In Total Surrender by Anne Mallory Page B

him grew longer. Fine. Perfect. Whatever it took. He turned into the main thoroughfare. Citizens enveloped him on all sides, and he grimaced in distaste. It was always such when he first entered a crowd. But bodies automatically began shifting to the perimeter of the walk, and he strode through the middle with ease. People could feel the devil in their wake.
    He avoided looking at the faces of the hoi polloi around him. People going about their business. Some bemoaning their lot in life, others celebrating their good fortune. Watching them stare or flinch was always irritating, so he avoided making direct eye contact.
    But that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of them, as a body, a unit, individuals making up a sweeping tide. When someone wasn’t a part of that crowd, they stuck out. Eyes told much about a person, but in a crowd it was too easy to become distracted by the extra thoughts inevitably caused by meeting a person’s eyes. The way a body shifted never lied.
    And the man striding toward him, twitching just a few inches inside the vee of the crowd line that spread in front, might as well have been waving a red flag. The movements of the crowd slowed in Andreas’s view. Two steps away, the man’s arm moved out in a diminished line. One pace away, Andreas stepped into the man, caught his wrist and twisted it, embedding the man’s blade into the man’s own stomach using his forward momentum. Andreas let go, shifting his body forward again, and continued walking, the crowd closing behind.
    The screams didn’t start for another six seconds.
    It had been a short knife. The kind favored on the streets of York. One of Cornelius’s men most likely. And Cornelius, who ran the underworld of the northern countryside, wasn’t stupid. Which meant—
    Andreas pulled his head back just in time and grabbed the arm thrust in front of his neck. Thrust from the alley to the right. The fist glittered. He gripped the exposed wrist and pulled at the same time he thrust a palm against the man’s shoulder. A loud crack sounded. Pushing the openmouthed man away—no one could hear him scream over the racket of the crowd gathered back around the first fallen man—Andreas whirled into the alley and caught the arm of one of the men who approached from behind—shadows snapping back into the darkness.
    A quick move sent the man’s head into the wall. He fell to the ground without comment. Another man rushed in, trying to capitalize, sword thrusting forth. Sword ? What the—
    He dodged and twisted his body, flat steel sliding along the fabric over his midsection. He grabbed the man’s wrist and cracked a bone there. The man screamed, and the sword released. Andreas pulled his fingers up, smoothly removing it, and stepped back as the man fell to his knees.
    “I know who you are,” the man said hoarsely, clutching his broken wrist.
    Andreas didn’t show his tension, but he watched the man more carefully.
    “People call you the mastermind, the unnatural. ”
    Relief mixed with irritation. Andreas slid forward a step, knowing what the partial afternoon shadows would do to his particular features. Sharp and dark and strangely regal. Unnatural.
    “Am I?”
    The man hissed in a breath. “You have at least ten targets on your back. You won’t survive the day.”
    “And yet I’ve survived all the days thus far.”
    “You control the devil’s machine. And you will be destroyed along with it.”
    Ah, a zealot. With a sword. A sword. It was like rolling a cannon into a tavern fight.
    Though there were some of the Quality who still favored the weapon. For honor.
    Phoebe Pace’s world.
    It was a moment’s hesitation on top of his arrogance, but it was enough.
    The man lunged forward, and with his functioning hand, he thrust a knife into Andreas’s right leg. A final, desperate effort. Andreas looked down at the knife oddly sticking out, then looked at the man and smiled.
    The complete terror that action inspired was . . . always