Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

Benny stepped into the reaper’s path, his sword raised.

“Stop!”

If Brother Peter was impressed in any way by Benny and his sword, he did not show it. He merely looked impatient. Benny shuffled backward to keep his body between the reaper and the colonel.

“No,” he said.

All the fighting in the hallway stopped. Even Chong hung back, his body hunched like an ape’s, his eyes feral and watchful, bloody teeth bared.

Brother Peter stopped.

“If it is your wish to die a hero, boy,” he said, “then I will oblige you.”

“That’s not how it’s going to be.”

“Ah,” said the reaper, “is this the point where you make a lovely speech about how we can all walk away with our lives intact? Will you offer me and mine safe passage out of here if we leave you and these other sinners alive? Is that what this is?”

“No,” said Benny. Despite the shadows the hallway seemed bright. All sounds were so clear and distinct. If his body trembled with fear, at that moment Benny couldn’t feel it.

“Or,” said Brother Peter, looking coldly amused, “are you going to play the hero and challenge me to a winner-take-all duel? Two champions fighting for our separate causes. It’s very grand, but—”

“Not really.”

The reaper’s eyes darkened. “Then what is it? Did you simply want everyone to watch your great death scene?”

Grimm, who had finally struggled to his feet, uttered a long, low growl.

“No,” Benny said again. He licked his lips. “This isn’t a grandstand play, and it’s not a scene from a storybook. This is me, Benny Imura, just a kid from a small town, telling you that I’m going to kill you. Right here, right now.”

Brother Peter shook his head. “Why is it that you people can’t understand that we crave death—all death, including our own. Why do you persist in trying to unnerve us with threats?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” said Benny. “I don’t really care if you want to die or not. I don’t care if killing you is like giving you a puppy on your birthday. I don’t really care about anything, you big freak. I’m just telling you that I’m going to kill you.”

Brother Peter raised his arms out to his sides, as Saint John so often did in the moment before he taught another blasphemer the error of his presumptions. “Then go ahead, little sinner. If you think you can kill me . . . then kill me.”

Benny Imura looked into the dead eyes of this master killer.

“Sure,” he said.

And he attacked.

85

TOM ONCE TOLD BENNY THIS about fighting: “Pit two amateurs against each other and the fight will go on all day. They’ll break a lot of furniture and they’ll bloody each other up a bit, but at the end of it, no one’s likely to get badly hurt. However, in a fight between two experts—two people with some skill and a real determination to kill each other—then it’s all over in a second or two. Sportsmen duel, killers kill.”

It was all over in two fractured halves of one second.

In the first half of that second . . .

Brother Peter parried Benny’s sword with one knife, spun off the point of impact, and drove the other knife into Benny’s back. The blade tore through the tough body armor and skittered along the back of his rib cage, exploding a fireball of alien heat in Benny’s body.

But Benny was not shocked by the pain. Or the damage.

He was not surprised by being stabbed.

He expected it.

He’d planned for it.