Eli met us there and handed me my bag of weapons, one hand holding Bruiser back. I left the men there, but my hearing was better than human, and I heard Eli say, “You hurt her and I’ll skin you alive and feed your carcass to the wild boars in the swamps. You copy?”
“I do. And I’ll break your arm if you ever accost me again. Civilized discourse is acceptable. Your hand upon my person is not.”
“Be nice, boys,” I called over my shoulder. “Be nice or I’ll beat both your butts.” Yeah. That’ll show them. I changed clothes in the ladies’ locker room, donning my second-best fighting leathers over Lycra undies—full-length leggings and a long-sleeved tight tee over the jogging bra. I now had two sets of black leathers, but this pair had already been repaired a time or two. Both sets were augmented by a thin layer of sterling silver–plated titanium chain mail, with hard plastic at the outer elbows and knees, the kind developed and worn by the Taiwanese military. Star Wars stuff. Bullet resistant all over. Fire resistant. The titanium chain-mail choker, I’d only recently discovered, was called a gorget. Who knew? This was my old fighting gear, soiled with blood and sweat and the smell of victory. The new gear was even better. And pretty, though I’d never say so aloud.
I slid into low combat boots with steel toes and rubber soles and a slit for a backup weapon in each boot shaft. Eli had packed no knives, so I assumed we were going for hand-to-hand fighting tonight, but I slid the stakes and blades I had worn under my skirt into my fighting clothes. I wasn’t stupid.
My hair was braided by a blood-servant who plaited it like a horse’s tail, into a club and then back up and into a bun bigger than my fist. I admired myself in the mirror over the sinks. I looked . . . yeah. Spiffy. Deadly, but spiffy.
I walked into the gym, which was, as usual, set for sparring practice. The scents were overwhelming for a moment—vamp, blood, humans. Sex. With vamps it was always blood and sex together. The big room had basketball goals and indentions intended to hold poles for a tennis net. Not that I’d ever seen them in use. It was weapons and fighting all the way in fanghead-land. As always, spectators lined the bleacher-style seating along one wall. Others clustered at the door on the far side, one I’d never been through. I made a mental note to check security there. The usual. However, one thing was new.
Weapons practice had never before included Grégoire or Girrard DiMercy. It had also never included swords. Two guys were in a sword ring fighting. Each man had two swords, and they were both bleeding through the padded white suits they were wearing. The smell of vamp blood and Gee’s blood mingled in a magical miasma that half of me thought tasty and the other half thought a little terrifying.
Beast leaned forward into my eyes. Long claws, steel and silver. Good claws. Want long claws.
“No way am I using a sword,” I muttered to her under my breath. It took years to master a sword. But Gee DiMercy and my Beast had other ideas and they didn’t mesh with my own.
CHAPTER 7
LSD . . . Psilocybin Mushrooms and . . . Tequila
“En garde, little goddess!” he shouted, and tossed me a sword through the air, hilt first, the way he’d tossed a sword to Leo. Beast reared up in me, flooding me with adrenaline and strength. Time fractured, seeming to slow and thicken. The room went brighter and greener, sharper, Beast’s sight meshing with my own.
As it flew through the air, I saw the way the hilt was made, the cross guard curving around to protect the wielder’s hand; the hilt itself was braided with leather for a firm grip. A narrow, thin, flat blade, the double edge constructed of blunted steel, for teaching and practice—not sharp, with no silver plating that could accidently harm a vamp. But didn’t classes usually start with wood swords?
Beast in charge, I stepped forward. My hand lifted into the air, moving with a languid ease, to slide fingers through the cross guard and around the hilt. The sword’s weight shifted out of the air as gravity and momentum shoved it firmly into my palm. Good claw. Fight with long claw, Beast thought.
But I had no idea how. I was a knife fighter. What Beast called her steel claws. Or a knife thrower, Beast’s flying claws. Not Beast’s long claw. Time slapped me in the face as my fingers tightened on the hilt and I whirled, feeling the weight and length of the blade as I pirouetted with it. Claw like long tail, Beast thought at me. Good for leaping. Good for balance. Good long claw. And I laughed. Around me, I felt the others, the onlookers, grow silent.
“Your Web page information suggested that you were ‘unrated in swordplay.’ Today we shall rate you.”
That sounded ominous. I said, “I’m unrated because I don’t know how to use a long sword at all. Only short swords, fourteen-inch vampire-killers. So can we skip this?”
“No.”
That was short and sweet.
“This is the proper way to hold a long sword,” Gee DiMercy said. “Feet thus, spine thus, knees and sword thusly.”
I walked closer, out of sword range, but close enough to study his weight distribution and the exact position of his feet. I copied his posture. And felt like an idiot. The sword was too long, too unwieldy. And my leathers were too constricting. I held up a hand like a traffic cop to tell him to stop and kicked off the boots, pulled off the jacket and the pants, trying not to notice the reactions of the others as I did so. The sudden silence. The sound of a slow breath taken nearby. It might have been Leo but I didn’t look to see. I didn’t even look at Eli when he appeared at my side to take my clothes. Eli was my second. It felt right to have him there, and I relaxed, shaking out my arms. I was standing there in bare feet, a long length of tight black spandex, and a sword. I rolled my shoulders to loosen up.
Leo appeared at my side and gave me a second blade, this one also dull-edged, but shorter, with a groove on the back of the blade for hooking an opponent’s weapon and pulling it away. This smaller blade felt good in my hand, nearly familiar, having the heft and balance of a vamp-killer. Leo smelled strange, his scent acrid and harsh, like rose thorns, but I didn’t look at him. Not while I was trying to find the balance of the weapons. Though they were of differing lengths, they were of similar weights, so the balance that my mind insisted was not there, was actually present.
“You will begin lessons in La Destreza, also known as the Spanish Circle,” Gee said. He spun his sword in a slow circle around him, behind him, left to right, always in an arc, the blade sketching and encompassing a sphere around his body. It sketched a cage of death anywhere his weapon reached. And then he sped it up. The blade moved faster and faster, until it was a flashing light all around him. I was going to be taught by the Obi-Wan of steel blades. Despite myself, my grin spread. I was either gonna hate it or love it.
“The books of history and books of teaching were incorrect,” he said, his body not tensing or pausing. “There is nothing stiff or static about La Destreza. It is fluid, smooth, like the flow of water or oil across an object. I will teach you the forms. You will practice. Many, many hours each day. You will be challenged to les Duels Sang by the Enforcers of our visitors. You will be expected to comport yourself well on the field of battle.”
“Okay. So I’ve got, like, three months to learn what the rest of them will have studied for centuries.” I handed the short blade back to Leo. I figured one at a time was smart, and the unfamiliar one first was smarter. “What are the rules?”
“Other than proper etiquette, there are few rules,” Gee said, his blade slowing. “One may fight with one blade or two, though two is more common. And most formal challenges are to first blood, though some few are to true-death. Deception and duplicity are looked upon with approval, as La Destreza—as the Mithrans practice it—is as much a mental game as a physical one.”