"Holly Lisle - Secret Texts 2 - Vengeance Of Dragons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

“Not at all. For now, at least, I cannot touch them. Butthey have thoughtfully left their relatives
behind, and put me in aposition where I have come to know them. After all, as family ofthese
‘heroes,’ I have given them everycourtesy.”

Imogene chuckled, and felt her secretary shudder.

“Then the assassin . . .”
“I want to play a little game. I want this assassin to killoff Ry’s friends’ families, person by
person, in creativeways. Let’s see how many of them we can annihilate before theboys get back
home. Don’t you think that will beamusing?”

Porth said nothing.

Imogene let the silence run for a while, then said,“Porth?”

“Yes, Parata. Amusing.”

He didn’t sound amused at all. Poor Porth — he lied sobadly.




Chapter 5



The water simultaneously weighed herdown and buoyed her up as she slipped through a world
marked byshifting, fluid light. Water flowed in through her mouth and outthrough the sides of her
neck, and though something about thatseemed wrong, she didn’t know what it was. She heard
thepounding of the tide in her bones and felt the movement of preythrough her skin, as if her
entire body had become her eyes. Painlay behind her; ahead of her lay uncertainty. In her present,
sheknew only hunger, a hunger so immense that it devoured her. Sheknew she was more than
appetite, but she could not reach the partof her that insisted this. She knew that breathing water
wassomehow wrong, but she didn’t know how she knew, and for themoment she didn’t care.

She rolled, shifting fins to arch her body around, and caughtsight of a cloud of silver shimmering
before her. With a flick ofher tail she was gliding toward it, hardly disturbing the waterthrough
which she moved. She slammed into the center of the cloudand devoured a dozen of the fish
before the school erupted, thenfollowed the largest group that broke away, pushing after it
withthree hard thrusts of her tail, conserving energy. She hunted, andfed. When the school of
silver fish scattered beyond convenientreach, she moved into a smaller school of large red and
yellowones, and then another, and another sort of fish. She avoidedanything that created a bigger
pressure line while moving than shedid, and when she tasted blood in the water, she stayed away.

She refused to question her existence, avoiding her mind’snagging insistence that she was not
what she seemed to be. She fed,because she had been weak and damaged and near death; and as
shefed, she grew stronger.

And when she was strong enough, her mind forced her body toacknowledge its presence. It