Grimoire of the Lamb Read Online Free PDF Page A

bring down a human quickly, and they knew it. The knives scythed the space in front of me when they jumped, feline screams rent the early-morning air as they fell to the sides, and I kept running. I tried not to do any permanent damage; I was making quick slashes, never stabbing, and hoping that Bast would feel properly guilty about this later and help those that were injured.
    Deflect and maintain speed
, I told Oberon as he fell behind to shake ‘n’ snap a cat’s neck.
Killing isn’t necessary, and it takes too long. We don’t want the horde behind us to catch up
.
    
    How many are back there?
    Oberon whined.
    A tabby latched on to my left shoulder, and I spun around to launch him off me. He left deep gouges in my skin as the centrifugal force threw him into a wall, but those would heal. I couldn’t slow down. The spin gave me a brief glance of our pursuit, and I could see what had boggled Oberon’s mind. There were far more cats back there than anyone could handle. I fought the nascent scream of panic growing in my belly.
    We still had a quarter of a kilometer to go, and the cats weren’t thinning out. If anything, they were getting worse. I ducked a Siamese that screeched in dismay as it sailed over my head, then struck out with my right to knock down a portly Persian as I rolled my left shoulder back to let a Peterbald ping off my arm with nary a single claw’s scratch. The cats that tried to attack my legs were either kicked away or tossed aside as I churned ahead; my momentum was too great to be stopped by a ten-pound cat.
    There were more ahead of me, bounding in my direction. Perhaps more than I could plow through. Oberon was providing some protection on my right side, and I was glad he’d talked me into bringing him along. I might have already gone down if it weren’t for him.
    “Bast!” I shouted in Coptic. I didn’t know how to speak the truly ancient Egyptian language, but I felt reasonably sure she would understand the form of it commonly spoken untilthe seventeenth century. “I know you can hear me!” She’d identified my presence on the basis of one cat’s pair of eyes, so she’d have to be deaf if she couldn’t hear me through the ears of however many hundreds she had following me now.
    “We don’t have to do this! No more of your people have to get hurt! I can return what was stolen! Let’s stop and talk!”
    The cats didn’t stop coming, and I didn’t stop running or cutting them down as necessary. Oberon didn’t stop batting them away or snatching them out of the air and tossing them aside. That was all okay. The overture of diplomacy had been made. Bast was far too proud to answer right away.
    It was a mess of gore and screams for a while, my knives flashing in the wan light of a gray cloudless dawn. Lights began to flick on in the buildings we passed, slumbering citizens awakened by cries of rage and death and offering up Arabic WTFs in the still, dry air of their apartments. And then the Nile beckoned, black waters lying still without sufficient sun to light the ripples of the current, the stench of oil and untold shit rising from its surface instead of the fresh breath of life it used to be in ancient days.
    The juice ran out fifty meters from the riverbank and I slowed, lungs heaving and informing me in no uncertain terms that they hated me to dickfinity.
     Oberon asked.
    Keep going! We have to make it to the river!
    
    We can’t stop or we’re dead
.
    We had built up something of a lead on the horde, but they were closing fast and yowling victoriously now that they could see we had slowed. There were no more cats in front of us. They had all engaged us earlier,