"Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith - Xmen and Xmen 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

known better.

To his surprise, as he stepped closer to take a proper look, someonewas there—though for some
reason he wasn’t sure until the figure stepped clear of the shadow, a lean-bodied man whose
stoop-shouldered stance belied the fact that he was roughly Karp’s height, wearing nondescript clothes
and a Red Sox baseball cap. Boyoboy, would he have fun roasting Alicia’s ass for being so careless as
to let a tourist stray from the group.

He reached for the man’s shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir, are you lost? I’m afraid you can’t leave the group—”

The man rounded on him—and Karp gasped, goggle-eyed, to find himself face-to-face with a demon.
Skin so dark a blue-black it was as if the man were cloaked in his own personal shadow, the only points
of color his gleaming yellow eyes. The ears were pointed, the teeth had fangs, and the hand that grabbed
Karp’s wrist possessed two fingers instead of the normal four.

Training took over. Without a conscious thought, Karp went for his gun—and a forked tail wrapped
tight around his throat, cutting off his cry of alarm. The tail spun him like a top into the alcove, and he felt
a blinding pain as the side of his head cracked hard into the arched stone. After that he never felt the
blow to the side, chop to the neck that finished the job of knocking him unconscious.

It was all over in a matter of seconds, but those seconds made the difference.

From the East Entrance came Alicia Vargas’ shout—she was already through the hallway doors, coming
at a dead run with sidearm in hand, ahead of the other agents and uniformed officers.

Karp’s partner was closer. He lunged for the intruder, who tripped him up with a sideways sweep of the
legs—ditching his shoes in the process to reveal elongated, weirdly articulated feet with a two-toed
configuration that matched his hands. The intruder leaped across the hall for the opposite wall, somehow
grabbing hold of the falling agent’s gun and pitching it clear. His leap landed him up by the ceiling. To
Alicia’s astonishment he stuck there, three-quarters upside down, as though fingers and toes were tipped
with Velcro.

Above the chandeliers, he was suddenly hard to see, and Alicia realized with a shock that he was
blending with the ceiling shadows. Against a dark background, the intruder’s indigo skin made him
functionally invisible.

With a snarl, he was gone, scampering faster than her eye could swallow, around the corner toward the
executive offices of the West Wing.

Alicia had a mini-mike clipped to her sleeve; she used it now.

“Code Red,” she cried. “Code Red.Perimeter breach at visitors’ checkpoint! Agent Vargas in the Cross
Hall, ten meters in from the East Entrance. Intruder is hostile, two agents are down. Threat to
Braveheart!”
 At the rear of the mansion, in the opposite wing, President George McKenna was working the phones,
applying a measure of charm—with just the faintest edge of threat—to a senator hoping to make some
political ink by throwing a monkey wrench into the latest administration initiative. The President was a
rancher by temperament and wished, as he found he often did since assuming the Oval Office, that he