Blood Blade

flexible you are. What kind of weapon do you think you’d use?”

“When fighting a Full Blood?” he mused. “I’d call in an air strike. Or how about a nice red button with a few nukes on the other end of it? That sounds good.”

Paige laughed under her breath and then calmly said, “Turn around.”

When he turned, he could hear the subtle brush of feet against the ground, which didn’t at all match the sight of Paige stepping forward while swinging both of her clubs at his head. He let out a surprised grunt and turned at the waist while swinging the sapling up in both hands to protect his face.

Stopping less than an inch before hitting him, she completed her attack by lightly tapping his forearm with the short blunt clubs. “There you go,” she said. “You should fight the way your instincts want to fight. You’ll need a two-handed weapon.” As she ran a club along the edge of his arm that was facing toward her, she added, “And see the way this arm is turned more than the other? You should be able to shift the weapon to block with that arm, but you’ll be able to use it either way.”

“Actually,” Cole said, “there was this one weapon I designed for Hammer Strike that had these—”

Paige cut him short with a politely raised hand. “Is it about this size?” she asked as she tapped the sapling he was awkwardly gripping.

“More or less. Don’t you remember when I told you about Hammer Strike while we were driving out from Chicago?”

“No.”

“Before we got to the outlet mall,” he added. “You know. It was the game with the Cerberus.”

Slowly, Paige began to nod. “Oh yeah. You got going about that a couple of times, but I sort of blocked you out. Here,” she said as she tossed the hunting knife to him. “You should do the carving.”

“I really don’t know how to carve.”

“You know how to whittle?”

“Barely.”

“Same idea,” she said. “Just sharpen the ends the way they should be and get it down to the basic shape you’re after. I’ll check on you later.”

“What about the Half Breeds?” Cole asked.

After glancing at her watch and then looking up at the bright gray sky, she replied, “I’ll check on them too, but they won’t be going anywhere until the sun starts to go down.”

“So they stay out of the sunlight completely? Does it hurt them or something?”

“If you looked like a peeled grape, you’d probably stay out of the sun too. Besides, they’ll be resting up for a good run tonight.”

Cole caught her looking up toward the sky again. “Full moon?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. Unfortunately, that legend’s true. Now get to whittling.”

By late afternoon Cole’s feet were covered in wood chips. His hands were bleeding from several cuts and splinters and his arms ached so badly that he prayed for them to fall off. In his lap, the fruit of his labor rested like a pathetic mockery of the feeble efforts that had produced it. The crooked stick was pointed at both ends and shaped roughly like a thick bow. One end was thicker than the other and had the beginnings of a notch carved into it.

“Behold,” he said as he held up the length of wood for Paige to see. “I shall name it…aw, this thing sucks.”

She sat nearby, with cases she’d unloaded from the car on either side of her. As the day had worn on, smells had drifted through the air from one of several holes she’d dug into the cold soil. Each of those holes had a small clay pot set into it. Now, she stood up, dusted herself off, and walked over to sit beside him. “What’s wrong with it?” she asked.

“First of all,” he replied as he tapped the rough notch, “this is supposed to be like two points split apart. Maybe it’s stupid, but it looked really cool in the—” Before he could finish his criticism, metal sliced through the air as Paige swung the hunting knife straight down toward the stick. The blade landed in the notch with a solid thunk and caused the wood to split another couple of inches down.

After twisting the knife to separate the two halves a bit more, she asked, “Is that more like it?”

Cole looked at that end of the stick and nodded as he compared it to the forked tongue model of his favorite melee weapon from Hammer Strike. “Yeah! I don’t know if it’ll do a lot of damage, but that’s the look of it.”

Taking the whittled piece of wood from him, she hefted it in both hands and nodded. “This isn’t bad. See if you can get these points a bit sharper, though,” she said, handing the wood back. “Then it’ll do plenty of damage.”

Cole rested the bow-shaped stick across his lap and got back to whittling. Once Paige returned to the clay pots she’d partially buried, he asked, “So, I had this really great dream where I kissed you and you seemed to like it. It seemed real, but I guess you weren’t there.”

“I was there,” she said quietly.

“Maybe it wasn’t a dream, then. Maybe it was a mistake?”

“I hope not,” she replied as she lowered her head and kept stirring the mixture at her feet. “You surprised me and I ran with it, but maybe it wasn’t the best time. Then again, who knows when there’ll be a better time?”

“For tomorrow we die,” he declared. “Is that it?”

“Could be tomorrow. Could be tonight. Maybe I’ve just been living day to day for too damn long.” She shook her head just enough for her hair to slip down into her face. “You probably think I’m such a—”

“Hey,” he cut in. “If you can help me turn this piece of crap I whittled into anything more than a glorified toothpick, I’ll think you’re a miracle worker.”

Paige looked at him without saying a word. Slowly, the frustration in her eyes faded away. After holding onto the silence that stretched between them for a few more seconds, she lifted a small bowl from the dirt and moved over to sit beside him. She reached out to take a small rag from one of the nearby cases and dipped it into the concoction. Cole watched her, savoring the grace in her movements, which brought out the sublime in even the most mundane of tasks.

“This is a resin made from a recipe that dates back to the 1600s,” she said. “I don’t know the name of the Skinner who cooked up the first batch, but I will tell you it works real well.”

“Do I need to learn how to make it?” he asked.

“Yes, but not tonight. This just needs to be worked into the grain of the wood in a thick, even coat. Here,” she said as she carefully handed it over. “This is your job.”

“Should I get any on me?”

“Only if you don’t mind losing the use of your fingers.” Paige smirked as she saw the panic that drifted across his face.

As soon as he got a look at that grin, Cole relaxed and simply held onto one end of the stick as he applied the resin like a coat of foul-smelling varnish. Before he was three-quarters done, he could hear something creaking and snapping like bones being bent until they broke.

“Is that supposed to happen?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Paige told him. “That’s the resin soaking in.”

Cole looked down at the stick and noticed how the sunlight was reflecting differently along the surface where the resin had been applied as opposed to where it hadn’t. While the end he was using as a handle still felt like freshly cut wood, the treated areas looked almost petrified.

“Coat the rest of it,” Paige instructed. “End to end. Top and bottom.”

Only about a minute after the rest of the coat had been applied, she took the stick from him and tested to make sure the varnish was dry. “Show me how you’ll wield it,” she said, and tossed it back to him.

Cole caught it and hefted it in his hands. Not only was the resin dry, but it made the stick somehow feet lighter and stronger at the same time. Holding onto it stick so the bowed angle arced away from him, he said, “I guess like this, but I could always switch it around.”

“You’ll hold it the first way,” Paige told him. “That’s going to be more effective. Now hand it back. Quickly.”

He gave the stick back to her and watched as she used the hunting knife to hack at a few spots halfway along the length of wood. She split off a few thin sections, peeled them back, then dabbed more resin onto the spots of fresh wood that had been revealed. After repeating the process several more times in a few different spots along