Shadows Read Online Free Page A

question. The Changed might read each other, but they could not read her.
    Breaking from her paralysis, Spider brought the corn knife up and around in a wide, curving arc. At the very last second, Alex flicked her wrist and changed her line of attack, driving for Spider’s chest now instead of her face. Spider tried to adjust, but momentum was her enemy now. The corn knife whizzed past and sliced only air.
    Alex bulleted into her. The blunt curve of the hook speared Spider’s chest, dead-center and hard enough that Alex felt the impact shiver up her arm and ball in her shoulder. Spider let out a loud ungh , and then she was backpedaling, trying to bring the knife down again. Alex saw the blade coming, and she uncoiled, swinging the pack in a deadly roundhouse, the weight of it like a heavy stone. Her eyes never left the corn knife, and she had just enough time to think how lucky she was that the blade wasn’t double-edged.
    There was a hollow thud as the pack hammered the girl’s chin. Spider’s head snapped back, and then the girl was spinning away in a swirl of blonde hair and wolf skin. Off-balance, Alex tried to pivot, but the tamped snow was slick. She felt the slide start; fought to regain her balance but couldn’t find it. The snow blurred, rushed for her face as she fell, the hook driving into hard pack. The snow had some give but not a lot, and she screamed as the impact shuddered through bone and wrenched her right shoulder. She lost her grip on the hook, and then she was gasping, on her side: left hand still knotted in her pack; her right hand on fire, the wrist singing with pain, the fingers already numb. Oh God, oh God, is it broken, did I break it . . . where’s Spider, where . . .? She pulled in a frantic, sobbing breath. Her right elbow bawled; she couldn’t move her fingers. Broken or cracked or maybe the nerves, and oh God, where is Spider, where is she?
    Her head swirled with panic and pain. Both nearly killed her. As it was, she only just felt the attack coming, sensed it before she knew what was happening: a shuffle, the scuff of a boot in snow, a sudden rush of air. She snatched her head back just in time to catch a blur of white and black.
    Spider: on her feet, rearing up, looming. Her lips curled, baring teeth that seemed very white and impossibly sharp. That girl could tear a person’s throat out with those teeth.
    Where’s the knife, where’s the knife, where is it? Her eyes jerked to Spider’s right hand. Empty. Nothing there, no knife, no knife, where is it? Had she dropped it? But Spider’s stance was all wrong; she was leading with her right shoulder, shuffling forward, her silver eyes flitting to a spot behind and to Alex’s right. What? The knife was behind her? Alex started to crane around for a peek. If I can get to it first—
    Then she thought, Wait, leading with her right. She gasped. Left hand . . . she switched hands!
    Screeching, Spider brought the corn knife down in a vicious, left-handed chop. For a split second, all Alex could do was watch that blade come—and then, at the very last second, shock let her go. Releasing her pack, Alex snatched her left arm out of the blade’s line and tried to roll. The blade cleaved air with a whistle, swishing past her ear to cut snow, the steel so close that Alex smelled the lingering copper of old blood and even the ghost of sweat from the farmer who’d once hacked at thick, stubborn stalks in September when the harvest was done.
    Alex had the luxury of a half-second to think: Close.
    And then there was pain, a lot of it, ice and fire roaring up her throat to crash out in a shriek. Twisting, she saw the corn knife buried up to the handle—and blood spraying a crimson starburst. Spider’s knife had sliced a long strip of skin and meaty muscle that now dangled in a grotesque flap from Alex’s left shoulder. Spider’s face, drippy with blood, swam into view, and then Alex saw the knife coming up again—
    “No!” Still turtled on