4.
 Kanon moved along the streets almost like an unmen himself. Unconsciously he tried to imitate their wide, loping walk. The beamer on his chest not only repelled them, but made them think he was one of them. The EMF wavelength was the same as their territorial grunts and warning roars, but outside the human range of hearing.
He was about halfway to his target when he felt, too late, the sudden kill charge from behind him at left. The unmen male hit him, bringing him down, and just as quickly, while Kanon rolled over in a daze on the squishy muddy ground, raised a hairy arm to bring down a hand armed with two six-inch long claws. They'd gut Kanon from neck to groin in one sweep, and in thirty seconds the creature would eat the entrails still warm in the steaming bowl of his belly.
A long silvery object slid through the air like a thread and entered the unmen's hairy brown torso. The unmen froze for a full thirty seconds, arm upraised, claws out and ready—then it toppled over backwards.
A pale sylph emerged from the shadows. "Hurry, we have to get indoors!" Kanon rolled the dead, stinking unmen off, and rose, rubbing his aching sides. The unmen lay in a grotesque pose of death, a long slender arrow piercing its body.
"But who—?" he started to ask.
"Hurry!" she snapped again, dashing down a black alleyway.
Kanon followed her. She was a head shorter than he, boyishly thin. She held a small spear in one hand, and a bow in the other. A quiver of arrows jiggled on her shoulder as she ran. Kanon had to jog breathlessly to stay close, and even at this pace he could not help catching glimpses of his traveling companion. Her leather tunic was open at the sides, revealing small, firm white breasts and pink, budding nipples. Her arms were thin and bare and wiry. She wore a frilly skirt under her tunic. Her skirt ended just at knee level, revealing scarred knees and beautifully trim legs. Her calves were skinny and wiry. She wore boots and wool socks, with tiny gold chains on each ankle. Her hair was as pale as her skin, almost silver, and cut short in a rough pageboy. Her face, too, looked boyish except for a feminine softness around the mouth and under the eyes, which were gray as smoky water.
They spotted the next unmen a block ahead—a female much like the one Kanon had seen earlier. She stalked something amid the rubble at her feet—probably a rodent.
The woman grabbed Kanon and bundled him into another, even narrower and more fetid alley. They ran as fast as they could on the wet cobblestones, their breath steaming behind them in gasps. They spoke in fragments:
"Where we going?"
"Safety. Stay close."
"Your name?"
"Rin."
"Who are you?"
"On the run from the Authority."
He thought of the unmen. "You have courage."
"Unmen are stupid."
"Are there more of you?"
"Yes."
She pounded on a door. The men who admitted them were shadows, withdrawing into deeper shadows. "They don't want to be seen by you," Rin whispered. "They fear the Authority." They were in a hallway of some large, rambling structure. Everything was in stone here, hewn in large blocks piled together without mortar. "We're in one of the base corridors of a pyramid," Rin told him. "Stay be me. I'll be your sponsor. The others won't trust you because you may be poliz." She spoke with an odd, clipped accent, maybe underworld gypsy.
"Why do you trust me?"
"Just feel sorry for you. You were about to be eaten by an unmen. No poliz would be so dumb to go out at night and get caught like that. What kind of detective work would that be? Besides, I don't have a man just now."
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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