blasts Reaper

A man stood over her. He was nearly seven feet tall and so thick with slabs of muscle that he almost seemed deformed-not pretty bodybuilder muscle, either, but the thick, dull slabs that come from endless physical labor. He wore overalls, a blue shirt, and a hockey mask, and there was a long, curved sickle in his right hand. As I watched, he took a pair of long steps forward, seized the whimpering girl by her hair, and jerked her body into a backward bow. He raised the sickle in his right hand.
Rawlins didn't bother to offer him a chance to surrender. He took a stance not ten feet away, aimed, and put three shots into the masked maniac's head.
The man jerked, twisting a bit, and released the girl's hair abruptly, tossing her aside with a terrible, casual strength. She hit a row of chairs and let out a cry of pain.
Then the maniac turned toward Rawlins and, even though the mask hid his features, the tilt of his head and the tension of his posture showed that he was furious. He went toward Rawlins. The cop shot him four more times, flashes of bright white burning the image of the maniac and the room onto my eyes.
He brought the sickle down on Rawlins. The cop managed to catch the force of it upon his long flashlight. Sparks flew from the steel case, but the light held. The maniac twisted the sickle, so that the tip plowed a furrow across Rawlins's forearm. The cop snarled. The flashlight spun to the ground. The maniac raised the sickle again.
I braced myself, raised my staff and my will, and cried, "Forzare!"
Unseen power lashed from my staff, pure kinetic energy that ripped through the air and hit the maniac like a wrecking ball. The blow drove him back down the aisle, through the air. He hit the projector on its stand. It shattered. He went through it without slowing down. He kept going, the flight of his passage tearing through the large projection screen, and hit the back wall with a thunderous impact.
I sagged in sudden exhaustion, the effort of the spell an enormous drain on me, and had to plant my staff on the ground to keep from falling over. My headache flared up with a vengeance, and the light of my amulet and staff both faded.
There were a few more screams, the quick, light sound of frightened feet, and I whirled. I saw someone flee the room from the corner of my eye, but I didn't get much of a look at them. A second later, the room returned to normal, the lights back, the broken projector still spinning one reel at reduced speed, a loose tongue of film slap-slap-slapping the broken casing.
Rawlins advanced, gun still out, his eyes very wide, down to the far end of the room. He went past the screen and looked behind it, gun in firing position. He looked around for a second, then back at me, his expression baffled.
"He's not here," Rawlins said. "Did you see him go that way?"
I just didn't have enough left in me to speak right at that moment. I shook my head.
"There's a dent in the wall," he reported. "Covered in... I dunno what. Some kind of slime."
"He's gone," I grunted. Then I started forward, toward the downed people. Two of them were young men, the third a young woman. "Help me."


Proven Guilty Chapter 12, Page 84-85