"Sean Williams - Metak Fatigue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Sean)

not quite enough to fully dispel the night. Shadows crowded about the bed,
whispering black secrets in the distant voice of the city.
He sat up, letting the sheet slip from his shoulders to his lap. The humid
air, stirred by the sudden movement, brushed the rigid bulges of his muscles
with the electric caress of an approaching thunderstorm. The woman
beside him snuffled to herself and rolled over. There was a subtle tension in
the air, an expectant pause, a moment waiting to be filled.
He listened ... People stirred in the buildings around him: someone
screamed, another laughed, a third raised her voice in anger. A nearby couple
made love with abandon, oblivious to his prying, sensitive ears. Far away, the
languid tongue of the river licked its lips and tasted the rotten teeth of
Patriot Bridge.
When the voice spoke again, it did so without sound ,,'or, expression. It
whispered directly into his mind a
second time, "I am Lucifer," then fell silent again, "Waiting.
He closed his eyes, concentrated, and visualised a
ljrgply, parcelling the soundless words into a bundle of electric thought and
hurling it outward into the night. I The response was instantaneous: "Remember
your duty." , He slid from beneath the sheet and stood upright. In profile and
near-darkness, his naked body was sexless and smooth-skinned. His chest and
shoulders were
massive, and his limbs gifted with both power and grace. His poise balanced,
trembling, on the brink of blinding motion.
He remained that way for some time - frozen, indecisive, reluctant to commit
himself to any course of action - until movement through a part in the
curtains caught his pinprick eye. Leaning closer to the window, he peered out
and down at the empty street below. As he watched, a shadow moved, stepped
onto the littered roadway and into a wash of streetlight.
The man stood 'a full foot shorter than he, with wide shoulders and a
wrestler's build not yet soft with age. Receding mouse-brown hair exposed a
high, proud forehead and generous ears. A thick moustache bristled beneath the
snub nose, lending the man an air of familiarity that defied the best efforts
of his memory. He might have seen this man somewhere before, although he
wasn't sure where.
It didn't matter. The man, whoever he was, was
irrelevant. Curiosity had been carefully bred out of him, replaced with an
inescapable compulsion to obey orders.
There was something about the man's silent watchfulness, though, that made him
nervous. Something
indefinably wrong. The man was so still, he hardly seemed to breathe ...
The woman stirred again, not quite awake. Her voice
was muffled by sleep. "Cati?"
He turned away from the window. The blackness of her hair formed a puddle on
the pillow, a pool of darkness deeper than the shadows. Reaching down with one
massive hand, he touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. The trembling of
his fingertips eased as he gently caressed her soft skin, even when the voice
called a third time. She was Sanctuary in a world he could not begin to
understand, queen of a haven called Peace; he would protect his Sanctuary
every way he could, even if it was his own nature that threatened her.
Slowly, her breathing deepened, became more regulaT, until she finally