Lightbringer Read Online Free Page A

She smirked.
    “I'll try to do my best,” he replied gravely and left, moving swiftly towards the shifting, eddying crowd.
    “You always do,” Elle sighed, waiting at the door until Piotr had vanished into fog and humanity. Then, fondly, she added, “Jackass.”

T he rising wind whipped flurries of debris about Piotr's ankles, lifting discarded shopping bags and candy wrappers into drifts like piles of autumn leaves. The brick streets beneath his shoes, warped into strange and twisted shapes by age and tectonic activity, were only the fading memories of the meticulously laid brick roads that had been before. Soon the remainder would crumble away, revealing concrete buckled by the California heat, already warped into rolling hills in the center, collecting water and spiritual debris with every summer storm.
    Drifting along, letting the wind guide him as if he were as light as the trash spinning by, Piotr concentrated on the journey home rather than brood on what he'd just lost. It took all his will not to turn around and go back, to accept Elle's generous sanctuary and learn to move among the living like a shadow. He couldn't though, even if he wanted to. The sky had opened above him, rain poured down, and there were Walkers abroad.
    Night was falling, brought in with the storm, and Piotr sped his pace, skidding down Highway 101's embankment, kicking aside flattened disks of soda cans and sodden cardboard boxes in his wake. The steel mill, their treehouse sanctuary, was still many miles distant, hidden amid the sprawl of industrial buildings and businesses that once thrived at the edge of the city, near the humid stink of the canal. Carefully maintaining his balance on the rain-slick grass, Piotr almost missed the sharp cry of pain amid the drubbing of rain and cracks of blue lightning across the sky.
    He paused and it came again, a brief shout from the tangle of buildings just south of the highway, articulate with fear. Stepping up his pace, Piotr followed the scream, heart thudding in his chest and breath coming in short, harsh bursts.
    Just south of the water treatment plant three figures fought, sliding through the fog and reflected highway halogens like skaters across ice. Two were long and lean and white-clad— Walkers—but the third, Piotr was surprised to note, was a short, dark figure he recognized: Lily.
    What is she doing here, so far away from her own turf? Piotr thought, but then he spotted moonlit steel. Lily was backed against the building, left thigh torn open clear to the bone and leaking silver essence in rivulets like blood; despite her wounds, Lily gave as good as she got, twin daggers flashing.
    “Lily,” he cried, sprinting now, “hang on!”
    Hearing him, Lily's attention wavered for a critical instant. One Walker was attacking her face-on, but the moment she paused the other swooped in from the side, clawing her deeply across the hip.
    “LILY!” Reaching her side, Piotr slammed the second Walker into the wall. Up close he could see a line of jaw beneath the white hood, and the teeth of the Walker where they poked through the rotting holes in its cheek. Coarse black stubble rasped against his hand as Piotr slapped the Walker's head against the wall over and over again, curling one hand in the white cloak for purchase. A stench puffed out at him from the fabric, rot and wet decay, moist with a black stink like old sour dirt and albino, crawling things.
    Then it laid hands on him, gripping him at the wrists, and Piotr was filled with cold.
    The Walker's icy touch sapped him almost immediately, drawing the strength from Piotr's arms and chilling his fury away. He could still hear Lily's raspy cries of pain but they were distant, unimportant, and slowly, under the Walker's insistent pressure, Piotr's fist loosened and fell away.
    Laying a palm flat against Piotr's chest, the Walker hissed in a slow and ragged language. Piotr felt a tug deep inside, a slow painful tearing like a hangnail peeling