“Sooo.” I thought as I watched him dance with the sword, knowing I’d never get a cut through the circling blade. “Cheating is acceptable.”
“Indeed. One may—”
Two-fingered, I pulled a throwing knife and flipped it at him. For once, I hit what I was aiming at. The steel blade embedded itself into Gee DiMercy’s chest, slightly left of where a human’s heart would be. If he had a heart.
Just like the last time I stabbed him, light sparkled out, downy blue mist, soft and bright. The mist had weight and texture. A blast of heat followed, stinking of cauterized blood and burned evergreen. Charred jasmine. Unlike the last time I stabbed him, when Gee had been asleep, no dark bloodred wings unfurled. I didn’t get a glimpse of a dark-sapphire-feathered beast with crimson breast and wings, claws like spear points, glinting at wing tips and feet. His blood, trapped by the cloth of his gi, didn’t splatter like liquid flowers, perfume like rainbows hitting the ground. No sparks shot up where the blossoms landed. There was none of that. But the air around his body flashed a faint shade of blue for a splintered moment. Had I not been watching so closely, I would have missed it.
The mist retreated, fast as a flinch, and the punch of power snapped at me, electric and solid. It hurt, even though I was farther away this time, and was expecting the reaction. I felt/heard a sharp, sizzling hiss. If he’d been human, I might have killed him. But he wasn’t. Gee was something else entirely. Whatever he was, the layers of glamour around him reacted negatively to steel. He had been expecting me this time. But he hadn’t expected exactly what he’d gotten.
“First blood. Cheating. With two blades,” I said. “Like that?”
“First blood to the Enforcer,” Leo said, his voice coming from the side, where the spectators sat, amusement in his voice. “Does our Enforcer’s methodology fit within the parameters of the rules of etiquette?”
Gee pulled the weapon from his flesh and his padded suit. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it back to me. Had Beast not been so close in my mind, I might have gotten stuck. Instead, I batted the flying claw out of the air and down to the ground. With the new blade. Gee chortled, delighted. “Excellent. You will learn quickly, my little goddess. Or not.”
Crap. I was gonna learn how to fight with swords. And I didn’t know whether Gee’s or not meant that I’d learn fast or not, or that I was his goddess or not. Either way, I was so in trouble.
Behind me I heard mocking laughter. Without turning, I said, “I’ll kick your butt for that one, Eli.”
“You can try,” my partner said, still taunting. “I’m just glad I’m not the part-time Enforcer. Somebody’s gonna be sore.”
I was taught the positions for my feet for the Spanish Circle and how to step into a lunge. I was not taught how to parry, which I guessed was a move for wusses. And once I halfway had the basic moves in my mind, if not in my muscle memory, I was slapped half to death with the flat, beat with the dulled edge, and stuck with the point of Gee’s sword. I was disarmed, tripped, elbowed, tapped numerous times—over a kidney from the back or into my gut from the front—light blows and shallow cuts that would have killed me had they been delivered with any intent. Gee made me pay for first blood with a host of bruises and a little blood when I turned wrong and his short sword caught my arm. Skinwalker blood added to the vamp stench of the room. Once upon a time that had bothered me. A lot. Now I had no reaction at all to the smell of my blood in a room full of vamps.
As soon as I was warmed up—his words, warmed up, more like sweating like a horse—we sparred. The next six hours were a blur. Okay, maybe not really six hours, but it felt like it. I was dripping with sweat when the sparring-practice session was over, and yes. I was sore.
Beast was elated. Beast likes long claw, she murmured to me. More.
“No more,” I gasped, wiping the sweat from my eyes. “I’m done.”
“Accepted,” Gee said, dropping his practice blades. “Tomorrow we will practice the same moves, study three more, and then spar for thirty minutes.”
“Yeah?” I brightened. “I can do thirty.”
“Excellent. Today you managed only twelve,” Gee said, swatting me one last time across my butt. Hard.
“Owww. What was that for?” I asked, rubbing my backside.
“For being so very out of shape.”
“Me! Bleeding and bruised all over, but not out of shape.” I pulled on my Beast and skinwalker magics, a small tug of gray energies, to help me get out the door. I am not out of shape.
Eli laughed. Evil man. But he took my weapons, which now weighed about forty pounds each, and carried them, along with my discarded leathers, toward the door. Out of shape? It had been a while since I lifted weights with the Youngers, but out of shape?
Just as we reached the hallway door, a prickle of danger danced along my skin, burning through the drying sweat on the damp, elastic fabric of my clothing. I stepped in front of Eli and grabbed the long sword from his lax grip. “Gun,” I whispered.
He didn’t argue or ask questions. He slapped a nine-mil into my hand and pulled his own weapons as I whipped my eyes across the gym. People were everywhere, three pairs on the sparring mats, Leo and Gee together, Grégoire and Bruiser together, Del and a young vamp named Liam, all with blades, sparring. What I was feeling wasn’t coming from them.
“What?” Eli asked, his voice dropping low, his body tightening all over, the way an animal pulls inward just before the pounce.
Heat and light danced into the room, tingling on my skin. My body flooded with adrenaline, my eyes darting everywhere at once. Something was coming. Coming fast. “Magic!” I shouted. “Leo! Gee! Bruiser! Beware!”
There was a glint across the room, a glistening brilliance, yet no one looked up. At the back door, the light-being flowed through and into the room, snaking along the ceiling, a sparkling hint of rainbows and shadow. I pointed. “Lillilend,” I said.
Eli grunted, not disagreeing, but not able to see it in the gray place of the change where energy and matter might be the same thing. Moving as one, we dashed back toward the center of the room. Eli holstered his gun and pulled blades. I realized he was right. You can’t shoot something made of light. Or you could, the same way you could aim and pull the trigger at the sun. But you weren’t gonna do it any damage.
I wasn’t sure what good blades would do either, but between one step and the next, I shoved the useless gun into my waistband and accepted a vamp-killer from my always-armed second, fourteen inches of silver-plated, razor-edged steel to back up the practice weapon’s blunted steel. Most magical beings had an aversion to some sort of metal, and I thought the lillilend’s metal allergy was to steel.
The lillilend sped around the room, fast as an eyeblink, its body tight against the ceiling, hissing with anger. Eli released the useless bundle of my leathers and leaped over the pile it made without breaking stride.
Just ahead, the sparring partners raised weapons and bladed their bodies as if we were the danger. “Above!” I shouted, pointing.
Overhead, the light-being whipped around the vents and fixtures, wings spread, like something Disney might have envisioned if he’d taken a dose of LSD, backed up with a serving of psilocybin mushrooms, and a quart of tequila. It flashed into the visible range, a rippling of light and shadow, with human-shaped head, rows of shark teeth that glinted like pearls, transparent wings in all the colors of the rainbow, and a frill around its head in copper, brown, and pale white. Its body was vaguely snakelike, with iridescent scales the color of tinted glass and thick smoke and hints of copper. It smelled like green herbs burning over hot coals and the tang of fish and water plants. The thought came out of nowhere—Dragon of Light . . .