But his expression told me he wasn’t joking.
***
I couldn’t remember where my feet went with each move. How high I should lift an elbow. How far I swept right and left before I lunged, lunged, lunged. I was clumsy, my mind on too many other things. My concentration was shot.
Or it was until Bruiser put on some Latin music. The beat thrummed through my paw pads, woke up my brain. And when Bruiser swatted my bottom as he passed by, I laughed.
He took up a position, long wooden stave high, short sword across his body. It wasn’t a fighting position I had seen before except in the dueling ring. “Let’s dance,” he said, a glint in his eye that communicated we were about to have fun.
I mimicked his position.
“Left elbow higher. Good,” he said. “Defend yourself.”
Fun,Beast thought, purring, peering out through my eyes with a golden gleam I saw reflected in Bruiser’s. He attacked.
The wood staves clacked, slow and careful, the sound reverberating off the bare walls and floor of the third story. Then louder. Faster. And I was sweating and breathing hard, even in this form. And it was glorious.
But vamp swordplayhurt. When I complained, Bruiser said, “It’s supposed to. Bruises teach your mind to fight through, no matter what. Soreness teaches your body to move even in pain.”
What it really taught me was that I sucked at this, evenwith the faster reflexes and greater strength of my half-form. But seeing it as a dance made me more graceful. More attentive.
Beast is lithe and lissome,she thought at me.Jane’s words for Beast.
Beast is a bruised cat,I thought back, as I barely blocked a vicious head strike.
Beast is best ambush hunter.She took over and dropped us into a crouch. Swiped Bruiser’s knees, while also stabbing upward into his gut. Both staves landed. Bruiser ooffed out a breath and danced away limping.
Okay,I thought. Yeah. Wearegetting pretty good at this.
I/we are better than Jane and Big-cat.
We struck out again. And again. Suddenly we were fighting together as one, one creature with one blended mind on blended reflexes, the same way we had fired the weapon that killed—sorta—Monique.
We landed hits—fastfastfast. Bruiser ooffed and ooffed and danced away.
“It’s supposed to hurt,” I sorta quoted him and laughed. “Bruises teach your mind to fight through, no matter what Beast and I do. Soreness teaches your body to move even in pain.”
His eyes lit up again. “You and Beast are fighting together? Good. Then I don’t have to hold back on Onorio gifts either.”
And that right there—and the attendant bruises and bangs and whacks and pain—taught me to keep my snarky mouth shut.
CHAPTER 9
Jane Needs Holy Water. Go to Place of Holy Water.
“Aw,” I grumbled afterward, trying to stretch out the sore muscles. We were all in the kitchen for a typical Louisiana afternoon coffee break, with attendant beignets and multiple hot beverages. No one had looked at Alex’s timeline, though we each had a hard copy in front of us.
“Old school,” Alex had called it when he placed the sheets on the table and took his seat. It was comforting, especially with the fire in the new fireplace burning merrily and the rain beating down. NOLA had nine months of summer, a month of fall and of spring (give or take) and two weeks of winter (but not all at once). The crazy temps were standard New Orleans fall: hot one minute, chilly the next.
He continued, “The info is mostly collated from Reach’s old files. I never bothered to update this.”
I sipped my tea, ate a beignet, and read the bullet-pointed timeline of Immanuel Pellissier, Leo’s son of his body, the child reproduced by human means and born into a powerful vampire family. The vamp eaten by one of my kind, and replaced by an imposter, by anu’tlun’tadoppelgänger. And then dead by my hand, the first month I was in New Orleans. By the end of the first few lines, I was beginning to understand why I was the wild card in all of this, because all sorts of possibilities were skittering around in my mind, none of them good. I had originally thought Immanuel had been eaten and replaced while in France to meet his fiancée, but I was wrong by more than a hundred years.
Immanuel: born in early 1800s, no exact date specified in Reach’s files. Could have been sooner.
