Tales of the Slayer

From: A Good Run

The Slayer Thessily Thessilonikki

The Battle of Marathon

Greece, 490 B.C.E.

She runs.

The ground is hard and dry, littered with stones and the bodies of the fallen, Athenian and Persian alike. She runs barefoot and avoids the bodies, but cannot avoid the stones. They bite at her soles, digging into her skin, and she can barely feel it, but she knows her feet are raw and blistered, and that with each stride she leaves a trail of bloody footprints across the plain. She barely feels anything but a distant and crackling pain from her lungs and a dull hot throbbing from the wound in her side, where the poison entered her body almost four days ago. Her chiton, once white, is now almost black in places, stained with days of dirt and sweat and blood, and linen has torn at her shoulder where a vampire grabbed her while trying to take her throat.

That vampire is dead, as are a hundred others, and she is dying, too, but she keeps running.

She has run nearly three hundred miles in four days, and she is almost finished.

In her right hand she carries her labrys. Perspiration from her hand has soaked the leather-wrapped grip, turning it blacker than her filthy tunic, and fine dust clings to the point of sharpe ... read full excerpt from: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayer, Vol. 1 ebook