"Mercedes Lackey - Urban Fantasies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

doctor, at least, not now.

They walked into the store, a brightly-lit building with rows of metal shelves, past a cheerful woman who
was chatting with the store clerk, a quiet-looking young man with shoulder-length blond hair. Liane and
Billy started looking through magazines near the front counter, and Kayla moved to the back of the store.
In the last few weeks, they'd refined shoplifting to an art, running interference and distracting the people
so one of them could walk out with enough food for dinner. It was a lot easier than other kinds of theft.
Kayla smiled in spite of herself, remembering how Billy had climbed through an open apartment window
only to find the occupant, a fat middle-aged man, up to his neck in bubbles in his bathtub with several
rubber ducks floating around him. He'd yelled and Billy had practically fallen out the window, terrified but
still unable to keep from laughing.

The three of them still laughed about that one, but the time when Billy had gone through an open house
window and another guy had reached for a handgun next to his bed, that hadn't been so funny.
Fortunately for him, the gun hadn't been loaded, and by the time the guy had managed to put some bullets
in the revolver, Billy, Kayla, and Liane were already two blocks away and still running.

Since then, Billy had said that they'd have to get by without any more breaking-and-entering. Shoplifting,
that was a good trick, though Kayla was getting very tired of pork-and-beans heated in the can, chili, and
stew. Sometimes she caught herself fantasizing about fresh-cooked food, something that didn't come out
of a can: baked potatoes, pancakes, or even bowls of oatmeal. Anything but canned -spaghetti.

She found the brand of aspirin she was looking for and checked the overhead mirror to make sure the
clerk wasn't watching—those mirrors worked both ways, if you knew what you were doing—and
slipped the package into her jacket pocket, smiling to herself. It was a quiet night, all right, and once she
took some pills to get rid of the headache, she'd be feeling fine. . . .

Gunshots shattered the silence.

Liane screamed a moment later, a sound that echoed through the store. Kayla didn't even think about it;
she ran toward the sound of Liane's scream and skidded around the corner of the row of shelves,
stopping short at the sight before her.

The woman was lying very still in a pool of her own blood, sprawled across a small potted palm. The
clerk's body wasn't in sight, but Kayla could see more blood sprayed across the wall behind the counter.
A man wearing a long leather coat stood near the doorway and smiled at her, a military -assault rifle
clenched in his hands.

Not three feet away from her, Billy held Liane in his arms, both of them frozen with terror. The man
brought the assault rifle up, aiming at the three of them. Kayla brought up her hands instinctively to shield
her face.

Nothing happened.

He isn't going to kill us,Kayla thought with a faint wave of relief, and opened her eyes.

The man was staring at her. Directly at her, not at Billy, not at Liane. A split-second later, she realized
why: her hands were on fire. No, not exactly fire . . . it was a blue light that flickered over her hands, lines
of light that weaved and danced around her fingers.