Chapter Four #3
Our wooden Judoka sets were of finer-quality workmanship than the bastard wasters, hand-shaped from black ironwood, the edges blunt but hardened with fire. Well-balanced wooden practice Judoka were difficult to make. These were perfect.
While EJ had shown an early affinity and skill for hand-to-hand, my gift had been swords.
I clearly remembered the time I landed a crotch lunge on my godmother’s Mercy Blade.
It had been a proud day. I was eight. It was that small success that had set me on several paths and had led me here, to what passed for freedom: my own business and my own life, outside of our family coven and without a full royal protection detail.
Unfortunately, it had also resulted in a checkered past, multiple bodies left on the floor of battle, that pesky price on my head, and a suckhead ex-husband.
Without taking our eyes from each other, we bowed, both swords crossed, upright between us. My magic seemed to have a life of its own, staring through my eyes at my opponent with curiosity and bloodthirsty desire. My magic wanted Walter true-dead. I did not.
Walter attacked.
Before he even moved, I stepped back and braced my weight. Block, block, block. Lunge. Lunge. I whirled into the spinning, heavy arc of a death strike and stabbed into Walter’s gut. Spun out, my longsword hitting his neck. Whispering, “Death strike.”
“Beautiful,” Walter said.
Beautiful. I could almost feel my battle magic preen. Which was odd.
“Again,” he said, “and this time I’ll block the tanto strike.”
“You can try,” I said, again showing teeth, holding my magic close, but now more like a lover than a horse or dragon.
We started from the beginning. When we reached the moment when I had stepped into Walter’s arc, I stabbed.
His tanto came up, faster than I could react to the precog.
It speared into my solar plexus. Pain shot through me like lightning.
My breath whoofed out. His longsword came down and touched my neck.
“Two death strikes,” he said. “Your battle magic is stunning. You are as fast as a Mithran when it comes upon you.”
My magic still wanted to kill him.
To keep that from happening, I opened my hands, and the wooden swords fell to the fighting mat to either side.
I dropped to my butt on the rubberized mat.
Rubbing my neck and upper stomach, I said, “Okay.” Barely managing to keep a note of complaint and pain out of my voice, I added, “That freaking hurt.”
Scorn in his tone, Walter said, “It was supposed to hurt. Life’s best lessons hurt.”
My magic bucked at the taunting. I had to rein it in.
Deliberately baiting my control, he added, “Stop sniveling, you bratty urchin. Get up, and let’s walk through the moves so you can avoid being killed.”
My magic roiled through me, a fire-breathing dragon, far more deadly than the queen’s scarlet dragon, Longfellow. “Sniveling?” I asked, my voice snaky as her flying lizard. “Bratty?”
“Brats snivel,” he said.
I let the power flow, holding it, directing it, riding it. My magic seemed to whisper, This is pleasure. More.
That was weird. Magic didn’t talk. My breathing evened out. Calm descended on me. I stood and took up a stance.
“Good, Angelina. Excellent control. I am pleased.”
We ran through several moves, then put them together in a sequence. It was new to me but with Walter’s help, I could see how to fit the move into the proper steps, how to block the move, and how to incorporate it into others.
“Okay. I got it,” I said.
Walter attacked. The wooden swords and vamp-killers clacked rapidly, solid powerful raps, violently brutal, relentless.
Blocking over and over, my swords circled in a ring of death, trying to penetrate Walter’s own arcs.
We danced across the small area of the traditional fighting ring.
Around and around. Back and forth. My magic raced, feeding my strikes, sharpening my vision and my pre-awareness of Walter’s moves.
Fast. Vamp-fast. Faster than I could process with my human mind. I was at the mercy of my magic. The sound of clacking swords was like castanets. Magic fed my body.
After forty-five seconds—a very long match—Walter lunged and touched my chest with his sword. It was more like a solid hammer blow, and it knocked me to my butt, rolling me out of the ring.
“Again,” Walter said. “This time use what you see. Stop my blows. Use your bloody magic, girl!”
“Yessss,” my magic hissed.
I folded my legs, tilted my body forward, and unfolded myself, levering up without using my hands. Still trying to get my breath, I attacked.
In two moves, Walter was down. My wooden longsword at his throat. My foot on his sword arm.
His tanto was at my knee.
Walter laughed in glee.
I had never heard his human laughter, happy, joyful. At the sound, my magic vanished. The lights, the colors, the knowings disappeared, dissolved into real time. Into reality.
I stepped back, exhausted. Shaking. Gasping. I had never caught the breath he had knocked out of me. My limbs were so heavy they felt as if I were wearing weights.
“Your magic is gone?” Walter asked.
I nodded, wanting to fall to the floor and moan. The room began to spin.
Overhead, Ojos issued a loud bing. The British butler voice said, “Someone has stepped to the front entrance of the private residences.”
“Ojos,” Walter said, “on screen.”
The NFL game disappeared. On the screen a female form in a long winter coat and carrying a large cloth bag stood at the apartments’ front door. Not The Firm’s business front door, which was only a few steps away. All we could see was the top of her head until she lifted her face toward the bell.
The woman was wearing a formfitting red dress beneath her unbuttoned coat, a clear invitation in the cold wind. She was a brunette, dark eyed with a narrow face, lovely. She pressed the bell.
“Looks familiar. Do you know her?” I asked Walter, trying to control my breath enough to not sound as if I were dying. I wasn’t successful.
“Yes. Londyn Simms,” Walter said.
He wasn’t even breathing hard. He wasn’t breathing at all. Dang bloodsucker.
“She runs the tea shop down the street,” Walter said, his voice unconcerned.
He hadn’t gone all mesmeric, using the steel tone of his protective mode. I staggered to my left and leaned against the wall, trying to catch up on my breathing. Hoping for my heart to slow down some. Trying to pretend I didn’t hurt all over.
“Evan Junior has been having relations with her.”
“Ohhh.” I was seriously grossed out but hid it. My brother had hormones. I knew that, but it was disgusting. “Just sex or love interest?” I asked. EJ had casual relationships, nothing more, but who knew. It could happen someday.
Walter chuckled, the sound truly amused. “I don’t believe his heart is involved, only his—”
“Got it,” I said, holding up a hand like a stop sign. Like most vamps, Walter spoke about sex openly and casually, but I didn’t want to hear that about my baby brother. “Ojos. Is EJ still in the ice bath?”
“Evan Junior is in the ice bath again,” Ojos said. “He is alternating between the steam room and the ice.”
Ojos had given me information I hadn’t asked for, which always creeped me out. It was too human.
My brother must be in a lot of pain. He needed to heal. For that matter, so did I. To Walter, I said, “I’ll handle it.”
“Or I could.” He vamped out fast, his jaw unhinging, his fangs clicking down on their small hinges, his eyes bleeding scarlet with wide, black pupils.
“We’ll save the scary vampire for next time. If there is a next time.”
Dinner with Constance and fighting my battle magic had left Walter acting spicier than usual, inside and outside the ring.
I grabbed a towel from a stool and took the elevator to my apartment, where I grabbed an amulet off the kitchen island, and took the elevator to the ground floor.
The metal door opened and I stepped out, my bare feet cold on the navy-painted cement of the entry hallway.
Winter was coming with a vengeance. I needed to check the forecast.
Across from me, the door to the fire escape stairs opened. Walter had followed me anyway. Thankfully, he stood behind the wall and didn’t come to my side, all vampy scary. I pressed my amulet and walked to the entry.
Opening the front door, I held it, blocking the way. The woman was even prettier close up: pale skin, black hair, color-enhanced green eyes. “May I help you?” I asked.
Londyn said, “I’m here to see EJ Everhart-Trueblood. He’s one of the owners. He’s expecting me.”
“No, he isn’t.”
Her emerald eyes narrowed, hot with reaction. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m saying you’re wrong. If that makes you a liar, that’s your problem.”
“Who are you?” Londyn asked, a nasty curl of jealousy in the question.
I was giving this woman nothing. Her tone set my teeth on edge, and there was also a faint curl of magic seeping from her pocket. An amulet carried in secret on a human woman who wanted my brother was not to be trusted. At all. “EJ is not available tonight.”
“We have a date.”
“No. You don’t. And if you did, it was canceled.” I let a small smile cross my lips, but rise no higher. “EJ doesn’t make mistakes. Go away.”
I started to pull the door closed, and the woman slid her foot in the crack. Oldest trick in the book. “I don’t know who you are, but EJ and I have been dating for three months.”
“You’re right on one part. You don’t know who I am.
” I stamped my bare heel down on the woman’s toes, and when Londyn gasped and withdrew her foot, I closed the door and pressed the indentation on the keypad that alerted all tenants to an unwanted person at the door.
The alarm also let them know that security had handled the intrusion.
I turned my back on the woman and walked away.
From behind the L-turn at the stairs and the elevator, Walter said, “That was oddly harsh. Why?”