Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

or resin, but a misty swarm of shadows from the deepest woods on the coldest, darkest night.
    It was a scent she also knew, very well.
    No, it can’t be. This close, she could make out the boy’s eyes, dark and deep as pits behind that wolf-skin mask. He’s got the same eyes, the same scent. But that’s crazy, that’s—
    The knife hacked down with a whir.

5
    The heavy steel blade buried itself in snow with a meaty, muffled boomph. A quick lightning jag of heat and fresh pain streaked across her chest and blazed into her jaw. Her vision flashed dead-white, then fractured, turning jagged as a single great talon of pain dug. Yet there was a clarity in her mind, like a brilliant pane of clear glass, and she realized that while the pain was very bad, it was not the bright agony she expected if Wolf had just hacked off her arm.
    Her eyes inched left.
    Her arm was still there. So was her hand. But Wolf held a scrap of something drippy and wet and very red and—
    Oh my God. Her breath, bottled in her chest, came in a sobbing rush. What Spider had begun, Wolf had finished. Horrified, she could only watch as Wolf inspected a flap of parka and skin and dying muscle.
    Her muscle. Her heart was banging in her ears. Her flesh.
    With a delicate, almost comical daintiness, Wolf tweezed the shredded, bloody parka as if removing a scrap of butcher paper from a freshly carved steak. Then, palming snow, he swiped the meat clean of gore and held it high, studying that slab of her flesh with a curious, strained intensity, smoothing the skin with his thumb. Looking for . . . what? She couldn’t begin to imagine.
    Satisfied, although with what she couldn’t guess, Wolf threw her a quick, speculative look, and she had the insane thought that in another time and place, he might even have winked as if to say, Watch this.
    And then he offered her flesh to Beretta.
    Her gorge bolted up her throat. She gagged as Beretta teased the meat with his tongue, lapping her blood the way a kid licks the melt of an ice-cream cone. There was that queer, ripping sound of wet cloth again, and Beretta’s jaws worked and he began to chew.
    This isn’t happening; this can’t be happening. Numb, she watched as they ate, sampling her and licking their lips like those guys on Top Chef trying to decide if maybe the sauce needed a tad more salt. She felt her center skidding again. Soon she’d tumble off the thinning ice of her sanity altogether. Or maybe she’d just snap, her mind breaking like a dry twig, and start screaming. They’d have to cut her throat just to shut her up.
    Now that they were so close, she also made out those weird, colored rags. They weren’t single pieces but a patchwork sewn together with crude, irregular stitches that reminded her of Frankenstein’s monster.
    And the rags were not cloth.
    They were leather.
    They were skin.
    Those colors weren’t just colors either, but designs. A withered butterfly. A wrinkled coil of barbed wire. A tattered American flag. In the leather knotted around Wolf ’s throat, she made out a faded red heart and frank done in a fancy, black cursive swoop.
    Now she knew why Wolf had used snow to scrub blood from that flap of her skin. He was looking for a good tattoo. The Changed were wearing . . . people.
    Oh no no no no no oh God oh God oh God! A scream balled in her throat as Wolf took the last bit of her flesh and flipped back his cowl. So she saw his face. She got a very, very good look.
    No. Something shifted in a deep crevice of her brain. No. That’s not right . I’m wrong . I have to be.
    But she wasn’t. God help her, she wasn’t.

6
    The eyes were identical.
    So were the nose and the high plains of his cheeks. The face was a carbon copy. So was his mouth. Those lips were the twins of those that had pressed hers, and with a heat that fired a liquid ache in her thighs. The hair was longer but just as black. Even that shadowy scent was the same.
    The only difference—and it was huge, because it