Silent Warrior Read Online Free

he’s pissed as all hell.”
    Hark grinned, feeling bold and way too reckless. “Step out of the way, or this gets as ugly as the lot of you. My current favorite thought is crushing your pelvis and both femurs.” He met the Pendray named Konnor face-to-face. “Then . . . you’d be shorter than me because you’d be confined to a wheelchair. I’ll apologize now in case I don’t have the chance later—you know, when I’m laughing too much.”
    “How the hell do you expect to do that?”
    “I hid a nighnor in the alley. It’s the best. Who doesn’t love a skull encased in iron? It’s the weapon that keeps on giving for about three thousand years.” He shook his head sadly. “Those poor Egyptian slave bastards.”
    “In the alley.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Outside the door I’m standing in front of?”
    “You have a keen grasp of spatial dynamics.”
    “And how are you going to get there, you thieving little fuck?”
    “Dragon damn, you’re thick.” Hark glanced at the quiet woman, who had raised her brows in obvious interest. For her, that was practically flirting. “I just went four hundred rounds with this wild child, and we’re growing very angry .”
    The Pendray growled with an animalistic power that began to coalesce in Hark’s bloodstream. A cloud of silken gray mist was gathering at the corners of his vision. He grinned when the woman adjusted her shield. Very nice. Defensive. Ready to do awesome, violent things. The best part was how her smile was broader now. That was like calling one tear a river, but it was a smile nonetheless.
    “Anyway, I want a steak,” Hark said, ticking off the list. “A bed. This woman in bed with me. And I want a really good long fuck. So, I could rip your powers from your head while she castrates your buddies here. Or you can shrink away like teeny tiny cowards. Either way, let’s get on with it. She’s gonna be much harder work than the lot of you. I might need all night.”
    The man had a fast swing. Hark would admit that. More like, he had to give him that after one punch sent him sprawling.
    He rubbed his jaw, which hurt like a motherfucker, and laughed. Dragon damn, he loved making people lose control. Nothing better in the world.
    That included sex. After all, what was sex but losing control?
    However, a couple serious beatings hadn’t been on his agenda for the evening—if he was ever so stupid as to make agendas. Konnor drew back his leg. The kick was stopped dead with the clunk of heavy leather against metal. Boot against shield. The woman followed up the defensive move with a spin that landed her on the offensive. She caught one man after another across the mouth. The jagged shark-tooth serration made them very ugly and very bloody in short order.
    From his position on the ground, Hark took a deep breath and let his gift take over. He became a Thief, which meant he gathered the Pendray’s berserker rage into every cell. Vaulting from the barroom floor, he landed square against Konnor’s chest. Momentum propelled them through the exit. They collided body to body on the brick alley. Hark scrambled away and stood. He never lied about something as precautionary as keeping his nighnor within reach of a gangbang-waiting-to-happen. People didn’t believe him because the ancient weapons were so rare, and because he sounded like a man prone to bluffing rather than brawling.
    Too bad for them.
    The skull felt right in his hand. Solid. Heavy. Deadly.
    Konnor took one look at it and stumbled back, then loped down the alley.
    “Toldja,” Hark said to himself, most satisfied by having broken the man’s pride.
    The gray haze of Konnor’s rage obscured the neon techno-glitz of a thousand signs in Chinese and English, which advertised everything from ice to underage boys. Nothing in Kowloon was ever dark, which was a fine, fine thing.
    He hated the dark.
    Standing in the doorway with a different smile—perhaps genuine amusement—the woman watched him with her