Benny wanted to jump in to help her, but the other reapers renewed their attack, forcing him back. Other killers surrounded Chong.
Suddenly a shot rang out and one of the reapers went spinning away, blood erupting from a hole in his throat.
For an irrational moment Benny thought it was Joe Ledger, but the ranger had only managed to get to his hands and knees and was leaning against the wall, gasping like a fish on a riverbank.
The shock of the gunfire temporarily stopped the fight in the hallway. The reapers backed away from Chong, uncertain of what was happening; and Chong scuttled away from them, bleeding, glaring, and confused.
A figure raced up from behind Dr. McReady, grabbed the scientist, shoved her away from all the fighting, and fired two more shots. Reapers dodged and yelled, and one of them fell with a wound in his shoulder. The newcomer wore a military uniform that was torn and bloodstained, and she had a wild look in her eyes.
Colonel Jane Reid.
She fired another shot and a reaper clutched his chest and fell, but then the slide locked back on Colonel Reid’s pistol.
Brother Peter saw this and dodged Nix’s cuts and ran at Reid, eyes blazing.
In a freakish way Benny could understand the reaper’s rage. Colonel Reid was the commander of Sanctuary, and this whole place stood as a symbol of everything the Night Church wanted to destroy. Killing her must be to Brother Peter what killing one of the archdukes of hell would have been for a crusading knight of old.
Benny stepped into the reaper’s path, his sword raised.
“Stop!”
If Brother Peter was impressed in any way by Benny and his sword, he did not show it. He merely looked impatient. Benny shuffled backward to keep his body between the reaper and the colonel.
“No,” he said.
All the fighting in the hallway stopped. Even Chong hung back, his body hunched like an ape’s, his eyes feral and watchful, bloody teeth bared.
Brother Peter stopped.
“If it is your wish to die a hero, boy,” he said, “then I will oblige you.”
“That’s not how it’s going to be.”
“Ah,” said the reaper, “is this the point where you make a lovely speech about how we can all walk away with our lives intact? Will you offer me and mine safe passage out of here if we leave you and these other sinners alive? Is that what this is?”
“No,” said Benny. Despite the shadows the hallway seemed bright. All sounds were so clear and distinct. If his body trembled with fear, at that moment Benny couldn’t feel it.
“Or,” said Brother Peter, looking coldly amused, “are you going to play the hero and challenge me to a winner-take-all duel? Two champions fighting for our separate causes. It’s very grand, but—”
“Not really.”
The reaper’s eyes darkened. “Then what is it? Did you simply want everyone to watch your great death scene?”
Grimm, who had finally struggled to his feet, uttered a long, low growl.
“No,” Benny said again. He licked his lips. “This isn’t a grandstand play, and it’s not a scene from a storybook. This is me, Benny Imura, just a kid from a small town, telling you that I’m going to kill you. Right here, right now.”
Brother Peter shook his head. “Why is it that you people can’t understand that we crave death — all death, including our own. Why do you persist in trying to unnerve us with threats?”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” said Benny. “I don’t really care if you want to die or not. I don’t care if killing you is like giving you a puppy on your birthday. I don’t really care about anything, you big freak. I’m just telling you that I’m going to kill you.”
Brother Peter raised his arms out to his sides, as Saint John so often did in the moment before he taught another blasphemer the error of his presumptions. “Then go ahead, little sinner. If you think you can kill me… then kill me.”
Benny Imura looked into the dead eyes of this master killer.
“Sure,” he said.
And he attacked.
CHAPTER 85
Tom once told Benny this about fighting: “Pit two amateurs against each other and the fight will go on all day. They’ll break a lot of furniture and they’ll bloody each other up a bit, but at the end of it, no one’s likely to get badly hurt. However, in a fight between two experts — two people with some skill and a real determination to kill each other — then it’s all over in a second or two. Sportsmen duel, killers kill.”
It was all over in two fractured halves of one second.
In the first half of that second…
Brother Peter parried Benny’s sword with one knife, spun off the point of impact, and drove the other knife into Benny’s back. The blade tore through the tough body armor and skittered along the back of his rib cage, exploding a fireball of alien heat in Benny’s body.
But Benny was not shocked by the pain. Or the damage.
He was not surprised by being stabbed.
He expected it.
He’d planned for it.
Brother Peter was too good to be defeated in such a duel. Maybe Tom, at the top of his game, might have done it. Maybe a younger and faster Joe Ledger might have. But no one in that hallway — not Nix or Lilah, not Grimm, not Chong, or Colonel Reid even if she had more bullets — none of them could ever beat Brother Peter.
Benny knew that Brother Peter would parry his attack because Peter was expecting the attack. Benny knew the reaper would stab him, because Peter was too good not to. So Benny attacked and was parried, and he was stabbed. And he was ready for all that. His first move was a big, fast kirioroshi, a downward cut. His raised arms gave Brother Peter something to block but also kept the killer’s knives away from his own throat.
In the last half of that one second…
As the blade chunked into his back, Benny pivoted in place. A sloppy move filled with agony, but perfect in its selection. It used the force of the stabbing knife to power the turn as Benny swung his sword between himself and Brother Peter. A yoko-giri, a tight lateral cut that cleaved the air between them.
Except that there was not enough distance for the sword to pass unhindered.
Brother Peter was too close.
Too close to avoid that blade.
Too close to escape the moment and all its red truths.
The sword drew a line through both of the reaper’s biceps, and through the flat plates of the man’s pectoral muscles, and grated along the bones in his chest, grooving the sternum so deeply that it collapsed inward. Brother Peter coughed as those jagged bones did awful work inside his body.
The kami katana flew from Benny’s hands as he staggered past the point of impact. He managed a single reflexive step before the pain drove him down to his knees. He fell against Colonel Reid, who — like everyone else — stared in abject horror at what had just happened.
The second came and went, and in its wake there was wreckage that would last forever.
Brother Peter stood for a moment longer. The stern, unlined face of the man who had never smiled now wore its first smile. A bemused smile, as he looked down at his chest and saw the red mouth that stretched all the way across his body. He dropped to his knees with such force that the sound of bone on concrete was like gunshots.
Benny turned and looked at him. They were only three feet apart, both of them on their knees.
“You — you haven’t won,” said Brother Peter in a voice that was wet and trembling.
There was a sound — the sharp, harsh, metallic sound of someone working the bolt of a machine gun — and Benny saw Joe Ledger, still bleeding, his face gray with pain, leaning against the far wall. His weapon was in his hands, barrel pointed at the remaining reapers.