Path of the Tiger, стр. 17
Pedro’s jaguar body was thickly muscled, fight-conditioned, and his reflexes were honed for combat, but even so the force of the impact almost ended the battle there and then. Unable to retain his grip on his opponent, he tumbled into a stack of garbage cans, scattering them like bowling pins and plunging into a time-lapse flower-bloom of billowing trash and plumes of dust.
The tiger rose to his feet, panting and bleeding from the wounds on his flanks and shoulders. Acutely aware of the fighting prowess of his opponent, he advanced cautiously on the pile of trash, his obsidian pupils wide and his senses on full alert. He crept closer, ever closer, but still nothing stirred. The tiger paused for a moment and sniffed at the night air, and at that moment something moved beneath the garbage, so he roared and pounced, his sabre claws and scimitar fangs bared for the kill. When he savaged the pile of detritus, however, he realized that there was nobody in it but a shrieking rat, which scampered away in panic.
As he watched from a ledge above the garbage cans, onto which he had been able to surreptitiously clamber via the cover of a stack of steam-belching pipes, Pedro grinned to himself, tasting victory within his grasp. Before the tiger even had the time to realise that he had been tricked, Pedro dropped soundlessly off the ledge; an angel of death descending from the night sky, ready to deal a killing blow with one swift clamp of his jaws.
But in the split-second in which he was airborne, hovering in a frozen moment of time above the tiger’s back, Pedro realized that he was the one who had been fooled. The tiger, in a lightning-fast gymnastic twist, rolled onto his back to catch him, a living bear-trap of razor claws and dagger fangs of doom.
As the two of them wrestled and rolled and grappled and slashed and bit in a tumbling, careening tornado of bestial rage, Pedro fought and struggled with all his might, inflicting some horrific wounds as he did, but his strength could not match that of the tiger, who finally overwhelmed him. In a brutal finishing flourish the tiger clamped his jaws tight around Pedro’s jaguar throat, slammed his claws deep into his flanks, and with the blades on his feet he tore open the smaller cat’s midsection.
The scimitar canines slashed through Pedro’s flesh and buried themselves deep into his throat, simultaneously crushing his windpipe and ripping his throat wide open with a spray of arterial blood. After the tiger dropped the jaguar’s battered body onto the blood-slippery concrete, he staggered back, exhausted and wounded. Pedro, meanwhile, changed himself from his jaguar form into his human one and tried to get up, but found that all strength seemed to have deserted him, leaving his muscles jelly-like and ineffectual. Raising his head from the ground, he caught sight of his adversary, who had also changed back to his human form. The man’s head was crowned by a yellowy moon leering through the haze of the tight-stretched sky, and there the ancient orb hovered, both twisted halo and mute witness.
William Gisborne’s piercing eyes reflected the flashing night-reel of neon from nearby signs, and his lips were curled in a grim smile. Blood tattooed his skin in chaotic henna designs from the wounds that Pedro had inflicted upon him, but he nonetheless retained the strength to stand and walk.
As Pedro’s chest rose and fell in a hollow, weakening rhythm, William hurriedly dressed himself in the clothes he had stashed behind a trash can before his ambush. Attired in his jeans, tee shirt, sneakers and motorcycle jacket, he had an air of an outlaw of sorts, or a simple outcast. His most striking feature was the barely visible inferno that crackled ceaselessly behind his eyes, and at this moment, with the adrenalin of combat coursing through his veins, those flames glowed ever so brightly. He knelt down next to Pedro, who was shivering with shock and gasping for breath, sucking in each mouthful of the cold New York air with futile greed.
‘Hernández,’ Gisborne said in his soft, gravelly voice, his odd accent barely placeable, but coloured with a vaguely Scottish tint. ‘So, we meet again.’
‘Gisborne,’ Pedro rasped through his rattling gasps. ‘Just finish me now. Do it cabrón, do it!’
‘I’ll give you a quick death if you tell me where your friends are, and how many of them are hunting me. And you will, I repeat, you will tell me exactly where the Ice Bear is hiding. You keep your mouth shut though, and I’ll watch you suffer. Give it up now, old boy. You’ve got nothing to gain from lying to me or clamming up.’
Pedro snarled through his shivers of shock and spat a mouthful of blood-thick saliva into William’s face.
‘Fuck you!’ he hissed. ‘You may have won this battle, but you and the rest of the Rebels lost the war a long time ago. There is no hope left for you. The Huntsmen are closing their net ever tighter around the few of you who remain … and they are on the brink of finding the greatest prize, the secrets you fools thought you could protect. And the Ice Bear? Hahaha, you idiot, you fucking idiot…’
William wiped the bloody saliva off his cheek with the back of his hand as Pedro leered up at him with a mocking grin.
‘Then you’d best tell me what you know,’ he gnarled. ‘This is the last time I’ll ask you nicely.’
‘Chinga tu madre,’ Pedro hissed through clenched, blood-browned teeth, his jaw quivering.
William shook his head, sighing with disappointment, and retrieved a flick-knife from his motorcycle jacket. He flipped the switch and the blade darted out with the immediate menace of a spark igniting a gas stream.
‘Despite your airs of bravado, Hernández, I