Invincible (A Centennial City Novel) - By Fionn Jameson
Prologue
“Don’t!”
My eyes stung from the blood.
“I’m begging you!”
As if I had any say in the matter.
My hand slipped further up the sword hilt and I clenched tighter. “I am sorry.”
But there is no answer to be got from a corpse.
Unseeing eyes stared upward at the dark, storm-tossed sky and rain continued to fall at a steady clip, the staccato of thunder almost in beat with my pulse. I reached down and wiped the sword blade on Henson’s jacket. He didn’t look like he needed it anytime soon. Clean, anyways.
The dead have little use for anything of the living.
Rain ran down my neck and I wiped at my temple, not even breathing heavily. It had taken long enough, but perhaps I had become an expert now.
An expert at killing.
“You’ve done well.”
I turned around slowly, hand on the scabbard as I slid the hwan-geom into its home strapped to my back. “Were you there the whole time?”
Adrian, sporting a perpetual five o clock shadow, nodded once and took his hands out of his leather coat pockets. “That’s one less Renfield we’ll need to worry about. Good clean kill.”
I took it as a compliment. “Thank you.”
He hunkered down on his haunches and snapped the small necklace off Henson’s scrawny neck. “I’ll be taking this then. Don’t need anyone knowing who he is, eh?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not really,” he said, straightening up to his full height of six-three. At that height, he was only a couple inches taller than I was. There weren’t many women who were as tall as I was, but then again, there weren’t a great deal of them in the same trade. This was one job in which height presented quite the advantage. “But it’ll be instant proof we got the bastard. Besides, I’d rather we had it rather than the cops. Who knows what they’d dig up with this as an identification piece.”
I shrugged. “As you wish.”
“I swear, one day you’ll say more than three syllables to me” he said with a shake of his unruly head. “Never mind, then. Are you hungry? I know a nice place. They make burgers that melt in your mouth and onion rings that taste like manna. Not butter burgers, though. Those things are terrible. Just looking at one makes my cholesterol go up.”
My stomach growled at the suggestion. I don’t think I would have minded burgers cooked in a vat of butter. “Thank you.”
Laughing just a bit under his breath, Adrian Hampton walked out of the blood-slicked alleyway.
I followed.