“Why do I need to follow you?” I asked, my lips feeling numb. Edmund was being tortured. I could hear his screams through the soundproofed door. I placed a hand on the door, as if I could ease his pain through the steel.
“Your two best fighters are down and out,” Shiloh said. “Koun is slated to fight seconds after this bout, so he can’t fight this one.”
“She’s trying to tell you that I accepted my own duel,” Eli said. He descended the last four steps and stopped beside me.
The acid in my stomach boiled. “Why?” I whispered.
Shiloh said, “Challenger is Lucrezia Borgia. Eli Younger chose weapons.”
“I picked matching German Sig Sauer P320s,” Eli said.
“Naturellement, I contested such barbarism,” the female vamp behind him said. “However, the priestess has denied my disputation.”
I recognized the woman. Hers was one of the histories I’d studied in preparation for the EVs’ visit, a VIV, very important vamp. She shouldn’t have been on the roster until later tonight at the worst. Tomorrow at best. And Gee or Ed should have been fighting her. Not Eli. I followed Shiloh down the stairs, not sure why we were going down and not up. My brain was wrapped in cotton. Ed was screaming. I could still hear him.
Shiloh said, “Lucrezia Borgia chose death.”
My boots halted on the stairs. I came to a stop, my mind flashing with useless information. Lucrezia was the illegitimate child of a pope and his mistress, in the early 1500s, and had become an assassin for Titus. She was a master at hundreds of weapons. Her dossier said that she practiced all night every night, with blades and firearms. I was so cold at the thought that my head started buzzing and nausea boiled in my gut. The P320 was a brand-new modular weapon, a serialized gun. It could be modified to shoot nine-millimeter loads, altered quickly to fire .357 Sig, .40 S&W, or even .45 ACP—automatic Colt pistol.
No matter how good vamps were, there were always weapons old vamps hadn’t fired, because they figured the ones they were most familiar with were the best. This was sometimes true, sometimes not. There was a chance, a small chance, Lucrezia had never fired this modular and wouldn’t have the muscle memory to make her a perfect shot. I started my feet moving again, down. Down to the death rings.
Eli was standing on the front porch, moonlight brightening the world around him, making his black leathers seem darker, as if he himself were a pathway into the underworld. I set my eyes on him, but he didn’t look back, though he surely had to feel the weight of my gaze. He led the way down the steps.
We were halfway down to the beach when Shiloh said to me, “The duel is at forty paces, twenty each, approximately one hundred feet, depending on stride. Since it’s with firearms, it’s all very methodical and according to protocol covered in codicils other than the Sangre Duello.”
I walked away from Shiloh, across the sand, following Eli. He was breathing slowly. The pulse in his neck was equally slow. Zen. Warrior face on. But he smelled—strangely—of excitement and joy. On the beach, the gulf’s waves curled on the sand. Lightning split and danced in the distant sky, a storm so far away it looked as if the clouds and water were one. With Beast-sight I studied the building cloud. Not magic lightning. Just one of the ubiquitous storms on gulf water. Thunder rolled in with the waves, long and low. The tide was high, making the beach a narrow strip. The wind was cold, and I shivered as it needled its way through my clothes.
Eli bent to his second. That second couldn’t be me, so Tex had accepted that position, and they spoke in voices I might have heard had I tried. Brute trotted across the sand to me and stuck his nose into my crotch.
I batted him away. “Stop that.”
He chuffed with laughter and sat close beside me. A moment later he leaned his entire body against me, from calf to hip, in what was clearly an attempt to comfort me. I could feel his panting breaths and his body heat through the leather uniform and I realized how cold I was. Probably shocky. Because I couldn’t help my people. And Eli was facing a warrior who had been fighting and shooting for centuries.
I scratched Brute’s head between his ears. “Dang werewolf.”
He chuffed in agreement.
Lucrezia was a pretty woman with golden hair and blue-green eyes. She looked way younger than her stated age when turned, and I figured she had been changed a decade or so prior to her reported death and her human self had been replaced with another woman. It was likely that replacement human was the woman recorded by history as having gained a huge amount of weight while supposedly grieving a dead husband, and died young.
Brute’s head on my leg, I stood to the side and watched the combatants, standing back-to-back. Snatches of instructions came to me on the wind. Eli and Lucrezia shook hands. Tex shook Lucrezia’s second’s hand, a human who had been fed on and had been sipping vamp blood for over two hundred years. She was currently known as Whimsical Lou. Stupid name, but that was what the second called herself. Whimsical Lou, No Last Name. The seconds walked out to the positions where their firsts would likely stand, and waited. Eli and Lucrezia stood back-to-back.
The moonlight was a long streak across the choppy water, ahead of the storm. I heard a distant bell-tone and Eli and Lucrezia strode away from one another, Shiloh counting off the paces. On his last pace, Eli stepped quickly to the side. They turned and fired, but Eli was a foot to the side of where he should have been. Lucrezia’s shot missed. Eli’s hit her chest, just left of midcenter. She screamed in that sound of a vamp dying, though it was all drama queen.
They had used standard ammo so the shot would fly true over the distance. She’d live.
I laughed in relief, the sound billowing on the wind and out to sea. The smell of Lucrezia’s blood sharp on the air.
Eli had survived and won his bout. Except that this was supposed to be to the death. He strode toward the downed vamp.
And then time broke in slow motion.
Time in battle is subjective, thick and viscous like taffy. An avalanche of images.
Brute snarled.
Beast leaped into the forefront of my brain, screaming challenge.
In agonizing, protracted fragments of time, Lucrezia’s second, Whimsical Lou, took two long steps into the dueling space, drew a long-barreled handgun. Aimed. Fired.
The round hit Eli. Midcenter. I could see it as it pierced his leather jacket.
Beast screamed. I/we leaped, raced down the sand. Grew claws with my right hand. Drew a blade with my left. The blade took the Whimsical second through the right eye. The claws tore out her throat. All while in midair. She fell. Rolled into the low waves, dark in the moonlight. A shot rang in the night, taking Lou in the chest. Tex, holding his six-shooter, fired again. Lucrezia fell. Tex stood over her. Firing until the chamber was empty. Time snapped back.
I rose from the landing crouch and sprinted to Eli, my combat boots crunching, throwing sand. Eli wasn’t moving, lying on the shore, facedown, head to the side. One arm twisted, outstretched in the slight surf, clear salty bubbles pooling in his palm. My body was so cold it felt like a shard of iceberg. Tears filled my lids and clung there as if holding on to the rims of frozen cliff faces.
I heard Shiloh ask calmly, “Have the deceased signed papers to be turned?”
Bruiser’s voice, sounding cool and distant, said, “Lucrezia is true-dead, as is Whimsical Lou. The judges await status of Eli Younger.”
I knelt, rolled Eli over, placed a hand on his chest, and . . . felt a heartbeat. Didn’t smell blood. I leaned in and sniffed, a long cat-scree of sound, pulling in air over my tongue. No blood. I pressed down on his chest, feeling the kind of armor Uncle Sam’s men wore to war, not just armor against blades, but against bullets. My tears spilled onto his face. I put my mouth at his ear and hissed, “If you’re not dead, I may kill you for scaring me to death.”
“Sorry, Babe.” The words were a breath against my cheek, his lips scarcely moving. “Just remembering how to breathe.”
I thought I might pass out from the relief that rammed through me. I shouted to the wind, “He’s alive. Eli will not be turned.”
“Never wanted to drink blood,” he gasped.
“Are you hit?” I whispered back, asking if the round penetrated the armor.