"Karen Koehler - Slayer 02 - Dragon Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koehler Karen)

part of himself. His hair, which had been bound into a tight braid for his supposedly quiet evening out,
had come undone but had otherwise been spared. His face was likewise clean. His coat was never
dirtied by bloodshed for very long; instead it seemed to somehowabsorb any blood that touched it. The
fact that it did so might have made him nervous, except he was used to dealing with things that
were...well, less than normal.

He had almost made it to the curb where he hoped he would be able to hail another cab when he heard
the cries for the first time. They were distant. Another human being would not have been aware of them
at all, especially this close to the neverending roar of the busiest avenue in New York, but he was wired
from the fight. He stopped to tilt his head and listen to them. Coming from three blocks away, in one of
the back alley niches no sane person had any business crawling around in. Probably some punk trying to
feed the monkey by working over a drunk.

No...not a drunk. It was a female in trouble. Probably a working girl in a lousy situation.

He glanced around the Avenue, but as always, never a cop when you needed one.

ItтАЩs not my problem, he reasoned. ItтАЩs been a long night already.

A cab pulled to the curb. He couldnтАЩt believe his luck.

The girl made a pained, animalistic noise that rang in his ears and in his bones.

тАЬFuck,тАЭ he whispered as he waved the cab on. Iwill get a personal driver, he promised himself as he
turned down the first alley he came to and leaped to the fire escape. He scaled it to the lowest window
available. From there on it was an easy enough task to pull himself hand over hand over the face of the
building. It was an old brownstone, plenty of windows and fancy cornices to use as a makeshift ladder.
When he reached the roof he hurried to the opposite end, jumped the ten-foot crevice between this
building and the next, and landed in a crouching lope atop the second rooftop. He repeated the action a
second and then a third time, until he found himself looking down into a filthy alleyway cluttered with
garbage and an overturned Dumpster. A Caddy was parked at the end of the dead end space,
preventing anybody from driving into the throat of the alley. The building he was crouched atop was
derelict, the opposite one a thrash club so loud it was unlikely anyone would ever hear a cry for help.

There were three of them. Asian kids with ying-yang bandanas and cheap juvie hall tattoos. Yakuza
wannabes. Runners and students of the street arts. And they were doing over one of the working girls.

One ofhis girls.

Turf warfare was none of his business. In most cases, he ignored the violence when drunks and dust
heads fell prey to the bigger, the fitter, the nastier. The city had a method of survival you didnтАЩt tamper
with. But the working girls were his. Well nothis in the sense that they belonged to him. They werenтАЩt his
personal harem or anything. It was just instinct. In the underworld of the vampire, as savage as it was, the
males protected their mates, something the humans had seemed to have forgotten, or perhaps never
learned. Where were the males to protect the human females? Where was this oneтАЩs mate to protect her?
She was alone, threatened, and that pissed him off. He didnтАЩt like cutthroat kids tampering with his
females.

He dropped the six stories and landed atop the overturned Dumpster with an impressive and
attention-gettingwhomp , his coat fluttering down around him like a pair of folding blackbird wings. The