Laura Anne Gilman Read Online Free PDF

maybe-cannibal tricks or mind games. “Look, I don’t know what the hell game you’re playing, or what this has to do with Tyler, who by the way is a bastard and you can tell him that next time you see his skanky ass, but—”
    Black Nails interrupted her. “Is there somewhere we can go, somewhere, private, to talk?”
    “Are you kidding me? I’m not going off anywhere private with you two,” she said, her voice rising enough that people might have taken notice, if they weren’t all carefully not paying attention.
    “Oh, for the love of Pete...” Hoodie-guy slapped his hands on his knees, the noise making her jump slightly. “Listen, we don’t have time for this. There’s no way we weren’t noticed, following you, and—”
    The bus went over a particularly bad pothole and jolted them out of their seats. Something scraped along the bottom of the bus, making both guys flinch. Jan tried to use the distraction to get up, get away, but Black Nails grabbed her again, hauling her back, pulling her toward the back exit.
    “We have to go now, ” he said.
    “What?” She tried to free herself, but his grip was painfully strong. Should she scream? Would the bus driver help her? There were reports of drivers who didn’t do anything, even when someone screamed, but those had to be urban legends, right? Stuff that only happened in big cities, not here, not—
    “Off the bus, now!” Black Nails sounded worried suddenly, and that scared her all over again, although she couldn’t have said why. The bogeyman of my enemy is still a bogeyman?
    The one with the messed-up face had already pulled the yellow cord that called for a stop, and the bus driver was jockeying through traffic to pull to the side at the end of the next block, even as she was being yanked toward the exit.
    “What are you— No!” She finally pulled away, drawing breath to scream, when Hoodie-guy glanced at the back of the bus and swore. Jan couldn’t help herself; she looked, too. The bus jolted again, there was another shrieking noise underneath, as if the bus had run over something sharp and metallic. Then the metal floor buckled once, twisting weirdly, as if it was melting. The old man stared at it, then looked away, and Jan wondered if she were hallucinating...except the guys hauling her out kept looking back, worried, too, hands flat against the door, waiting for the bus to stop so they could get out.
    “What is—” she started to ask, about to pull herself loose from their grip and tell the bus driver something was wrong, when the floor buckled one last time, and something shoved its way through, a long arm with small fingers, skin the gray-white of old bread streaked with mold, stretching as though to grab at whatever rested above.
    Right where she would have been sitting.
    Suddenly, getting off the bus seemed like a damn good idea.
    The hand sank below the metal again, the fingers creeping around the opening, as though searching for something. Or someone.
    “Off,” Black Nails said, and with a shove from behind, they were out, even before the bus had come to a stop, and the three of them were standing on the street. “Keep moving,” he said, and pulled her forward, away from the curb. “Don’t look back.”
    Jan felt her chest clench and grabbed her inhaler out of her pack, even as they walked too quickly for her comfort. “What...what was that?”
    The other one, the one with the snout, answered. “A turncoat.”
    “A what?” Her fingers curled around her inhaler, and she took a hit from it, feeling her chest ease slightly.
    “A—” He growled, and this time it was a definite growl, the skin on her arms pricking again with goose bumps. “There’s no time, now. They’ll figure out we’re gone in a minute: we have to get you somewhere safe.”
    “But...the others on the bus...” Jan waved her free hand vaguely back at the street. “We can’t just—”
    “Once you’re gone, it’ll leave, too. The damage will be blamed