Broken Soul: A Jane Yellowrock Novel (9 page)

Between food deliveries—I couldn’t quite call them courses—Bruiser drew me out on my life in the children’s home, and how I started into the security business, though he’d done a deep background on me before I was ever hired to work with the New Orleans’ vamps. He sounded interested, as in
interested
, and it made me feel too warm, and all weird. He asked me about my weapons training and about my life in Asheville, before I’d come to work here. He made me feel important and . . . admirable, maybe. Which was a totally weird feeling.

There were two veal dishes, three filet mignon dishes, and sweetbreads, which were bull balls and I passed on them. Bruiser ate my portion with what looked like delight. The wines changed with every part of the meal. With my skinwalker metabolism, I could drink most humans under the table, but even I was feeling a little woozy by the time the meal
ended. And full. And totally decadent. The food at Arnaud’s was pricey. I snuck a peek at the menu when I went to the ladies’ room, and figured that we could feed a whole house full of unwanted children at Bethel Nondenominational Christian Children’s Home for a week for what we spent on one self-indulgent meal.

“Okay,” I said afterward, as we weaved through the immaculate tables and the hoity-toity diners, Bruiser’s hand warm on my spine through the thin blouse. “Next date, one week from now, in the Clover Grill, my treat.” I grinned with delight. I loved getting what I wanted. “Followed by . . .
dancing
.”

Bruiser leaned in and spoke next to my ear. “Only in the aisles, not on the tables.” Which let me know he’d really been there. There was a sign printed somewhere in the diner proclaiming that. I smiled slowly as I got into the limo.
I can do this,
I thought.
I really can do this
. Not that I knew what
this
was. Yet.

•   •   •

We had talked through the sunset and into the dark of night. It was nearly nine when we braked in back of HQ, under the porte cochere, and alighted from the limo. That’s what you did from a limo, though I’d never say the word aloud.
Alight
. I had a mental eye roll at the thought.

Eli met us there and handed me my bag of weapons, one hand holding Bruiser back. I left the men there, but my hearing was better than human, and I heard Eli say, “You hurt her and I’ll skin you alive and feed your carcass to the wild boars in the swamps. You copy?”

“I do. And I’ll break your arm if you ever accost me again. Civilized discourse is acceptable. Your hand upon my person is not.”

“Be nice, boys,” I called over my shoulder. “Be nice or I’ll beat both your butts.”
Yeah. That’ll show them.
I changed clothes in the ladies’ locker room, donning my second-best fighting leathers over Lycra undies—full-length leggings and a long-sleeved tight tee over the jogging bra. I now had two sets of black leathers, but this pair had already been repaired a time or two. Both sets were augmented by a thin layer of sterling silver–plated titanium chain mail, with hard plastic at the outer elbows and knees, the kind developed and worn by the Taiwanese military.
Star Wars
stuff. Bullet resistant all over. Fire resistant. The titanium chain-mail choker, I’d only recently
discovered, was called a
gorget
. Who knew? This was my old fighting gear, soiled with blood and sweat and the smell of victory. The new gear was even better. And pretty, though I’d never say so aloud.

I slid into low combat boots with steel toes and rubber soles and a slit for a backup weapon in each boot shaft. Eli had packed no knives, so I assumed we were going for hand-to-hand fighting tonight, but I slid the stakes and blades I had worn under my skirt into my fighting clothes. I wasn’t stupid.

My hair was braided by a blood-servant who plaited it like a horse’s tail, into a club and then back up and into a bun bigger than my fist. I admired myself in the mirror over the sinks. I looked . . . yeah. Spiffy. Deadly, but spiffy.

•   •   •

I walked into the gym, which was, as usual, set for sparring practice. The scents were overwhelming for a moment—vamp, blood, humans. Sex. With vamps it was always blood and sex together. The big room had basketball goals and indentions intended to hold poles for a tennis net. Not that I’d ever seen them in use. It was weapons and fighting all the way in fanghead-land. As always, spectators lined the bleacher-style seating along one wall. Others clustered at the door on the far side, one I’d never been through. I made a mental note to check security there. The usual. However, one thing was new.

Weapons practice had never before included Grégoire or Girrard DiMercy. It had also never included swords. Two guys were in a sword ring fighting. Each man had two swords, and they were both bleeding through the padded white suits they were wearing. The smell of vamp blood and Gee’s blood mingled in a magical miasma that half of me thought tasty and the other half thought a little terrifying.

Beast leaned forward into my eyes.
Long claws, steel and silver. Good claws. Want long claws.

“No way am I using a sword,” I muttered to her under my breath. It took years to master a sword. But Gee DiMercy and my Beast had other ideas and they didn’t mesh with my own.

LSD . . . Psilocybin Mushrooms and . . . Tequila

“En garde, little goddess!” he shouted, and tossed me a sword through the air, hilt first, the way he’d tossed a sword to Leo. Beast reared up in me, flooding me with adrenaline and strength. Time fractured, seeming to slow and thicken. The room went brighter and greener, sharper, Beast’s sight meshing with my own.

As it flew through the air, I saw the way the hilt was made, the cross guard curving around to protect the wielder’s hand; the hilt itself was braided with leather for a firm grip. A narrow, thin, flat blade, the double edge constructed of blunted steel, for teaching and practice—not sharp, with no silver plating that could accidently harm a vamp. But didn’t classes usually start with wood swords?

Beast in charge, I stepped forward. My hand lifted into the air, moving with a languid ease, to slide fingers through the cross guard and around the hilt. The sword’s weight shifted out of the air as gravity and momentum shoved it firmly into my palm.
Good claw. Fight with long claw,
Beast thought.

But I had no idea how. I was a knife fighter. What Beast called her steel claws. Or a knife thrower, Beast’s flying claws. Not Beast’s long claw. Time slapped me in the face as my fingers tightened on the hilt and I whirled, feeling the weight and length of the blade as I pirouetted with it.
Claw like long tail,
Beast thought at me.
Good for leaping. Good for balance.
Good long claw
. And I laughed. Around me, I felt the others, the onlookers, grow silent.

“Your Web page information suggested that you were ‘unrated in swordplay.’ Today we shall rate you.”

That sounded ominous. I said, “I’m unrated because I don’t know how to use a long sword at all. Only short swords, fourteen-inch vampire-killers. So can we skip this?”

“No.”

That was short and sweet.

“
This
is the proper way to hold a long sword,” Gee DiMercy said. “Feet thus, spine thus, knees and sword thusly.”

I walked closer, out of sword range, but close enough to study his weight distribution and the exact position of his feet. I copied his posture. And felt like an idiot. The sword was too long, too unwieldy. And my leathers were too constricting. I held up a hand like a traffic cop to tell him to stop and kicked off the boots, pulled off the jacket and the pants, trying not to notice the reactions of the others as I did so. The sudden silence. The sound of a slow breath taken nearby. It might have been Leo but I didn’t look to see. I didn’t even look at Eli when he appeared at my side to take my clothes. Eli was my second. It felt right to have him there, and I relaxed, shaking out my arms. I was standing there in bare feet, a long length of tight black spandex, and a sword. I rolled my shoulders to loosen up.

Leo appeared at my side and gave me a second blade, this one also dull-edged, but shorter, with a groove on the back of the blade for hooking an opponent’s weapon and pulling it away. This smaller blade felt good in my hand, nearly familiar, having the heft and balance of a vamp-killer. Leo smelled strange, his scent acrid and harsh, like rose thorns, but I didn’t look at him. Not while I was trying to find the balance of the weapons. Though they were of differing lengths, they were of similar weights, so the balance that my mind insisted was not there, was actually present.

“You will begin lessons in La Destreza, also known as the Spanish Circle,” Gee said. He spun his sword in a slow circle around him, behind him, left to right, always in an arc, the blade sketching and encompassing a sphere around his body. It sketched a cage of death anywhere his weapon reached. And then he sped it up. The blade moved faster and faster, until it was a flashing light all around him. I was going to be taught by the Obi-Wan of steel blades. Despite myself, my grin spread. I was either gonna hate it or love it.

“The books of history and books of teaching were incorrect,” he said, his body not tensing or pausing. “There is nothing stiff or static about La Destreza. It is fluid, smooth, like the flow of water or oil across an object. I will teach you the forms. You will practice. Many, many hours each day. You will be challenged to
les Duels Sang
by the Enforcers of our visitors. You will be expected to comport yourself well on the field of battle.”

“Okay. So I’ve got, like, three months to learn what the rest of them will have studied for centuries.” I handed the short blade back to Leo. I figured one at a time was smart, and the unfamiliar one first was smarter. “What are the rules?”

“Other than proper etiquette, there are few
rules
,” Gee said, his blade slowing. “One may fight with one blade or two, though two is more common. And most formal challenges are to first blood, though some few are to true-death. Deception and duplicity are looked upon with approval, as La Destreza—as the Mithrans practice it—is as much a mental game as a physical one.”

“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 . . .

It dove. Snapped at Leo. He raised his weapons, executing one of the whirling moves Gee had used, his sword whipping
and stabbing. Beside him, Gee stood still, his eyes and mouth open wide, his blades lowered, pointing at the floor. The lillilend dodged Leo’s whirling blades as if they were stuck in park and bared its fangs. It struck. Biting down on Gee, fangs entering front and back across his left shoulder. Bruiser raced in, ramming the stunned Mercy Blade to the floor. The light-dragon released him and the small man landed on one knee, dropping his swords, still staring up. I caught a glimpse of his face in something like reverence or awe, his eyes a luminous blue with a funky, oily shimmer that moved, like heat rising. And blood on his chest that appeared iridescent, not red. Almost faster than I could follow, the magic light-thing reared back and dodged in again, this time extending a black tongue and flicking it at Gee. Tasting his blood.

At vamp speed, Bruiser and Leo went back-to-back, standing over Gee, as if they’d fought this way before, many times. Their blades sang and cut in perfect synchrony, holding the creature away.

“Jane,” Bruiser shouted. “Do it! Change!”

For a span of heartbeats I had no idea what he meant; then I remembered. Bruiser had fought the light-dragon, or one similar to it, once before. In the gray place of the change, as I—as Beast—ran away. It was one of many things we hadn’t talked about.