Dacy upended a small glass vial over Ed’s severed thumb and a thick, syrupy drop formed on the end of its rubber spout.
I recognized the scent of the blood remedy. Leo’s Texas biomedical lab indeed had reverse engineered the revenant potion left by the vamp funeral director when the Caruso blood-family skipped town, to back the EVs. But instead of creating it to make revenants, Leo had made his version for healing. The MOC was a dangerous creature, but sometimes he was also a pretty cool dude.
I still wondered at the oddity of the Carusos leaving their bottle, and at the letter Leo had received claiming they had betrayed him only to save Laurie Caruso’s daughter. It could be insurance, a bid for protection should Titus lose. Carusos playing the long game, maybe.
Dacy dribbled the drop on Ed’s severed thumb and pressed the thumb back in place. Ed screamed. He continued screaming as Dacy and six other vamps held him down so Del could apply the blood mixture to the ends of his amputated hand. Del’s blond head bent over my primo, her fighting leathers the color of her eyes. Ed screamed, his ululation so high-pitched that I went deaf and had to step from the room. Yeah. That was the reason. Not my own cowardice at seeing a man I cared for injured and in agony for trying to protect me.
Shiloh walked down the stairs toward me, followed by a line of men and women. “Leo wants you to follow this one,” she said, her long straight red hair swinging. Except for hers, I had never seen straight red hair. Red hair was always curly. Stupid thoughts. Stupid duel. I hated this. These mind games and blood and death.
“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 leathersseem 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 adecade 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.
