again with the Sight safely turned off.
Laz looked normal again. Well, as normal as any six-foot-six bald man with a body like a young African god could look, anyway. I said, “Well, fuck me,” very softly.
Lazarus, bless his predictable little heart and soul, leered at me. “Name de time and de place, mon cour.”
I couldn’t help it: I snorted a laugh. He wasn’t going to distract me, though. “I knew you weren’t a sorcerer. I thought you were a witch. A really strong one, like my friend Melinda. One with a personal connection to her goddess. You’re not.”
“No.” Laz spread his hands wide, palms up, innocent. “I am not dem t’ings.”
“No,” I agreed, and started to grin. Jane was over there all but doing the pee-pee dance, dying to know what the hell we were talking about, but before she could ask, we all heard an infant wail from behind the stage.
Jane, who had the quickest reflexes I’d ever seen on anybody, whirled and yanked the stakes from Grégoire’s belly. I half wanted to stay and watch what happened to an un-staked vampire, but Jane raced along the wall and through the door at the end. Laz and I went after her and the vamps followed.
Amaury was in the next room, an office with oriental rug, an antique desk covering more floor space than some third world homes, ornate lamps, stone busts, bronze statues. Serena was clasped to his chest, a knife to her throat. Beside him was a screaming baby in a crib. I didn’t speak a lot of baby, but her shrieks were more than just general misery. She sounded hungry and she sounded furious, like she had every intention of laying the smacketh down on Amaury just as soon as she learned to walk and kick ass. I liked her automatically.
Jane, who maybe liked the infant on general principles just like I did, laughed and pulled her nine mil, pointing at Amaury. It looked like a tricky shot, aiming for the knife instead of the vamp. She started to squeeze the trigger.
Serena screamed, “No!”
Jane, who had the best goddamned reflexes in the universe, froze. Stopped with the shot so close I was afraid that if she exhaled, the semi-automatic would fire.
In the same instant I turned the Sight back on, and the knife flared with damned near as much brilliance as Lazarus had. Grey storm fury danced in the blade, Damascus folds that lived, pulsed and changed. Amaury’s hand trembled, holding the thing. It fought him with everything it had. With the force of a category five hurricane. It fought him with Katrina’s soul, and even with all the magic in New Orleans helping him keep it in line, he could still just barely keep the storm contained.
“The knife,” I whispered. “It’s the amulet.”
Jane, millimeter by freaking millimeter, eased off the trigger. Amaury’s smile flashed white and sharp with three inch fangs, and he pressed the knife a little more closely against Serena’s throat. “Now we can settle this, no?”
I said, “Yes,” so softly that even I thought I sounded afraid. I wasn’t. I was thinking, yes, but mostly I was getting ready to move. Way back in the back of my head, I said, Rattler? and a spirit snake, a sketch of light and lines, awakened in my mind. He was one of three animals that had come to me in my shamanic journey, and he was the weapon in my arsenal. The others carried me through death and time, but it was always my rattlesnake I turned to when I needed to strike with inhuman speed.
Hey, I whispered to him. I need your speed, Rattler. We’ve got a fight on our hands, and I’m going to have to move faster than I’ve ever done.
Rattler stretched and coiled in my mind, ropy muscle tensing and relaxing in preparation. He hissed, We ssstrike, with pleasure, and I released my awareness of him so I could speak to Jane again, ever so softly.
“Get the baby,” I said. “Get Serena. And stay out of the way.”
Jane, in the corner of my eye, bristled and shifted her shoulders like her hackles were rising. I had no idea what her problem was, but her eyes were pure gold, like Beast had a thing or two to say about my commands. I took my gaze off Amaury for a three-second stare-down with a big cat, and neither of us liked it at all.
Jane’s nostrils were flaring, her lips curled back like she was a cat smelling something nasty. I bared my own teeth, one hunting animal to another, before recognition snapped in. Beast was smelling something nasty: she smelled Rattler rising in me. I laughed again, and this time it was a warning hiss of its own. “You and me can throw down after this, Beastie girl. Right now we’ve got a cub to save.”
I looked away, insouciant as a cat. Pretending I didn’t care, pretending she wasn’t a threat. I had to trust Jane to control her Beast, or we were all so much lunchmeat anyway.
Amaury, clearly enjoying our little tête-à-tête, clearly happy about the dissention in our ranks, had simply watched the exchange. Mistake. Big mistake.
I said, “I’m sorry,” to Serena, because unless she got very lucky, things were about to go remarkably badly for her. She would survive it—that was kind of my raison d’être—but unless I misjudged things, there would be an unpleasant thirty seconds or so where she wouldn’t think she was going to.
She had exactly enough time to widen her eyes in alarm before Rattler’s magic filled me and I struck.
Jane’s commentary had made it clear that vampires were fast. Hell, in my extremely limited experience, I’d seen them pop from one place to another so quickly the air exploded with confusion. At a guess, there weren’t any predators a vampire might normally face that could come anywhere near their speed.
Too bad for Amaury that not one goddamned thing about this day was even vaguely normal.
I slammed the sword through his right shoulder before he even knew I’d moved. Serena got lucky: his arm spasmed out, not in, and the knife only left the thinnest scrape across her throat. She still screamed like she’d been murdered. The baby screamed even more loudly, and Amaury put them both to shame with a cry that rocked the heavens and made my eardrums shudder with pain.
He wrenched his body from my sword and shot backward at speed, leaping up onto the antique desk with such incredible grace that under any other circumstances I’d have applauded. Blood made a thin arc between his shoulder and my sword. I bunched my thighs and leapt, rattlesnake-fast, to tackle him off the desk before the blood had even broken from its flawless arc. Momentum carrying us, we bashed into the far wall.
Fists flew. Amaury hit like a pile driver, vampiric speed making up for lack of strength, assuming he lacked it, which my aching jaw did not assume. I hammered my elbow into his face, feeling his nose crack beneath pointy bone. He howled, which was gratifying. I’d broken my nose as a kid. It was good to know it hurt a vampire as much as it had hurt me. Then he seized my shirt with one hand, strong-armed me straight into the air, and slammed himself up at top speed, bashing his forehead into my nose.
Blood spurted everywhere. I couldn’t breathe enough to scream. Amaury flung me across the room and I rammed into another wall, sliding down, half blinded by tears. I managed to catch a breath and my healing magic kicked in, straightening cartilage—ow—and stopping the flow of blood as well as the dripping tears.
That let me see all sorts of exciting things. Serena had been knocked against a far wall amidst fluttering papers that had been tidily piled half an instant earlier. Jane was still caught in the aftermath of the motion that had flung Serena to safety, one arm extended, her very person bristling with energy and preparation. Amaury was already on his feet again, the knife upraised. Jesus, raised over the baby, who was about to be a vampire’s sacrificial lamb.
The biggest cat in the universe leapt on him, and that was all the time I needed.
Amaury had no fear of Beast. He thrust her away as he’d done me. She writhed in the air, landing prepared to pounce, leaping even as her paws touched down. But I bellowed, “Get the kitten!” and she changed the angle of her jump, her body swiveling in midair, her long stubby tail swiveling opposite for balance. The crib went to pieces under her weight, but she came up with a squalling miserable infant’s onesie caught gently in her teeth. Serena’s screams underlined the baby’s.
Lazarus, during all of that, just waited, arms crossed over his chest, watching. That was it. He just stood there, calm, handsome, waiting. I gathered myself while he waited, and this time when Amaury came to his feet, I struck again.
Not his chest. Not his neck. I was pretty sure my sword would obliterate him—it was solid silver, made by an ancient Irish king called Nuada—but I didn’t know what would happen if he died before the amulet was contained. So he spun, protecting his heart, and I—
—I, as infantile as I was gleeful, yelled, “Unhand me, thou shag-eared villain!” and lopped off his right hand, the one holding the dagger.
It was an upward swing, so momentum would kick the stump—was it a stump if it was the free-flying end? It
