“Well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint Old Man Winter,” I said, taking a step forward.
“It ain’t a wise idea to piss the old guy off,” Clary agreed, watching me carefully.
“I know what Old Man Winter wants,” I said, and took another step toward him. “I know what Winter wants better than you do.”
“Well, he wants you not dead,” Clary said, hesitating, “and if you keep coming at me, I’m gonna have to put you down, hard. You ain’t got a prayer, girl. You can’t even hurt me. Don’t do it. Don’t make me—”
I pulled my gun before he could say another word and snapped off three rounds. Two of the three plinked off his face; the third hit his left eyeball and drew a scream of pain. I felt an inadvertent grin split my lips. “You might want to reconsider that bit about me not being able to hurt you—”
He roared and came at me in a lunge. I saw a flash of red dripping down his cheek as he did it, his left eye a bloody, destroyed mess. I dodged left as he tore past me, the sidewalk cracking with every thunderous step he took. I bounced off the boarded-up brick storefront behind me as he passed and started to turn, looking for me with the one eye he had left.
“What’s that old saying, Clyde?” I sneered at him as he came around to face me. “An eye for an eye?” He glared at me and I stared back at him, unruffled; my sunglasses were still unmoved.
“Oh, I’m gonna take more than an eye from you for that,” he breathed.
“You already took more than that from me,” I said, “and I mean to take more than that from you in return.”
I raised the gun and fired again, but this time he was closer, close enough to raise a hand and block the shots with a ham-like palm. I tried to jerk my pistol away but his fingers closed on it entirely too quickly, and I heard the sound of the metal barrel creak as he bent it. I let it go and dodged to his left in a dead run, back toward the alleyway I had been standing in before.
“Where do you think you’re going? ” he shouted and I heard him take off after me, feet crashing against the pavement as he ran. I kept ahead of him, running at full speed through the alley. I dodged over the tripwire I’d left in the middle of it, hoping he wouldn’t see it until it was too late—
The sound of a pallet of bricks falling onto Clary’s metal head greeted my ears as he snagged the tripwire, followed by a sharp shout of rage. I tossed a look back over my shoulder when I heard them drop and watched as he disappeared under an avalanche of falling red bricks. I paused only a second, long enough to see him come out the other side of the cloud of dust where he had broken through them. I turned on the jets again, feeling my thighs pump up and down as I ran out the end of the alley and crossed the street beyond.
“DAMN YOU, GIRL!” The shout was like the end of the world, and was followed by the sound of a ton of metal leaping through the air behind me. Clary jumped twenty feet, surprising the hell out of me. I’d never seen him do anything like it before, and when he landed he did so not terribly far behind me. I jumped a chain-link fence in a single bound and heard him run through it behind me, the links snapping from the force of his charge. I landed in an overgrown field, my boots sinking into the mud from where the frost had melted but failed to be absorbed into the ground. The thick, sticky consistency of it caused me to waver for a moment before my feet broke free of the suction. I was moving again a second later, but it gave Clary a chance to close the gap between us to a little over five feet.
I was taking deep breaths by this point, the adrenaline pumping through my veins. I jumped the fence on the other side of the lot and landed on the sidewalk beyond. My eyes came up and fixed on my destination in the distance, not far now, only a couple of streets away—
I was still running when I felt something land on my coat collar. With a yank I felt myself ripped backward in a horse-collar tackle as my legs kept moving forward. The back of my neck was slammed into the street’s hard asphalt. Pain ran down my spine from the impact and instantly my head pounded with searing agony. It felt as though someone had taken a spear and stabbed it through the top of my head and let it run down the base of my neck, shattering my spine all the way down. I heard a cry of pain, a gasp for air and I realized it was me.
A steel hand gripped me around the throat and tore me from the ground, lifting me into the air. He brought me up to his face, looked at me with his remaining eye, a singularly humorless expression etched on his metal features. “What were you saying about an eye for an eye, girl?”