aimed, at the man’s ankle bone. He heard the contact, like a well-hit line drive.
    His attacker showed no response. His swinging foot missed Jack’s face, but the attacker landed on that foot and immediately leaped off it, coming toward his target again.
    â€œOh, shit,” Jack said, scrambling back. He had always thought these impervious-to-pain players were cheats in a game world, and he’d never imagined encountering one in real life. That smash on the ankle bone would hurt like hell, he was sure of that, but the man wouldn’t give into the pain until after this fight. After Jack was down and dead.
    So Jack’s dowel rod wasn’t going to be much help, except to fend off attack, but now the other man would be ready for that. The attacker stood for just a moment looking at Jack with a flat, dull gaze. Jack wondered if this staring at the opponent was a new form of martial arts. This man didn’t seem to be trying to hypnotize him. Maybe only to memorize him.
    No, it was a distraction. Even while the eyes remained on Jack, the man’s foot came at him again, this time directly upward. Jack stepped back and held the stick parallel to the ground, tightly in his two hands, hoping the foot would smash on it again. He held it perfectly positioned. The foot hit right in the middle of the stick.
    And broke through it, hitting Jack in