Not knowing what else to do (and feeling a sense of disaster in the worsening storm), I stopped humans to talk about the weather. I wasn’t the chatty type, but their surprise at my noticing them seemed odd. I always noticed—the way they moved, the way they smelled—I just didn’t engage in useless conversation. Even now. This convo about the weather was important because the weather was not acting like itself. Not that the humans had noticed. No one had any ideas about the weird storms, and most locals pointed to the fact that New Orleans always had weird weather. “What’s new?” was the most common reaction. As the minutes passed, I reached the lower levels, where the effect of the lightning was less. It seemed that being underground even a bit abated my magic’s reaction to it and the stuttering of time eased.
I ended up in the workout gym, where I discovered Gee teaching swordplay with two wooden sticks to an advanced student. The woman was Ro Moore, a self-proclaimed Alabama backwoods hillbilly, boxer, wrestler, and MMA cage fighter. Ro had no fear and didn’t believe that there were limits of any kind on her abilities. She was putting on a show for the gathered security types in the Spanish Circle form of sword fighting, also known as La Destreza. She’d be peppered with bruises tomorrow, because if Gee was holding back, it didn’t show. The clack of wood staves was so fast I had to pull on Beast-vision to follow. With each hit, Gee was whapping her hard, but the slender, muscular woman wasn’t backing up. She even managed three touches on Gee, which humans never did. I didn’t know which vamp she was drinking from, but whoever it was had given her remarkable strength and speed. Sword work seemed to be something Ro was born to do, her prominent shoulders, narrow waist, and long arms giving her a long reach, longer than Gee’s. But Gee was inhumanly fast. He backed her up a step. Then two.
Ro ducked beneath Gee’s staves, dropped to one knee, and swept her other leg out to impact Gee’s knee in a move I had learned in the dojo. Gee’s leg buckled and he nearly fell. Instead, he swept around and caught both of Ro’s practice sticks in his, did some kind of swivel motion, and ripped them from her hands. There was a collective intake of breath among the watchers and an instant of silence as the sticks flew. They smashed into the wall across the room in a clatter.
But by then Ro was dead. Not dead as in lifeless, but as in flat on her back, Gee’s staves at her throat, crossed for a scissors move that would have sliced her head off had the staves been blades and the fight been real. One of his feet was on her abdomen; the other pinned her right hand. She was immobilized. And Gee was ticked off.
“Who taught you this move, human?” Gee demanded.
“An old man named Clementine. A cage fighter who thought I showed promise.”
Gee backed away, crossed his staves in front of him, and bowed. “You have done well. Next time follow it up with a strike to the jaw and one to the heart. Go ice your knee. Drink from your mistress this evening. You will need healing, as will I.”
Ro rolled to her feet and backed away, far enough for Gee to miss if he was planning a sneak attack. She crossed her hands as if she still held staves and gave him a deeper bow, but without taking her eyes from him. Smart woman.
Gee was about to call the next student when I pulled my magics close to try to keep them steady and said, “A moment of the Mercy Blade’s time for the Enforcer?”
It was a formal request. I was getting good at using the ceremonial speech of vamps, which worked better than, “Hey you, Bird Brain. Got a minute?” My invitation was all proper and curly, like calligraphy of the mouth.
Gee scooped up Ro’s staves in addition to his own and headed my way. He was dressed in skintight black, his dark hair tied in a short queue, and he sauntered across the floor as the gathered humans dispersed into small groups. Gee was fine, despite the blow to his knee. Whatever Ro had kicked, it hadn’t been his real knee, but some other bird body part hidden by glamour. A lot of people now knew he was bird-shaped in his natural form, but he didn’t show that off unnecessarily.
Oddly, Troll, Katie’s primo, helped Ro out the back door, which claimed Ro for Katherine Fonteneau, aka Katherine Louisa Dupris, Katherine Pearl Duplantis, Katherine Vuillemont. Katie was Leo’s heir, owned the oldest continuously operating whorehouse in New Orleans, and never showed any interest in her blood-servants or scions learning swordplay.
I was watching the pair so tightly that I missed the toss and caught the staves only inches from my face. Barely blocked the Mercy Blade’s strikes, three clacks of wood against wood. Parry and block were often considered cheating in the vamp version of La Destreza, though the archaic rules were confusing. I blocked three more strikes and caught my balance. Attacked, circling my staves, still heated from Ro’s hands, circling, thrusting, moving forward, drawing on Beast’s speed in addition to my own skinwalker speed.
Fun, Beast growled deep inside. Play with mouse.
Lightning struck, a crash-smash-bang of thunder that shook the building. HQ, struck by lightning. The Gray Between ripped open and the world went still and silent. Gee’s face was frozen in a look of intensity. His lips were slightly parted so he could breathe steadily, his feet were planted securely on the wood gym floor, and his black hair was a solid glisten where the light hit it. His glamours were an interlocking, underlying patchwork of power-reds from scarlet to crimson to cerise. Lots of blanketing shades of lavender and grape and periwinkle and amethyst. And all glowing with magic to Beast-vision. I stepped back from Gee’s staves to keep from drawing him into the time bubble with me.
In the room beyond I could see the blood-servants and -slaves, watching us with a sense of expectation and excitement. All but Ro, whose eyes were narrowed and cataloging the scene that Gee and I made. I walked toward her and took in Troll’s expression and the protective hand on her arm. Interestinger and interestinger.
Back at Gee, I realized that I wasn’t cramping. My stomach wasn’t constricting; I wasn’t throwing up blood; I wasn’t nauseated. I looked at myself in the Gray Between. My body was a shadow of matter. My souls were golden wisps of light, swirled around one another, intermixed. Beast moved up into the forefront of my brain and panted, watching what I was watching, understanding what I was understanding. Maybe better than I did. My magic was in a pentagram, a star geometry, stable motes of power moving like the new normal in the slice of time around me. But the scarlet motes always seemed to be moving just ahead of my skinwalker magic. Leading instead of being herded? That was a scary thought. The one perfect thing about my magic was the empty place against my heart where the shadow of murder had been. Now there was a feathery light there, bright and sweeping. Light. That was unexpected.
Either the storm was doing something to my magic, or being taken to water had done something to my magic, or the new Vitruvian Man motes had done something to my magic, or some combo of the three. The star shape, or pentagram, had proven to provide the best geometric and mathematical stability for magical workings, and was best when five magic users came together to work energy to a purpose, what laymen called a spell. I had five of the little red motes zipping through me and around me, in a working that appeared to be part of me. Either it had fixed the problem with my skinwalker magic or it was about to try to kill me.
Beast. Talk to me. What’s happening here?
Angel Hayyel happens. Purpose of light. Like purpose of Beast is to hunt.