BROKEN BLADE

by J. C. Daniels

  All of this could have been avoided.

  Hindsight was such a bitch.

  Crossing my arms over my chest, I focused on the charred ground and said, “I shouldn’t have come down here.”

  “Don’t.”

  Serene’s voice was gentle and sad. And…oddly, Es-like.

  It made the ache in my chest spread.

  “She’s dead because I came here.” Shaking my head, I strode away.

  Serene followed.

  “She’s dead because some ancient bitch with a grudge decided to come knocking,” she said, her voice flat. “An ancient bitch who decides to make an appearance every few centuries and when she does, a whole bunch of mortals die. When that happens, your kind and mine gets jerked around, the weres get all primitive-like and regress for a century or two and the vamps get even more cold-blooded. She tries to send us all back to the dark ages where everybody jumped at shadows and where we were supposed to play exterminator, something that was driving us insane. Es did the same damn thing any of us would do—she stood up to her. And you want to play martyr? Fuck that.”

  I glared at her. “You think I want to play martyr?”

  “I think you want to bury your head in the sand and feel bad—I don’t blame you. I would feel bad—hell, I do feel bad. I was her guard. I was the one who was supposed to take the hits for her, but I was also charged with keeping her house safe.” Serene scrubbed her hands over her face and then abruptly, she sank down onto the ground, looping her arms around her long legs, staring at the house. “I can’t protect the house if I’m dead next to her. And the bottom line is this—none of us were going to survive this fight. Not today.”

  Tired, grieving, furious, I sat down next to her. “I can’t believe that Es was just supposed to die, Serene.”

  With one hand fisted in her hair, Serene stared at the house. Her voice came in slow, uneasy, broken bits as she said, “But sometimes that’s how it is. Things happen…because they were meant to.” With a jerky nod, she looked at Tate. “Like her. That mouthy, mean bitch. Sometimes I hate her, you know. And we aren’t supposed to hate. But I do. I hate her. But her ability for fire is almost unmatched. I felt the fire that bitch was casting around. If she’d been slamming that full force into the healing hall from the get-go, she might have managed to break through. Tate was the only one who could have neutralized that much fire coming at us. Not even Es could have taken that kind of heat in her.”

  I slid a look toward the witch in question.

  Tate was still standing in the exact same spot she’d occupied earlier, her expression stony, her gold eyes glittering.

  “And…” Serene closed her eyes and a spasm wracked her body. Then she looked over at me and her eyes were glassy. “Es’s protection over this house passed to me on her death. I’m the mother now. It works that way. I was keyed into what was happening as she passed and I was witness to what was going on as that…thing…picked herself up off the floor and dragged her sorry ass off. She’s hurt now. Between what Es did to her, and the damage she took when Tate’s fire tore through her, she’s hurt. And pissed…and maybe a little worried, because she knows she can be hurt.”

  Licking my lips, I picked through those words. Serene. She was the mother now. A warrior of the house? Okay, that’s not the important piece. She’d witnessed Es’s passing—my heart broke a little more and if I could have, I would have tried to comfort her. But I was too broken myself.

  “Pan—”

  “No.” Serene’s hand, quick as a blink and strong as the earth itself, shot out, closing over my wrist. “Don’t say the name. There’s power in a name. You know this. Don’t speak it.”

  I curled my lip. “Not speaking a name feeds fear.”

  “This isn’t a demon, Kit. She might love that you’re afraid, but your fear or lack of it doesn’t change her power in any way.” Serene shook her head. “If she’d been forgotten, her name lost in the sands of time, perhaps we wouldn’t be dealing with this plague now.”

  Crossing my legs in front of me, I shook my head. “No. A creature like her doesn’t cease to exist just because she’s forgotten.”

  “That’s a debate for a different time.” Serene sighed and rose to her feet. “I have to gather my house. Prepare for Es’s wake. And you…” She held out a hand.

  Although I didn’t need it, I accepted it and let her pull me to my feet.

  Our eyes met and I felt that oddly familiar calm settle around me. Yes. Warrior or not, I could see her as mother to this house. “You have a job to finish.”

  I don’t think I’m equipped to handle this job…not the one I’d taken on from Pandora and not the one that both Es and Serene seemed to think I was taking on now.

  “There’s nobody else who can,” Serene said quietly. “She’s too much like a witch for any of us to confront. She’s like…umber-primeval witch, or something. But she knows magic. What she doesn’t know is weapons. She doesn’t know you, or your kind or how you think. You already know vamps and weres are going to be useless against her. So who is going to step up? Your useless family? Humans?”

  Clenching my jaw, I looked past her to the ruin around us.

  “The time to stop her is now…before she takes over that new body. Before she kills a child. Not just because of those two innocent lives, either.”

  “That’s reason enough, isn’t it?” I rubbed the back of my hand over my mouth and tried to breath. Between the ache in my heart and the fear, it was almost impossible.

  “Oh, it’s reason enough. But just think about how much worse it’s going to get, Kit. I know what Es told you. You really want to see what the mortals are going to do if the Blooding starts all over again? They’ve got the technology now to do us a lot of damage. You were born after the wars, Kit. If she has her way, though, the wars will start back up…and they’ll be worse. A lot worse.”

  My heart turned to ice as I realized what she was saying.

  Oh. Fuck.

  “Yeah.” Serene’s gaze was far more direct and her attitude was far more blunt than Es’s. “We’ll be looking at another interspecies war…and we might just manage to do what we didn’t all those centuries ago—push the vamps and weres into extinction. But who knows if any of us will survive.”

  “I get the point.” I turned away and strode to my car, weaving my way through the rubble, ruin and drifting eddies of smoke. The devastation stopped somewhere between the house and the area where most of the people parked, so many of cars had come through unscathed, including mine. I had just laid my hand on the door when Serene said my name.

  I paused and looked back.

  “Do me a favor. Make that bitch wish she’d never come looking for you.”

  * * * *

  I wasn’t even a mile away when the call came.

  The Imperial March was the tone I’d been using for Justin for years and I wasn’t surprised that he was calling. “Call to speaker,” I said, glancing in the mirror. A speed-freight was roaring up behind me and I crossed over into the other lane. Those things moved at almost two hundred miles an hour and half the time, they didn’t care if you got out of the way or not.

  “What’s happened?” Justin’s voice cut out of the phone, sharp as a blade.

  “Es is dead.”

  The words were like a slap and I had to pull over as the grief hit me, hard and fast.

  “What?”

  “Es is dead. Pa—” I remembered Serene’s warning and as stupid as it seemed, that house had provided me protection too many times. Es had died doing it. I’d respect their concerns. “She knew I was there. Es had information about her. She wanted me to come down. So I did. She showed up—I don’t know if she followed me or what, but she came down and picked one hell of a fight. Es is dead.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Over the phone, I heard a strange crackling noise. If I wasn’t familiar with magic, I might have thought the connection was acting up, but it was Justin’s magic, chaotic and turbulent, spillin
g out of him and seeking release. The grief in his voice tugged me. “You knew her?” I asked.

  Seconds ticked by. Numerous vehicles, including several of the speed freights sped by, rocking my battered old car as I sat parked on the side of the highway.

  Finally, he answered. “Yeah. She…ah. She was one of my earliest teachers when I went to work for Banner. That’s how I figured out something was wrong. Word started spreading fast; she was big in our world. People are going to want blood for this. Not just the witches, but Banner, too. They tried to call me back in.”

  “What?”

  “They want me back. I told them to get fucked with a battering ram.”

  “You have such a poetic way with words.”

  “I learned it from you.” He blew out a sigh. Voice thick, he whispered, “I can’t believe she’s dead. Shit. How many others?”

  “Just Es.” I passed a hand over my face. “I don’t want to talk about this now. I’m parked on the side of the road. I’ve got information but I don’t want to discuss it until I’m there and…” It hit me, then, what I had to do. “We’re going to have to go to the Lair, Justin.”

  A snarl trembled in his voice. “What?”

  “Don’t.” I checked my mirrors and pulled back out onto the road. “Don’t give me grief and don’t hassle me. But we’re going to have to work with them—there’s information they have to know and if you have an issue with it, just go back to Banner. My head is already spinning from what I had thrown at me. I don’t need to deal with this.”

  “Why do we need to work with the shifters, Kit?”

  “Because it’s necessary. And if I can handle working with them…” Working with Damon… “So can you. Suck it up, buttercup.”

  I hung up on him and focused on driving.

  * * * *

  Memory swarmed up, taunting me, as I stared at the blade on my bed.

  Call me, I am here…

  I gasped for breath as the largest one drove his fist into my stomach. Doubled over, trying to breathe, I thought, Please…just let me die…That was all I’d wanted to anyway. That was what had led to this.

  I caught the flash of something silver tucked into the guard’s boot. His name Visran. One of my grandmother’s favored guards. If he was here, doing this, it was with her approval. Perhaps she’d even given them leave to kill me. I can only hope—

  I snagged the blade and swung out, clumsy from the cold, from hunger. The hot, wet splash of his blood on my hand was a shock and instead of keeping my hand around the blade, I lost my grip.

  Seconds later, I was face down in the dirt and panic assailed me. Not again, not again!

  “Little whore!”

  Vicious pulls destroyed what remained of my clothes. The shirt hung in rags around me. I twisted and fought to get away from them, but it was pointless. Me, against two hardened royal guards.

  Call me, I am here—

  That voice. I was going mad. If I’m losing my mind, can it happen already so I don’t have to be here!

  Hard hands wrenched the shreds my pants away and I screamed, twisting. Just barely, I managed to get my feet up and as Visran tried to grab me, I got my legs between us and kicked. He went flying back.

  “Stupid cunt—”

  The other one, Tolan, laughed. “I like it when they fight—”

  Call me!

  This time, it was a strident command that all but leveled me and the heat building in my hand left me screaming.

  And then—

  * * * *

  I knew the weight of a weapon in my hand.

  Even at sixteen, broken, battered and bloodied. I knew what it was to hold a weapon and realize that I had to fight or be destroyed.

  Those last moments were nothing but a blur, but it was a blur of silver and blade and blood.

  I left Visran and Tolan dead in the snow, taking their packs and fleeing into the night, certain my grandmother would seek me out. And all the while as I ran, the blade had whispered to me. I am here now. I am here…

  Reaching out, I touched her hilt and drew her from the sheath and stared at the gleaming, liquid length of silver.

  “You’re not here now.”

  If ever there had been a time when I needed her, it had been when I was trapped up on that mountain. Broken, desperate.

  But she hadn’t answered my call.

  And she couldn’t come to my hand now, either.

  Stroking my fingers down the blade, I closed my eyes…and wished.

  Then I turned back to my weapons trunk and went about getting myself ready.

  Just what did you take to the party when you were dealing with some ancient, psychotic evil who unleashed holy hell just for the fun of it?

  Chapter Twenty

  The Lair was a massive building built decades ago that sprawled across an entire city block. Once it had belonged to the mortals. It had been a government building, although it was hard to see any sign of that now.

  The cat clan of Florida had taken it over sometime during the war.

  When we’d…come out…so to speak, it had been a thing of necessity. A couple of stupid, young weres had been caught—on camera—shifting as they fought and the video went viral. Then there was another sighting, and another…

  Discovery was inevitable, it seemed.

  The Assembly—our governing council—had thought if we controlled how we made our presence known to the mortals, we’d have the upper hand. In a way, they were right.

  In a way, they were wrong, because nobody, and nothing, can predict how fear will dictate a situation. Things had gone…mostly okay, for the first few months, despite the numerous suggestions that we all be contained until more about the threat was understood.

  It didn’t matter that we’d been living among them all this time. Humans are nosy creatures and they think testing and research and all that shit will solve everything. Or maybe mass extermination had been their endgame.

  In the end, it hadn’t mattered.

  The smarter mortals had already figured out that we were too many. Even if our population was only a fraction of the mortal population, creatures like weres and vamps, or people like witches held too big an advantage to assume numbers alone would be the deciding factor. They wanted cool, rational thinking to prevail.

  But others were less than impressed by that logic.

  Attacks broke out, most of them staged by fanatical humans looking to brand the NHs as animals. The attacks led to mistrust on both sides. That led to an interspecies war that lasted almost a decade and had resulted in the death of millions. It had taken wisdom on both sides to realize that in order for us to co-exist in this world, something had to be done.

  The Assembly offered a treaty.

  Human governments fought over this point and that, but after two years of bickering and negotiations and even more deaths, an uneasy peace was found. The more advanced countries were the first to accept the treaty. Third-world countries still have struggles breaking out even now—there were a few places where either one species or the other pretty much ruled. Me? There are a few countries I won’t ever visit—the hospitality to the NH population leaves a lot to be desired.

  By treaty law, places like East Orlando—any place heavily populated by NHs—remained under NH control.

  NHs had agreed, naturally, not to encroach on human territory.

  Whatever in the hell that meant.

  If you were licensed, like I was, you could move back and forth between the segregated areas without much trouble, and humans could come looking for a wild time on NH turf—or claim that’s what they’d done. But heaven forbid any shapeshifter try to grab a meal at restaurant on human-regulated land. They could, would, and did refuse to give service to any non-human. And if they decided to make a call to the cops, the NH could be arrested for so much as breathing. Banner would pick your ass up and you better be prepared to make a good argument or you might find yourself doing hard labor or maybe even spending a few months in a box.

>   It was the younger ones that always ended up in the worst trouble.

  After you’d been around a few years, you learned to either stay on your own territory or travel with enough people so you had witnesses.

  Guys like Damon were wise to steer clear of mortals. They oozed menace and even though he could play mortal when he wanted to, he usually didn’t bother.

  Few of them did.

  Right now, the Alpha was currently striding my way and the look on his face had hot little darts zinging through my belly.

  It hadn’t been that long since I’d seen him.

  A couple of days?

  It seemed like longer.

  There was a subtle difference inside me and whether it was because I’d forced myself back into my life, or something else, I didn’t know. I wished I had time to think about it, time to do more than think…

  In the back of my mind, I heard his voice. I’ll wait…

  His gaze locked with mine as I closed the distance between us and I wracked my brain thinking of what to say, how to say it. There wasn’t an easy way to do this.

  “Kit.”

  His voice, low and rough, stroked over me and for that brief, brief moment, some of the tension melted away and I let myself just…feel. The need to move closer to him was strong, so very strong. I could close those few inches, slip my arms around his waist…

  Then his gaze dropped to the tattoos on my neck, left exposed by my braids and I tensed.

  Just that quickly, his eyes jerked back to my face and I had to fight the urge to tug at my collar, loosen the braids. Anything to hide—

  You already covered the scars, I reminded myself. Your way.

  Maybe there wasn’t as much of a difference inside me as I’d thought.

  “Damon.” My voice came out steady. Go, me! I am aneira…

  The words drifted through my mind and even though I didn’t know if it was right of me to lay claim to that anymore, just the words soothed me. It was so messed up, because the aneira had never done much of anything for me. But it was my…