Shadows Read Online Free PDF

flicked to the others. They were all standing there, mouths open, tongues writhing, drinking her in. A scream bubbled in her throat, and she felt her breath coming faster and faster. No, don’t. She muscled herself under control. This is what they want; they want you to panic; come on, don’t lose it, don’t lose it!
    Wolf edged closer. She could feel the hum of his anticipation; saw it in the set of his body, smelled his need on the air, read it in the way his gaze roved as if undressing her with his eyes. His was hunger and more: it was possession, deep and primal and sensual and awful in its power. He wants me, and he’ll have me, he’ll—
    And that was when something very, very strange happened. For just the briefest of moments, something so fleeting it was more an impression than an actual thought, an image swam into her brain—of her, stretched on the snow, clothes gone, and Wolf, crouching over her body, his tongue dragging over every inch of her skin—and she felt when his hands feathered down and between her—
    No! Gasping, she cringed away, both from the scene playing itself out in her mind and this boy. Get out of my head, get out of my head! In the next instant, her mind seemed to snap back with a shock as physical as a slap. Her awareness sharpened to a laserbright focus, and as she came back to herself, she felt her fingers clamped on icy bone.
    And then the skull cupped in her right palm moved. “Aahhhh!” Her shriek was wild, inarticulate, enraged. Wolf ’s arm was already coming up, steel flashing in the early light, but she had the skull now, was swinging with all she had left, thinking, Hit him, and when he drops the kni—
    Something slammed against her right temple. The blow was so vicious, so stunning, Alex’s mind blanked and stuttered the way a bad CD skips a track. She went down like a stone, the skull tumbling from her nerveless fingers. Through a swirl of pain, she saw Slash, the girl with the scar, standing over her, a cocked fist ready to strike again.
    Even if Alex could have fought back, Acne never gave her the chance. He dropped onto her legs. A moment later, Slash straddled her chest and ground her knees into Alex’s shoulders. A surge of white-hot pain flooded her chest, and Alex let out an agonized shout as Slash forced Alex’s wounded left arm to straighten, tacking Alex’s wrist to the snow with both hands.
    Wolf loomed. He made sure she saw the knife, too. But it was when he drew back and she saw where he stood and read the tilt and angle of his body that Alex finally understood what would happen next.
    He wasn’t going to kill her, not yet. Oh no. Too easy. Too quick. First, he would chop off her arm.
    God, no, no ! Her heart boomed. Frantic, she heaved and surged, but it was a waste of energy. The others were too heavy. She was pinned, and this was how it was going to end: in the snow, arms and limbs hacked away, her body emptying her life in a hot red river that would melt through the snow until there was nothing more for her heart to pump. She’d done enough amputations with Kincaid to know that you had to clamp off those arteries fast before they could spring back into muscle, or else you might as well just cut the poor guy’s throat. But what if the Changed were so good at this that they knew which arteries to pinch? What if they kept her from dying fast and made her linger, carving her up, eating her alive, one juicy, quivering mouthful at a time? She might last a long, long time, because she didn’t think anyone could die from pain. Maybe, for them, watching her suffer was part of the fun.
    The corn knife flashed before her eyes. In her terror, the blade seemed a foot long and then ten feet and then a mile. Her vision was so keen that she picked out every nick, every scar where that razor-sharp edge had bitten into bone. The sewage stink of the Changed mushroomed and swelled—
    And then she smelled something else, just behind that roadkill reek: not turpentine