Lockhart's Legacy (Vespari Lockhart Book 1) by J. Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

lunge and turning about on him, Lockhart couldn’t say for certain where the creature’s heart was inside that skeleton. This was usually their biggest and most impressive bone. That had been the longhorn skull, but clearly, he’d been wrong.
    There had to be some other indication though. Each vishler started somewhere. They were most often born in graveyards, battlefields, or anywhere else a body might be abandoned, surrounded by all those bones. It was in these bones that the vishler first came into being. He’d found that sometimes a vishler could be sentimental, forming an attachment to not its biggest bones but rather its oldest.
    That initial set of bones it collected was where the organ first developed. Focusing on this, Lockhart examined the vishler’s skeleton as best he could in the starlit night. He scoured the various bones, searching for the oldest looking ones. That was where the heart had to be.
    Lockhart didn’t have that kind of time though. The vishler was nearly on him again. He fired another shot, this time aiming for one of the enormous femurs. If he couldn’t kill it, he would cripple the creature to buy him more time. Pulling the trigger, Lockhart watched as the femur splintered in a tiny explosion of bone fragments. The vishler stumbled and fell to the ground, but held itself up with its long arms. It abandoned the femur and kept moving.
    During this brief fall, Lockhart got a better look at the belt of skulls dangling around the vishler’s waist. Among the other skulls there, the vespari saw a small lizard’s head. The teeth had long since come loose and fallen off. The bone had decayed more than the others around it. The desert sun had bleached this skull more than anything else. That had to be the first bone the vishler took.
    As the creature got back to its feet, new bones moving to replace the shattered femur, Lockhart took aim once more. Three bullets, he thought. Three bullets to kill one vishler. He had no choice. The vespari fired the third shot, smashing the lizard skull.
    Black blood exploded from the tiny skull, as all the other bones collapsed to the ground. Unlike its feigned death, this time the vishler’s bones all separated from one another, splaying out before Lockhart.
    Again, the vespari waited for the essence. He waited for the sensation to flow into him. With a vishler kill, a vespari could expect one of the more peculiar effects that the monsters passed on. As the vishler was nothing more than a single bloody organ, using bones, vines, and weeds to assemble a body, it had the ability to finely control its makeshift limbs. For the vespari that killed it, this translated into a better understanding of their own bodies. It didn’t make them stronger, faster, or smarter. The energy just allowed the vespari to better understand their own body.
    There was nothing though. Just as with the harpy, Lockhart felt nothing. It had to be the Caustic Brand, he decided. It had to be interfering with his ability to gather his kills’ essences and grow stronger.
    Ignoring all that for the moment, he stepped past the other bones to find the lizard skull and what remained of the vishler’s heart. He found the heart under a pile of ribs, but there was nothing left of the lizard skull but shattered fragments. That was fine. He didn’t need it.
    Lockhart did need the heart though, runed bullet still lodged within. The black blood continued to ooze out for some time, and not wishing to dirty his hands any more than necessary, he scooped it into the mason jar that he’d stored Mr. Brown’s intestines inside. He stared at it for a moment. This vishler had been special. Maybe it would go into the notebook after all. He’d never encountered one that faked its death like that before.
    He’d detail it later when there was more light. In the morning, after he’d returned to Abilene and acquired his payment. He would use the heart as evidence for the kill. In case that wasn’t enough, he also