Mercy Read Online Free PDF Page A

another.
    The woman tripped, falling on her face. She was feisty, trying to run, but Krishani felt another gunshot hit her back and she flopped like a fish out of water. For Krishani it was like riding a bull. She twisted and heaved, her eyes spilling tears. She screamed, muttering in Arabic about her family. Krishani recognized the dialect and the cadence of the syllables. He didn’t try to calm her; it was better when they died in a fit of anger and this woman was livid. She pounded the ground and intensified her own pain as the hand of death washed over her. Krishani didn’t like it but most of them prayed in their final moments. He recognized the familiar prayer, having spent months in the same area, stalking the grounds, waiting day after day for bombs to go off. When it was done he didn’t let go. There was no salvation for the weak, and hunger won out against mercy. If it wasn’t him it would be one of the others.
    No escape.
    She pinched her eyes shut when it happened and as Krishani rose out of the body he tried to take a breath only to be run roughshod by two men, one who was fully alive and another that wasn’t. Familiar pain ran over him in waves, but with every soul it was worth it. Tiny pieces of this man’s memory embedded into his form. Thousands of years, thousands of memories crowded his form.
    The fighting continued but Krishani found himself on the ground, inside the writhing bodies of the dying. In the dark ages he’d wait until the whole village was slaughtered before taking a soul, but Ambrose came, and Jenima and Noelle and it became impossible. They blessed villages before death found them.
    Cheaters.
    Krishani found if he wanted a soul it was better to live inside it like a parasite until it died. The Ferrymen and the Valkyries couldn’t have it if he was there first.
    He stumbled in the body he was in, reaching the edge of the village, squinting at the horizon. When he was in a body, the original host had control. He couldn’t make the man do anything. This one wasn’t injured but he was in the open, being really stupid. Screeches from the herd pulled Krishani out of his stupor and he left the man, unable to hang on while the man contemplated his escape plan through an unforgiving desert. Even the cottonwoods were dying, their gangly roots dried and cracked from the root up.
    Krishani felt them in the air, nearly finished with the village. A few men cowered inside a tent beside him while the men from the khaki truck approached, guns aimed. Krishani felt the urge in his bones and snaked around them, causing a chill to race through them. Bullets pierced the nothingness of his self-contained storm and hit the men in the tent. Eight more gunshots rang out and Krishani devoured every one of their souls, lapping up wispy white smoke like water.
    He stumbled a bit, drunk on white matter and clenched his fist, joining the swarm and following them to the next cesspool of the sick and dying.
    O O O
    Hospitals were not Krishani’s forte. A blinding pain mushroomed across his form as he shifted, making himself look as human as possible. It didn’t make much of a difference, but in a hospital, there was a chance someone could see him. He smoothed icy black wisps of energy into combat boots and a long black trench coat, pitch-black arms, fingers, an abyss for a face, the illusion of slicked back hair. He felt them, souls on the brink of letting go, modern medicine singing in their veins like poison Krishani recoiled from. Those liquid solutions and powdery pills kept people alive long after their expiration date. Krishani breathed it in, savoring the saccharine smell of souls. He almost forgot why he was there in the first place. On the white matter of eleven souls he could live comfortably for days, maybe even weeks, following the herd was only a necessity, one he would forgo if he could possess a body for longer than seconds.
    He would have possessed the man trying to escape the Koochi tents in the