Bulls Rush In Read Online Free PDF

hilt of the wakizashi was sticking from his back, but his shoulders and neck had become too wide to be flexible, and the blade had severed muscles. He lifted his head up to the sky and bellowed, began to change again, his body twisting and expanding in front of me. Flames licked over his frame, making the black fur look reddish.
    Samuel became a massive bull.
    And I ran for my life.
    Even injured, Samuel began to gain on me fairly quickly. The blade was keeping him from rotating his head, but basic forward motion was unimpaired. Only the fact that I was dodging between trees saved me, but I had planned on that. I could feel his breath on my back, a hot furnace blast that actually singed my cold, wet skin through the rain, his hooves shaking the ground so hard that it threatened to make me slip on the wet forest floor.
    So, I jumped. My foot hit the edge of the large grave I’d dug, and I propelled myself into the air, over the opening. Samuel’s eyes were lowered and he saw the trap at the last instant, but his front hooves skidded and collapsed the edge of the grave, his body dropping into the wide pit half-filled with water. The ground shook beneath my feet as Samuel’s head rammed into the opposing end of the slick pit with all of the power of his massive body behind it, momentarily stunning him and embedding his horns in the earth.
    I had time to run and grab the bucket of improvised liquid nitrogen after all. My katana was out and in my other hand when I carried the bucket back.
    *  *  *
    “Sam’s dead?” Jim Reedy’s voice was faint and no longer seemed to be coming from a specific direction. I couldn’t see his reflection in the surface of the picture any longer either.
    “Do you sense him anywhere?” I sounded tired. I just wanted to get the whole sad farce over with.
    There was no response, but I was getting used to that. I don’t know how long I sat there before Jim’s voice spoke again, even more faintly. I’m not sure I’d have heard it if I didn’t have better-than-normal hearing, but maybe I would. That voice wasn’t operating along the lines of normal physics. It just spoke one word. “Christina.”
    Christina? A wife, maybe? A daughter? A sister? A best friend? A drag name? I didn’t know much about Jim Reedy, and I knew even less about how to answer that question. “I’ll make sure your body is found if you can tell me where it is,” I said. “If the people who cared about you need closure or insurance money, that should help.”
    Nothing. I would have researched Jim Reedy more thoroughly before returning to the house, but I’d had no idea he was going to pop up like this.
    “It couldn’t hurt,” I added. “Can you feel anything with your skin? Do you know where your body is?”
    “Buried under the deck,” Jim’s voice said, and then he was gone. I knew he was gone. I felt a weight I couldn’t even begin to define lift. The weight wasn’t real, but it had been all the more intense for it. Nothing is heavier than a secret that needs to be revealed.
    And Jim Reedy died happily ever after.
    Or at least I hope so. I went back to cleaning or removing everything I’d touched until there was no sign that I’d ever been in that lonely house. As if I were a kind of ghost myself.
    *  *  *
    The bonfire I’d thrown Samuel’s body on was down to a bed of hot coals. His flesh didn’t burn, but I had known it wouldn’t. It had taken a long time to make that large a fire even after the rain had stopped, but I had plenty of dry tinder and kindling in the corner of my tent, and I am nothing if not stubborn. Even when I don’t know quite what I’m doing or why I’m doing it.
    I’ve killed some truly evil beings and slept deeply the same night. Hell, some of the messed up-things I’ve killed, I would have lost sleep if I’d left them alive. But Samuel wasn’t evil. Miserable, sure. Violent, yes, under the right or wrong circumstances, and selfish too, but who isn’t? And there