Vicious Grace by M. L. N. Hanover Page B

and flew for a second, backward and down. I landed on both feet and one hand, our opponent’s broad back in front of me. He tried to turn, but I jumped forward, driving the heel of my palm right about where his left kidney was.
    He grunted once and went down like a sack of flour.
    Kim was still getting to her feet. I tried to call out to her, to ask if she was all right, but my throat didn’t respond; the wards and protections were driving, and my body was not yet my own. It took half a second to understand why. The red-haired man had been the fastest, but the others were coming. The low rumble of their feet was like a small earthquake. From the opposite direction, an older man in a white lab coat walked toward the elevators, saw me, saw Kim and the groaning man on the floor. His eyes widened, and he backpedaled fast. Smart cookie. The mob rounded the corner.
    Seven of them ran toward me, mouths in square gapes of rage. When they saw me, they started screaming together, one voice from all their throats. The blond woman who’d come out of the patient’s room leaped for Kim. I shifted forward to protect her, but the others were on me. I kicked hard into someone’s knee, feeling it give way. An elbow got me in the ribs, but not hard enough to break them. A man in a nurse’s uniform lifted me by my shirt and the waist of my jeans like he was going to throw me. I brought my knee up into his jaw and my palm down on the bridge of his nose. His blood spattered my belly, and he dropped me.
    I caught a glimpse of Kim wrestled to her knees by the blond woman. A dark-skinned man with a salt-and-pepper beard drove his shoulder into my gut, pushing me back by main force. I dropped my elbow into his neck, and three new attackers rounded the corner. Watching from the still space behind my eyes, I was afraid for Kim, I was afraid for the men and women boiling out of the cardiac ward with murder in mind, but from the moment the red-haired man fell, I wasn’t worried about myself. I’d fought riders before, and they didn’t go down this easy.
    A man threw a clipboard at my face, and I knocked it away as I dodged one of the new women’s kicks. I sank my foot into the soft of a fat man’s belly, his breath gusting out as he collapsed. Someone grabbed me from the back. When I dropped, turning into them, and brought my foot down on their instep hard enough to crunch, the grip at my neck went slack.
    They were fighting, but they were fighting like people: fragile, untrained, inflamed with anger, but not technique or supernatural power. I put my faith in Eric’s protections, and my body danced around the blows as I worked my way toward Kim. More of the mob’s reinforcements came, but each group that arrived seemed weaker and slower than the last. The people who couldn’t run as well catching up. I started to wonder if the cardiac patients would show up too, throwing IV stands and catheter bags at me.
    I got to Kim’s side as the elevator behind us chimed, a red down-pointing arrow glowing. My fist sank deep into the blond woman’s throat, and I lifted Kim up. Her hair was tangled, and a trickle of blood marked her hairline.
    “I’m okay,” Kim said. The elevator doors slid open. An elderly woman in a wheelchair and a girl who must have been her granddaughter started to come out, then hesitated. There were a dozen bodies on the floor, either unconscious or incapacitated and groaning. I pushed Kim into the elevator car past the wheelchair and turned back. Five of the mob were struggling to their feet, chests rising and falling together, and none of them coming close enough to make a real attack.
    As the doors closed, they screamed. Frustration, anger, despair. The sound of a predator whose prey has just made it down the rabbit hole. I sagged against the wall, my body my own again. I felt bruised and spent and jittery. Kim was on her feet, wiping at the trail of blood on her face, her efforts smearing the mess more than cleaning it.