Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

wasn’t as strong as the metal chains were, and the beam creaked, then snapped under the giant’s great strength and heavy weight. The entire structure started to slide sideways.
    I threw myself forward out of the way of the flying seats and clanking chains. A second later, the whole thing collapsed in a crashing cacophony of metal, dragging the trapped giant down with it. Chains and seats piled on top of his broad back. The giant groaned but didn’t get up. Well, that was one way to bury someone. I’d take what I could get.
    My hands and knees sank into the loose gravel that covered the ground around the swing set, and some of the stones scraped my palms. By this point, the stones had taken on low, ugly, harsh mutters, reflecting the violence that had just happened, as the giant’s blood continued to seep onto them. The gravel was just as dense as the sand in the box, which made it hard for me to scramble to my feet, as did the stabbing pain in my hip.
    The second giant surged forward and clamped his hand onto my shoulder, his fingers digging into the socket like drills. The bastard picked me up, hoisted me up over his shoulder, and benched-pressed me as high as he could—a good nine-feet-plus off the ground. There was nothing I could do to stop him or make him put me down. Not from this angle. Fuck. This was not going to end well for me.
    “You’re going to pay for killing Olson, you bitch!” the giant screamed and threw me down as hard as he could.
    I closed my eyes and reached for my Stone magic, pulling the cool power up through my veins, pouring it out onto my skin, head, and hair, letting it harden my body into an impenetrable shell.
    I slammed into the closest seesaw, the whole left side of my body smacking into the metal, before rolling across the top and plummeting down the far side. It didn’t hurt that badly, not like it would have if I hadn’t used my Stone magic to protect myself, but it still jarred me. I still felt the hard, raw, brutal force of it. Especially in my injured hip. I gritted my teeth, ignoring the pain now shooting down into my leg and on past my knee.
    But I didn’t get up.
    Fighting hand to hand, the giant would kick my ass now, especially since I wasn’t a hundred percent anymore. Which meant that the quickest way to kill the bastard would be to surprise him. Hence my header on the gravel. The force of the fall had ripped my silverstone knife away from me, and I didn’t dare reach for another one. Not yet. Not until he was in range.
    Ten … twenty … I hadn’t even counted to thirty before I heard his shoes crunch on the gravel. I cracked my eyes open just enough to track his movements. He came at me from the opposite side of the seesaw. The rows of seats still creaked up and down from the force of my body hitting them. My eyes flicked up at one seat wobbling just above my head.
    “Bitch,” the giant muttered as he neared me. “That’ll teach you to kill one of us—”
    I surged up, grabbed the seat, and brought it down as hard as I could.
    On the other side of the seesaw, the opposing, attached seat zoomed up and clipped the giant in the chin. He groaned, staggered back, and fell—right onto the merry-go-round. The giant’s head slammed against one of the metal handles with a sickening crack. Dazed, he slumped to the ground, half on, half off the merry-go-round.
    I got to my feet, grabbed a knife out of my boot, and hobbled over to him. The giant’s oversize, buglike eyes rolled back in his head, but he still saw me coming. He reached up, trying to keep me at arm’s length, but the blow to his skull had messed up his depth perception, which made it easy enough for me to kick him in the balls. The giant howled, his hands automatically going south to cover himself from further assault instead of protecting his chest and head.
    I leaned over and cut his throat.
    The giant gurgled, his blood spewing out onto the sky blue paint that covered the merry-go-round. I watched him a second to make sure that he wasn’t going to get back up. But his body was already shutting down from the trauma, and he didn’t even try to move.
    With the giants down and dying, I turned toward the sandbox just in time to see Brown, the vampire, punch Vinnie in the chest and scramble to his feet. The vamp stared at me, eyes wide in his face, as though he couldn’t believe that I’d actually taken out two giants all by my little lonesome.
    Then he turned and raced off in the other