Wrassler greeted us. “Evening, Legs, Eli.”
I nodded to the big guy and moved into position for the pat-down. Wrassler was seriously huge, nicknamed so because he was bigger than any World Wrestling Entertainment superstar. He motioned a woman to pat me down and took Eli himself, walking with a limp, on a prosthetic that had replaced a foot and lower leg lost in a battle here at HQ. I knew that his injury wasn’t my fault, but I still felt the responsibility to help him move forward and cope with his new life. Responsibility was a step up from guilt, so, for me, that was good. I was growing. I used to try to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. Eli and Alex had been working on me, schooling me to be fair to myself. I was trying.
The woman’s pat-down was professional and non-handsy and I declared the vamp-killer strapped to my thigh. “And I have wood stakes in my hair,” I said.
“No silver?” she asked.
“Nope.”
She stepped back and away before I could look at her name tag. She was one of the new blood-servants from Atlanta. We were still integrating the blood-servants and blood-slaves of Atlanta’s former Master of the City.
“Leo’s in the gym with Gee,” Wrassler said. “He’s asked you to join him there.”
We signed in and walked away, Eli silent in his combat boots, my dancing shoes loud and somewhat clompy. Once behind the wall on the way to the elevator, I asked, “Well?”
“Did not detect a thing.”
We stopped and checked our pockets for the miniature tracking devices that were being tested in advance of the next big hootenanny in town, when the European Mithrans came to New Orleans to kill Leo and take over the U.S. That was their plan and saying no to the visit and attack wasn’t an option.
It took a while, but Eli finally pulled a tiny device out of a stake sheath. He held it up to the light and it looked like part of child’s toy, a red and blue plasticized square. “That was a good plant,” he said. “A good location, and I didn’t even notice the insert.”
I, however, couldn’t find one on me at all. We turned and retraced our steps to the front, and on the way, I stopped and picked it up. Eli frowned, a slight downward hitch of his lips, before his face relaxed. He said, “She slipped it into your knife retrieval pocket and it went straight through.”
“Yep.” Back at the entrance, Wrassler stood to the side, his hands loose and ready, as if to draw a weapon. Losing a limb could make one hyperalert. “Wrassler’s insert was excellent,” I said. “I’m wearing slacks with false pockets and it went straight through.”
The little blonde grimaced. Well, she wasn’t little. She stood five-seven, but that was several inches under my six feet, so she was little to me. Her name was Brenda Rezk and she had been number three in security in Atlanta back when. So far, here, she was feeling frustrated and tentative. It was hard to move in an apparent downward direction in anything, but she was better than she was feeling right now, and if she kept up the progress, when she went back to Atlanta, she would end up higher than number three in the clan home of the new Master of the City of Atlanta.
“Where should I put it, then?” Brenda asked Wrassler. “Jane doesn’t have anything else on the outside, and I had no reason to feel inside her jacket to the inner pocket when I could do that from the outside.”
“You were doing a pat-down,” Wrassler said. “You should have squeezed the fabric of her jacket lapels, and dropped it in whichever pocket was empty.” Wrassler motioned me against the wall, and I leaned in again, hands high. He patted me down, much less hesitantly than Brenda had, and when I stepped away from the wall, he turned me to face him and ran the jacket front between his hands, first one side and then the other, holding them each out to inspect for weapons holstered beneath each arm. He nodded to me and smoothed the shoulders of my jacket, the way a tailor might, which was intended to center my mind on my shoulders, not my jacket, leaving me that impression. Shoulders. Not jacket. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said to me. “I appreciate your kindness in letting me ensure the safety of everyone who enters the council chambers. Do you need a guide to tonight’s festivities?”
Festivities. Right. Wrassler was demonstrating the whole thing, which was probably a good idea. “No, thank you. I can find my way.”
“Enjoy your stay. And if you need anything, you’ll find house phones on each floor near the elevator, and in your rooms.”
I leaned around Wrassler, to Brenda and Eli. “Which pocket?”
“I couldn’t spot a thing,” Brenda said.
“Right,” Eli said. He had a fifty percent chance of being right. And he was.
“Good guess,” I said.
“Not a guess. Wrassler’s got a weak hand from the injury. He’ll always use his strong hand to insert the tracker.”
“Huh,” Wrassler said. “He’s right. And we have to assume that the European Vamps have intel on everything inside.” He looked at Brenda. “Practice. You’re in charge of teaching lefties and righties to be ambidextrous when inserting the trackers. You’ll also run the detail handling the searches when the EVs get here.”
A fleeting smile crossed Brenda’s face, and her shoulders went back slightly. “Thank you, sir.”
I dug inside my breast pocket and found the tracker, dropping it in the tracker can. Eli and I made our way down the elevator to the gym. When the doors closed, Eli said, “EVs. Bad influence, babe.”
“Yeeeah.” I drew out the word. “I heard that.” Once upon a time, everyone at HQ had used full names for everything and everyone. Since I got here, it was acronyms, nicknames, and a bit more snark than most vamps were accustomed to. “I’ll address it at some point.”
Negotiations for the visit were still ongoing, and slower than frozen molasses. I hoped they’d last another six months, because we weren’t ready to deal with the amount of magic and bad attitude the EVs would bring. Fortunately, with the EVs, any kind of negotiation took an agonizing amount of time because they didn’t accept or use or probably even know about the existence of e-mail, texting, or FaceTime. Their lack of electronic sophistication wasn’t something I had known going into this gig. I had expected the Visitation by Evil to take place right away, but when you live centuries, and even millennia, preparations for anything can last a long time. Time itself has no meaning when you are that old. And electronic media was something trashy done by the nouveau riche—or the nouveau fanged—and their blood-servants. For communications, they preferred and insisted upon heavy bond or handmade paper, or maybe papyrus, hand-delivered. It was ridiculous. But unless they thought they could get the upper hand by making a surprise visit, their whole stuck-in-the-past attitude was working to our advantage.
The elevator opened and I stepped out, leading the way to the gym. Eli stopped at the men’s locker room and came back out with a sword belted at his waist. “Seriously?” I said. Instead of a reply he drew the sword and shoved open the door to the gym, preceding me inside. “Men . . .” He was taking this whole “being my second” a little too seriously, though it was a position he had been forced to undertake on more than one occasion.
The gym at HQ was big enough for a full-sized basketball court, but it was usually set up for fighting rings. I had damaged one recently, and the antique wood on all three rings had been replaced with a modern practice mat, the kind used in the Olympics for martial arts. They were easily replaceable, in case my claws came out again, forgiving to body slams, and less abrasive than most older-style mats. They had the classic tatami texture and smooth surface, giving better traction, but also had an antiskid, rubberized, waffle backing. The mats also eliminated odors, decreasing the reek of stale vamp and human sweat, looked better than the scarred wood, and were versatile enough for standing arts and grappling arts—meaning sword practice and hand-to-hand. Also, a final plus, blood washed out of them easily.
It was close to dawn, so there should be no vamps in the room, only humans, but I smelle
d Leo, the chief fanghead, and the city’s Mercy Blade, Gee DiMercy. He pronounced the name something like Zjeee, which sounded Frenchy. It was the misericord’s job to kill young vamp scions when they didn’t cure after the devoveo, the ten years or so of insanity that every human went through when turned. Not all of them made it. Until recently, humans made a bad bet when hoping to be turned, assuming that they would survive to the sane and blood-sucking stage. The odds hadn’t been great. However, things change, and Leo’s scions were now waking up sane and in control years before other masters’ scions did. Another reason the EVs wanted to conquer the American vamps—to gain control of the one vampire who could shorten the devoveo (the time between when humans were turned and when they regained sanity) from an average of ten years to around two. Of all the things the EVs wanted, Amy Lynn Brown might be the most important.
I didn’t see Leo at first. He was sitting against the wall on the bleachers with his new personal assistant, Lee. He had taken my advice and freed up his primo for important stuff, taking on the redheaded, perky Lee Williams Watts. Or maybe the last names were reversed. I no longer did the background checks on people and so I missed a lot of minutiae that I didn’t need to know, and sometimes the bigger, important stuff that I did need. Watts looked sweet on the surface, but there was something about her that said she was a firecracker when she got mad, and it wasn’t just the red hair. She was a tiny little thing, but I’d be moving slowly around her until we were better acquainted. She looked scrappy.
Their heads were together while she took notes the old-fashioned way, on a spiral notebook with a pen in what looked like honest-to-God shorthand, not a skill many had these days. Her eyes looked stormy and tightly focused and she was scribbling furiously. Like an accountant with superpowers.
Eli walked a little ahead of me, to one side. I followed in his wake, passing the fighting rings where Gee was teaching two security types to fight with the sword. At the same time. A sword in each hand, he was keeping them both occupied as they tried to prevent their armor and their bodies, protected beneath, from being cut into nice even ribbons of bleeding flesh. It was like dancing, maybe some violent love child of the flamenco and the tango.
Eli nodded to Leo, a little head tilt granting Leo temporary command status. Very temporary. Eli and Leo both shifted their attention to me and I was about to speak when something changed in the air. Eli shouted, “Jane!”
I threw myself to the floor, twisting my body into a horizontal roll, taking the fall on shoulder and outer foot. Hearing my shoe crack the wood. Smelling Gee DiMercy. Feeling a sword slice the air beside my face. I’m being attacked. I rolled behind the metal bleachers. Attacked by Leo’s Mercy Blade.
Ambush hunter! Beast shouted. Her fury flamed, an adrenaline rush of heat blazing through me and away, out through my hand on the floor. Gone. Every hint of her speed and strength flooded out of me in an instant. Which was wrong, so very wrong. It was such a shock that I nearly fell. Beast took over, shoving both hands to the floor, catching my balance, my feet sliding up under me in a move that was pure cat, but . . . still off somehow. As if pained.
And the Mercy Blade was attacking me. Why?
I felt as much as saw Eli toss me his sword. My right hand lurched up and snatched the sword out of the air. The hilt slammed into my palm, and my fingers closed over it. Instantly I recognized it. The grip perfect for my hand. My sword. Not Eli’s.
Instead of forcing a partial change on me, or making time slow and bubble so we could get inside Gee’s reach, Beast snarled and drew in tight, deep within, sitting, hunched, shivering. Her inaction divided my attention, for a fraction of a moment.
Clumsy, I parried a cut—rude by vamp standards—and bounded to my feet, sliding left and cutting right, an ungainly backhand cut before finding the circular form of La Destreza, also known as the Spanish Circle form of sword fighting. I spun my sword in a circle around me, backing to the wall to protect my flank. As I adjusted to the shelter offered by brick and mortar, my sword flashed left to right and right to left, steel clanging on steel, ringing bright and sharp on the air, always in an arc, the blade encompassing an oval around my body. But I wasn’t wearing fighting leathers and my jacket was too tight across the shoulders for full range of motion.
And weirdly my left palm burned, the one that had been scanned earlier. My empty hand felt as if I were holding a red-hot branding iron.
Inside me, I felt Beast lift her left paw and shake it. She growled in anger. Screamed in fury. Finally Beast’s strength and speed touched me, adrenaline pumping into my blood, far too slowly, but damping the weird pain and making me faster than human. Nearly as fast as Gee. But nearly wasn’t good enough, because Gee wasn’t human either.
The Mercy Blade was an Anzu, birdlike beings once worshipped as storm gods. He had centuries of fighting experience and two long swords to my one. They sketched a cage of death around him that made my weapon useless. My body bladed, I slid my hand into my false pocket and pulled the silver-plated, steel-edged vamp-killer, a shorter blade than usual.
Seeing my new weapon, Gee rotated his blades even faster, an inhuman speed of glinting, blurred steel. His swords moved faster and faster, a flashing light all around him, our blades clanging, the scent of excitement from the spectators rising on the vamp and Anzu-scented air. Despite myself, I laughed, a low growl of soft sound. Within me, Beast’s four paws were pulled close in beneath her, a snarl on her face, her killing teeth showing. The growl in my laughter was hers.
The Circle was based on rotation, body angle, geometry, and foot placement, and my dancing shoes weren’t giving me purchase on the slick floor. The mats were too far to reach. Alive, that is. But then I didn’t intend to play fair. Though there were no rules in the Duel Sang—the Blood Challenge of the Mithrans—there was protocol and a long history of expectation. Cheating was my best weapon, but cheating only worked once.
Gee shifted his feet into an advanced move, one sword still whirling, the other a lunge, lunge, lunge as he tried to turn me away from the wall so he could circle me and force me into an open area. Not gonna happen. But sword fighting wasn’t second nature to me yet, and Gee had probably been born with a sword in his hand. Or hatched that way.
As Gee completed atajo and thrust, the most basic move, I swung into the lunge with my short blade as if to begin the move medio tajo y medio reves. But I caught one of Gee’s swords on the vamp-killer’s notch—barely a quarter inch deep—below the Ricasso and above the minuscule cross-guard. I swept the sword away, into the air. Gee started to react, but before he could, I slipped inside his blades. Brought my sword up in a thrust for his neck.
My left palm burned, agony detonating up my arm as I moved. Gee’s eyes blazed unusually blue, the color of the cloudless sky in the east, as the sun set in the west. Blue, blue, achingly blue.
I heard the clang of his right blade hitting the floor. In the same moment I felt the piercing burn under my right arm. Up. Inside me. I hissed in a breath that burned like ice and sleet and cutting steel. I caught a whiff of burning hair, acrid and vile.
I grunted and Gee swept his blade out of me, the sharp edge slicing into rib, the pain a frisson of shock.
Beast grunted softly. So did I.
From somewhere far away, I heard Eli say, “Jane?” Worry and shock in the tone. Then a demand, “Leo!”
Gee stepped back, sheathed his third sword, the short sword he had hidden in his clothes or with his glamour, and picked up his discarded long sword. His eyes were still blazing that strange, too-bright blue. Magic, I thought. The entire room had fallen silent, a shocked, nonbreathing silence, when you hear a pin drop.
Blood ran under my clothes, pooling in my waistband before trickling down and into the crack of my buttocks. Warm. Cooling in the cold air. A lot of blood. I reached again for Beast, knowing I needed to shift, to change into Puma concolor, my mountain lion form. I stretched down into the dee
ps of me. Beast hissed and snarled, chuffing as if at a challenge. Growling in anger. Dalonige i digadoli, she thought at me. My Cherokee name. Come.
But I couldn’t find her. Worse, I couldn’t find me. I fumbled deeper. I still couldn’t find the twined snake of genetic material, the snake at the heart of all creatures. It had changed recently, but it had always been there, my lifeline, my weapon of last resort. But this time the RNA strands, even twisted and damaged, weren’t there.
And I remembered again waking up to the tingle of magic in my fist, burning deep. The odd reek of burning hair. Oh, crap. What had happened?
Eli cursed, softly, far, far away.
Gee said, “Atajo, then step into medio proporcional. The European Mithrans will not allow you a trick. There is not one they have not used.”
I dropped to my knees. Raised my left hand. In the center of my palm, an eye appeared. A blue eye, as if it had been tattooed in the palm of my hand. It was staring up at me. I had seen it before, when I first met Gee DiMercy. It was his watching magic. As fast as it appeared, it faded, the blues going green, the color of the witches’ green magics, a green eye looking up at me, blinking, seeming to take in something about me, maybe more than I wanted anyone to know. And then it faded further, like an old tattoo, dispersing into my skin or vaporizing into the air.
A line of red soaked from my pants and spread beside my knee. The stink of burning hair faded, to be replaced by the stench of human fear and shame and my blood. Odd.
“Jane,” Eli said. Toneless. Combat voice. I heard the familiar schnick of a nine-mil being readied for firing.
“I smell Jane’s blood,” Leo growled. He was suddenly standing beside Gee and Eli, vamped out. His black eyes on me at his feet.
A drop of blood fell from my waist and landed in the scarlet pool on the floor at my knee. I lifted my eyes to Eli. His face was expressionless, harder than stone. The weapon was in both hands, pointing beyond me. “This is bad,” I whispered. Eli shifted his aim, a minuscule change.