Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

Her eyes locked into Don Luis’s gaze and she watched his expression change from lust and greed into one of confusion and pain.

Ratt had maneuvered one of the spotlights into a straight line to the VIP booth during the last few seconds of the song, as they hoped to take the head off the wolf in the first few seconds of the attack. The plan was sound, and Ratt’s aim was true, but what they didn’t count on was Don Luis’s constitution. Perhaps by dint of his great age, or maybe because he had been turned by the demon-urchin itself, Don Luis Fernando seemed to be more powerful than his peers. Whatever the reason, he was not instantly vaporized by the beam of sunlight the way the savages had been last week, the way his retinue of bodyguards burned around him.

Maya watched with morbid disappointment as the beam illuminated Don Luis’s face, blackening it into a rough, cracked, leathery affair, which seemed to steam or smoke but didn’t burst into the consuming flames of purification she had hoped for. His charred face contrasted his ivory fangs, exposed to the light as his lips were pulled back entirely in a sneer of rage and suffering.

Surprised and wounded, Don Luis still had his survival instincts; they were, after all, his strongest character trait next to greed and selfishness. He reflexively pulled his hands to his face and the shiny, polished silver chrome pommel of the cane he had been holding diffused the incoming beam like a disco ball, splashing the burning rays out and away from him, effectively saving him for the moment.

That brief moment turned out to be all he needed to survive longer.

His hand burned, but his face was shielded enough for him to see a bodyguard who was writhing in his seat, only an arm’s reach away. Don Luis ruthlessly grabbed the man and pulled him up, holding him out and in front of himself as he dropped the cane. The bodyguard performed admirably as a protector of the city’s king, though not for very long.

Don Luis had only been holding the man for a few short seconds before the body-turned-shield began to burn like the tallow-dipped torches of the palace catacombs. It was long enough, however, for Don Luis to make his getaway.

He leapt out of the VIP booth, using the dying bodyguard as a tower shield, and dashed to a short stone wall that was part of a raised garden bed, one of several that decorated the city square and had existed long before anyone had thought of turning the plaza into concert grounds. He held the man-torch in his hands until he reached the garden bed, his hands burning from the flames.

When he reached it, he tossed the man up and over and ducked down, effectively disappearing from the immediate threat of the sunbeams. Don Luis noticed that immediately after switching from decorative stage lights to lethal beams of sunlight, something he didn’t quite understand, the beams began to move, eliminating survivors of the initial assault the way a side-door gunman in a helicopter would mow down fleeing infantry.

He watched in horror as beams of light chased down his fleeing kin and burned them to ash. The city seemed aglow, sounds of screams echoing everywhere.

“How could this have happened? We are gods! We must fight back and destroy this witch. I was such a fool! Sofia was right! Sofia!” His mind raced, and he searched the crowd for signs of his wife. He had casually noticed that she had not joined him in the VIP booth; in fact, he had not seen her since last night. They had fought again briefly after his short visit to Lily Sapphire’s chambers. He had not even listened to what she’d said—something about Lily’s assistant wandering through the palace where he didn’t belong the night before, something about how she would show him. He’d cared nothing for the rambling gripes coming from his wife. I should have listened, he thought now. Perhaps Sofia knew something. Where is she?

Sofia stared in shock as her city burned.

My husband is a bigger fool than I thought! He has invited a bruja into our city!

Besides the light of day, there was only one other thing that Don Luis Fernando and Sofia feared. Mágico. Strange. And those who could shape it. Early on in the first days of New Puebla, they had discovered some of their human cattle began to spontaneously alter reality in mystical ways. One, in particular, could light fires from nothing, even going so far as to become a living inferno, seemingly invulnerable to its own conjured flames. That was enough, then and there, for them both to agree that no such talent, no matter how harmless it may have seemed at the time, would ever be allowed in their city. Since then, any Puebloan citizen demonstrating paranormal abilities was swiftly and thoroughly taken care of, without prejudice.

“Now look what your lust and stupidity have wrought us!” Sofia screamed to the night.

She and her men had marched to the plaza from their covert meeting place and entered the plaza from the north, coming at Don Luis’s VIP booth from the side. The plan had been simple, if risky: keeping their distance from the VIP booth, they would attack the singing slut from the side of the stage, provoking Don Luis into shooting at Sofia with his laser pistol. Her loyalists would be ready, and form a veritable shield wall phalanx, using their mirrors to reflect the lethal beam directly back to Don Luis. If the initial shot did not kill him outright, then they would move in, like an armored tortoise, until they could get close enough to overpower Don Luis and rip him to shreds. He never would expect it, or even defend against it, because he truly believed that no one would kill him, lest they die themselves.

Now it seemed that