Broken Warrior (The Weavers Circle 1)

And for once, the sense of panic didn’t return. The need to keep moving was absent. Clay could rest.A rat.

Had to be a really big rat.

Lying in the bed, he rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to wake up. When he could focus, he blinked at the alarm clock on the nightstand. 4:17 glared in red digital numbers. Longer than he’d thought.

The scratching had drawn him from sleep. There were no other sounds in this slice of nowhere. No cars. No wildlife. Not even the hum and crash of the distant ice machine running through the night.

The scratching shifted to metal on metal. Something…no, someone was trying to pick the lock to the room.

Okay, definitely not a rat.

Clay threw off the covers and grabbed the jeans he’d tossed over a nearby chair. He’d just finished pulling them on when a deep growl rumbled outside of his room. The door exploded inward as if someone had kicked it.

Three men crowded the opening, dressed in jeans and T-shirts from what he could make out in the thin parking lot lamplight. But their eyes glowed a sickening red. He was sure he’d seen that before but had convinced himself that it had only been a trick of the light or a hallucination. Hell, maybe he was still dreaming.

He clung to that thought until the first suffocating wave of odor surged into the room. Rotten meat cooking in the hot summer sun. Clay gagged and tried to step away, but his legs were already pressed against the mattress.

Fuck this. And fuck them. He was so damn tired of running.

Rolling across the bed, Clay dropped to his feet, putting the mattress between himself and the intruders. They blocked the exit, and the only other way out was through a tiny window in the bathroom at the rear. Not an option—he wasn’t leaving his back exposed. He was going out the front door even if he had to make a hole through them.

The first two flew at him from across the room. One guy had fingers tipped with the kind of hooked claws he would have seen on a vulture. The second man slashed through the air with a knife.

The talons ripped through his T-shirt and shredded skin, cutting long furrows. Crying out, Clay slammed his fist into a face. The bastard rocked on his heels for a second but returned in the blink of an eye. They traded blows. These assholes were far more prepared for a fight than the guy he’d hit with the bag of cereal.

Sweat poured down Clay and soaked his shirt. His head throbbed, and his muscles burned. He was getting nowhere. He needed something more. Something—

A shotgun blast rang out, cutting the fucker in the open doorway nearly in half. They all looked up in shock, ears ringing. An old woman with poofy white hair stepped into the opening and cocked the gun again. Her thin lips were pressed together in a grim expression of determination, but there was a look of glee sparkling in her bright-blue eyes. She lifted the gun to her shoulder and took aim at the bastard standing to Clay’s left. He squealed and darted, jumping on the bed and trying to head to the front window, but she unloaded another deafening shot that threw him against the wall in a splatter of blood and rancid guts.

He didn’t question his luck or the distraction. Grabbing the one remaining asshole by his shirt, Clay twisted around and threw him into the bathroom so that he landed headfirst into the toilet.

“Come on! We have to get out of here!” the woman shouted.

“Who the hell are you?”

“We don’t have time for this, Clay. We’ve got to get moving now. They weren’t the only ones. I ain’t got enough shells on me to take out a whole army.”

He’d initially felt the urge to go with her, but…she knew his name. How the hell did she know his name? Was she any better than the fucks who’d been trying to kill him?

Sure, she might have saved him, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to drive him out to the woods and pump him full of lead with the shells she did have left.

“Who are you? Do you know who these people are? Why the hell they’ve been attacking me?” he shouted at her. The length of the room separated them, and the longer his attackers remained in there, the thicker the stench was growing.

She groaned and pushed a few stray wisps of gray hair out of her eyes. “Yes, and I’ll be happy to tell you, but not here. This isn’t a short discussion, and I’m not waiting around for their friends to show up.”

Taking a step backward into the parking lot, she looked one way and then the other, as if she expected them to suddenly materialize from out of nothing while she stood there. The double-barreled gun was held at the ready. God help anyone who startled that poor woman. He could only pray no one else had been staying near his room in the motel. Last he looked, his car had been the only one in the lot, but that could have changed while he was sleeping.