Shadow Rites

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 smelled 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.