Guardians of the Portals Read Online Free PDF Page B

safety being released, but he couldn’t pinpoint the exact location. He grabbed the woman’s arm and urged, “Run!”
    They took the narrow stairs two at a time, while Trey frantically encoded the sequence to open the gate. He felt rather than heard the pounding of at least four men behind them. Two more steps and they would be home free.
    The woman gasped, “I can’t...” as shots rang out. He grabbed her about the waist and hurtled through the gate.
    ****
    “W here are we?” the woman gasped.
    “Huh, good question. Put pressure ... here.”
    She winced but did as instructed. The bleeding had stopped for the moment, but he was sure the bullets had nicked an artery or vital organ. There was no exit wound so the metal lay somewhere in her innards.
    “Are you in pain?”
    The woman grunted, “Call me Kathleen. And no, but I can’t feel much below my waist.”
    “I have to get those out and I don’t have any tools. Just this.” Trey held up his stiletto, then lowered it quickly at her panicked stare.
    Eyes flicking from the stiletto to his face, the woman asked, “What do you want?”
    Trey busied himself with clearing a spot on the forest floor. They’d landed in old growth forest, possibly somewhere in the American northwest. He’d done an ET-phone-home without using precise co-ordinates. They were lucky he hadn’t plopped them in the middle of an erupting volcano.
    “Want?”
    “Why did you bring me here?”
    “Lady, what part of ‘I saved your ass’ don’t you appreciate?”
    “You could have left me there.”
    “Yeah, right, and they’d have been all over you for details of our layout. What do you think would have happened once they’d wrung every piece of information out of you? Come on. You’re smarter than that.”
    She gasped as Trey pulled the piece of cloth away from the wounds. They were spaced close together, three holes, all angled toward her spine. He had a bad feeling he knew why there were no exit holes. Odds were good at least one or more bullets got lodged in her spine.
    “How do my powers...” she sucked in air, frantically trying to stifle a cough; blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth.
    “You are a shape shifter. Maybe not full blown, but good enough that your DNA would be of use to both us and Greyfalcon.” She arched her brows, unable to form the question. “That’s what they’re called, at least in our dimension.”
    She gasped, “So you both want me for my glamour.”
    “Basically, yeah; other things, too. But I’m not a scientist and I don’t really give a fuck about that stuff. I just do my job.”
    “Which is?”
    “I take out the trash.”
    Kathleen considered his words carefully, her brows knit in understanding. She didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to know she was royally screwed. Neither side was going to let her loose, so other than him she had no allies.
    He had to lean close as the woman whispered, “I went to Greyfalcon to bargain for my husband’s life. Offered myself in exchange.” She coughed up blood-tinged spittle. “They made the usual promises. I knew enough not to buy any of it but since they seemed willing to bargain, I figured I had nothing to lose.”
    That had the ring of truth, but only a partial truth. The woman held something back.
    “How did your husband get to be so important to...” he almost let slip ‘my father’ but choked it back in time. He had no idea how many people were privy to the particulars about what made up their clan’s internal structure.
    Taking shallow breaths, clearly in pain, she rasped, “Jake ran the arms side. Made sense. It was what he did when he was...” A small moan escaped her throat. He clasped her hand, desperately tracing the neural pathways, seeking some means to send healing energy into her battered body. She continued each word punctuated with twitches of agony. “He got old and they took his position away. He couldn’t bear that. It wasn’t him. So they gave him something