Excerpt: The Sentinel's Circle

Townsend stood in the very center of the intersection and bellowed again as the girl emerged from between the two foremost cars. One of them blared their horns as she passed, but received no reaction. "Ma'am, get off the road!!"

She walked directly towards him. There was a determined, resonating solidity in her eyes, purpose in her steps, and no sign of hesitation. Townsend puffed out his chest and inhaled with a grimace. She'd need to be straightened out, it seemed. He took a step towards her and prepared to speak again. Before he'd moved too far, he stopped with a cocked head. He knew her face, he'd seen her before. Her right hand moved towards the gleaming object at her hip.

"You're Angela Corwy-"

A strand of hair flicked past her face and her body shifted so fast Townsend didn't even have time to realise she'd moved at all.

In an instant, she was past him. A discarded black scabbard clattered on the ground a few feet away.

Townsend felt different somehow. His neck ached and he was confused by what just happened. Where was the girl? He tried to turn around, but felt unable to.

The driver of the BMW a few meters behind him had watched as a dozen crimson raindrops spattered onto his windshield. He blinked and watched in horrified silence as the police officer in front of him collapsed to his knees, and his head bounced loosely from his shoulders and toppled like a melon onto the asphalt.

A hundred wide eyes witnessed the uniformed girl take a few steps further, then come to a stop in the very middle of the intersection.

Taylor had just looked up from her quarry being held in HC-13 a few hundred meters away. It had suddenly become deathly silent, save for the distant throbbing of the traffic helicopter overhead. She focused just in time to see her partner's headless body fall prone onto the street, and a young woman reaching down to pick up the hem of her skirt to wipe something metal on it. Instinctively, she fumbled for her sidearm and started assessing the situation, hurriedly running over the grass towards the scene about three hundred meters away.

In dreams, Taylor always imagined herself running towards a goal and never being able to make it before the dream ended. As the woman in the intersection took a stance and angled her sword toward the ground, it felt just like those dreams.

The girl thrust the sword ground-ward. The blade slammed into the asphalt and pierced it like it was sand.

The blade glinted.

Angela's palm rested gently on the hilt of the sword. She straightened up and seemed to exhale. Like a dictator with his finger on the "launch" button, she pressed her palm down on the sword.

All at once the intersection lit up like the sun had been summoned. Taylor skidded to a stop so fast she crashed backward into the grass. In the flash of an eye, the blinding light that lit up most of her vision exploded into energy so bright it felt like it scalded her retinas. She didn't even have time to reach up to cover them before a deafening, shrieking, unnatural explosion screamed into her ears, and a force like nothing she'd ever felt sucked the air out of her lungs and flung her like a rag doll far across the field.