“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Neva says we need him alive,” Benito said.
“To find his master,” Claudia added.
“You have betrayed our laws, the duel is forfeit, I am king,” Hector said, but he spat blood on the sand. It wasn’t from anything I’d managed to do to him. I fought the urge to glance at Pierette or ask what she’d done at his back to make him spit blood.
Fredo came to stand between the two fallen fighters. He was still trying for an appearance of neutrality, but he turned the mic on and spoke for the almost silent crowd. “If we heal no matter what is done to us, then our fighting skills mean nothing. A vampire has violated our holy of holies; the vampire would put a king of their choice on our throne. Those closest to him have smelled the vampire on the traitor’s skin. It is not enough to kill the traitor; we must slay his vampire master.”
The crowd cheered, and some of them made a high, guttural hissing noise, which I think was the rat equivalent of cheering, or maybe it meant something else altogether. As long as they agreed that we could do what needed to be done to Hector and Padma, I didn’t care what it meant.
“We must end this threat in its entirety,” Neva said from much closer than I’d expected. All three of the brujas were on the sands. How had I missed five people coming down here? That kind of carelessness could get you killed in a fight. Oh hell, I’d been listening to Fredo and the crowd. I couldn’t even blame the combat.
Hector got to his feet. He’d healed whatever Pierette had done to him. Claudia, Benito, Pierette, and I went down into a fighting stance. “Four against one, is that what has become of the honor of the rodere?”
Neva yelled a word I didn’t understand and stamped one foot hard on the sand. I felt something rush past, and then Hector stumbled on the sand as if someone had tripped him. Claudia and Benito were on him before he’d regained his balance. I didn’t know what had just happened, but they did. Pierette and I moved up, but Benito and Claudia had disarmed him with nearly identical flourishes that drew more blood, as they forced his swords to the sand. They kicked them out of his reach. Hector rushed Benito, sweeping one arm and sword past him, but Benito hooked Hector’s leg and sent him sprawling backward, fighting for balance. Claudia drove her elbow into the side of his head, which staggered him more, and then brought her other elbow to the other side and hit him again. He swayed, eyes rolling back into his head. Benito was there to catch one arm as he sank to his knees. A man I didn’t know came across the sand with a pair of special shackles. Not a single voice from the crowd rose in protest. When they had him secured, Neva said, “We will work our magic upon this one. You see to our king.”
“Can the doctors come help him now?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“Can he shapeshift and heal himself?”
“Not until Hector has left the sand.”
“In vampire duels between masters, if the human servant kills, it’s considered the same as the master vamp doing it.”
“We need Hector alive to work our magic on him and his master,” she said.
“But afterward if I strike the blow, does it count as Rafael’s kill?”
“No, because Rafael is not your master, you are his; if you kill for him, he will still lose his crown.”
“Shit,” I said. Jean-Claude whispered through me, “We can give him energy to heal as we have shared with our other halves in the past.”
“What does your master say to you?” Neva asked.
I wasn’t even surprised that she could sense Jean-Claude. “We could give Rafael energy to heal. Will your laws let me do that?”
“Normally, no power outside of each champion would be allowed to aid them.”
The other witch who had remained silent up to now said, “Rafael carries enough power as our king to be able to heal better than this, especially here in the heart of our power.”
“So why isn’t he healing better?” I asked.
Neva said, “We believe that this Master of Beasts is preventing it, though that should not be possible, especially here.”
“If vampire power is breaking Rafael, let me use vampire power to fix him, please?”
“We will have to convince the assemblage that it is a fair balance of power, or you could heal Rafael and still lose him his throne.”
I wanted to scream my frustration.
“Nothing like this has ever happened during a challenge for kingship, Anita. Give us a few moments to search our law and lore,” Neva said.
The younger one with long hair said, “Trade places with Fredo and send him to us. He is one of our lore keepers.”
I could have asked what that meant, but it seemed self-explanatory, so I just turned and started walking toward Rafael, because Fredo was kneeling beside him. I’d send Fredo back and I’d hold Rafael’s hand, and this would all work out. I tried really hard to believe that as I walked toward them. I tried not to look at the blood on the sand around Rafael and do the math in my head of how much blood you can lose before it’s too late. I had never dreamed that a shapeshifter could bleed to death, but the only thing that prevented it was their healing abilities; take away that and they were just stronger, faster humans. It was ridiculous that we would all let him bleed to death when regular first aid could give him enough time for us to fix whatever Padma had done so that Rafael’s own power could heal him. I would not let that happen, even if it cost him his crown, I would not let him die because of rules, not if I could save him. I promised myself that as I walked across the sand and saw all the blood around him. I promised myself I would save him, fuck the rules.
31
I CROSSED THE sand with the borrowed swords still naked in my hand. I had no sheaths for them and until the fight was declared finished, I was holding on to them, just in case. I knew the idea was that by delaying Hector’s death, we had a chance to find Padma and end the larger threat, but it still felt like the swords should have been soaked in blood, with maybe Hector’s head to throw at Rafael’s feet. Here, here is your enemy dead; even if you die, he died first. As presents went it probably wasn’t very romantic, but for survival and shared rage, it would have been nearly perfect, or maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly?
Fredo was holding Rafael’s hand, and when he looked back at me, his eyes were shining with unshed tears. The moment I saw the tears, my stomach clenched tight. I’d never seen Fredo cry.
I concentrated on his face, not letting myself look at Rafael yet; that would come, but first I’d deliver the message. “The brujas need their lore keeper to decide some things.”
Fredo nodded; he raised Rafael’s hand to press it to his face, closing his eyes, which made the first tears fall. He kept his face averted as he said, “My king.”
“It is all right, Fredo, go. I will be here when you return.” Rafael’s voice sounded almost normal. I finally let myself look at him. I’d been strong through all of it until I saw him lying there on the pale sand surrounded by a halo of blood, his and Hector’s, but mostly his own. Sand was clinging to the wounds; normally they’d have cleaned that out first, because once he was able to heal normally, he could heal so fast the sand would still be inside when he did it. He couldn’t get infections from it, but the body could encase foreign objects in tissue, sort of like an oyster does except you wouldn’t get a pearl from it, just a nonmalignant growth that sometimes had to be removed.
I stood there and looked down at him and tried to keep my face blank like I would at an awful crime scene, but this wasn’t some stranger, this was my lover and my friend.
Rafael managed a smile for me, but his eyes stayed pain-filled. “Your face, Anita, now I know how bad it is.”
I fought not to cry; I could at least do that for him. I started to kneel down and then realized I would have to put the bloody swords in the sand, so I wiped the blood clean on my pants, so that sand wouldn’t cling to the edge if I had to use them later. It probably wouldn’t have made that big a difference, but on
e, they weren’t my swords so I wanted to take care of them, and two, sometimes small things can make a big difference on how well an edge slices, or if it catches on things. You want a blade to slice clean, sharp, and even. It helped steady me to worry about the swords. It let me kneel and place them one on either side of me and not cry.
I touched his shoulder and he made a motion toward my hand with the other arm, but a shudder of pain ran through him and he had to close his eyes and focus on breathing not to cry out. He was king; he would not let them see him be weak. I had to swallow hard not to cry; if he could be strong, I could be, too. “Don’t move, Rafael. I’ll come to you.” I took his hand in mine, the same hand that Fredo had been holding.
Rafael opened his eyes, smiled, and then closed them again, breathing through another wave of pain. His legs were shredded. The only other time I’d seen damage like this had been wereanimal attacks where the human victims were already dead before I got there to hunt the killer down and make sure they never hurt anyone else ever again.
“Jean-Claude says we could give you energy to heal.”
He swallowed and tried to focus on my face. “What does Neva say?”
I debated lying to him, but I couldn’t do that to him. If we healed him and it lost him his right to be king . . . Rafael had to know the risks first.
“She says that since it’s vampire power keeping you from healing, it might be okay to use other vampire power to heal you.”
“Will it cost me the throne?” he asked, voice hoarse as if he’d been screaming when I knew he hadn’t been.
“They’re checking your rules and stuff, that’s why they wanted Fredo. I didn’t even know you guys had a lore keeper until tonight.”
“We are a complicated people.”
I smiled. “You can say that again.”
He smiled back, but his eyes were beginning to wander as if he couldn’t see me or was having more trouble focusing. He was pale. He had a slight dew of sweat on his forehead. I touched his hand to my face, but it was still warm and then I realized that Fredo had been holding it. Had his shoulder been warm or cold when I touched it? I couldn’t remember, so I raised his arm and laid my cheek against it. His skin was clammy. Shit!
I yelled back toward the waiting group around Hector. “Can I put a tourniquet on Rafael’s wounds?”
Benito yelled back, “We cannot allow doctors onto the sands yet.”
“Can I do first aid?”
Claudia came jogging toward me, her long strides making the distance nothing. “You may only use what you have brought with you onto the sand. We can’t call in any of the medics.”
I let go of Rafael’s hand and said a prayer of thanks that I’d brought the tourniquet and combat gauze with me.
Claudia said, “You brought a tourniquet with you?”
I got the other rubber-banded pack out of another pocket. “Do you know how to use a rapid-application tourniquet? It’s a Gen 2.”
“Yes,” she said. I handed the second package to her. I put three fingers through the loop of the RATS tourniquet, then realized I was going to have to lift Rafael’s leg so I could slide the tourniquet under before I put it over my hand. My hand was too small to lift his thigh, so I knelt down and slid my arms underneath to lift. Blood gushed over my arms, and it was the usual surprise that enough blood was hot against my skin. His leg was too light, or too heavy, or just not weighted right. Nothing moved like it was supposed to, and when a piece of the meat of his leg swayed and hit my hand, I had to swallow hard. I would not throw up, damn it. If Rafael could endure it, I could handle helping him get through it. If he’d been human, he’d have lost both legs below the knees, but he wasn’t human. If we could get him out of here alive, he would heal.
I put three fingers back through the loop and cinched it tight. Rafael groaned, which I took as a good sign. Claudia’s bigger hands and longer arms were making it quicker for her to encircle his leg multiple times. It wasn’t the blood that was slowing me down so much as the pieces of his leg swinging in against my body at odd moments. The amount of damage that Hector had done to his legs was disturbing. You never know what will bother you until it does. This bothered me. I swallowed hard and was taking deep, even breaths as I finished the last round of the tourniquet until it was tight enough and hooked the end into the little clip. The only thing the RATS Gen 2 didn’t have that most other tourniquets did was a place to write the time you put the tourniquet on. If you left it in place, you could destroy the limb you were trying to save, but the rule was life over limb, though I wasn’t sure Rafael would agree. But I knew that for him and any shapeshifter, if we could just keep him alive, then they could chop off the leg above the dead point and he’d grow back the legs. There were options if we could just keep him alive.
The blood trickled to a stop on the leg I was working on. I glanced over at the other leg and the blood had stopped there, too. I felt a moment of triumph and then wished like hell I’d thought about the simple first aid sooner. I started to open the gauze packet, then stopped and asked, “Will this work on you guys?”
“Yes,” she said.
I tore the packet open and then didn’t know where to put it. The leg was dismembered, so it was like there were too many wounds. I was happy I’d brought two packets of both gauze and QuikClot, but looking at Rafael’s legs, I wanted an armful of QuikClot. Jesus, I’d never seen anyone who lived through wounds like this, and then I realized that I’d never seen anyone who was just cut up this way here; when a shapeshifter went bad, they didn’t stop at the legs. They didn’t stop until there were pieces missing that we’d never find. It’s not like that scene in Jaws where the body parts come spilling out of the shark. Mammals digest things faster and have to chew them up into smaller bites to eat them.
“Put it here,” Claudia said. She guided my hand and I let her do it, because I’d never tried to treat a wound with this many moving parts. Rafael moaned as we shoved the QuikClot gauze against his wound. Again, I took it as a good sign. As long as he was reacting, he was still alive.
Benito came to stand above us. “The brujas need you. I will stay here with Claudia and tend Rafael. The tourniquets and QuikClot will hold our king on this side long enough for the brujas to work their magic.” He offered me a hand and I took it, but my hand was so slippery with Rafael’s blood that I lost my grip and Benito grabbed my arm to steady me.
“So much for being suave and debonair,” I muttered.
He smiled and patted me on the back before he let me go. “Pierette and Fredo will have your back while you help the brujas.”
I didn’t question it, just walked toward the other little group on the sand.
32
HECTOR WAS STILL on the ground with his wrists and ankles shackled together with a long bar of metal. They were the new restraints that the police had designed for supernatural prisoners now that they were actually taking some of them into custody instead of just executions all around. Fredo and Pierette stood ready with sword and knife. When Neva and the other two brujas looked at me, their eyes were all black and shining with the cold light of distant stars, but Hector was still laughing. “The greatest magic the rats have at their disposal and it is not enough. You cannot defeat my master.”
“Where do you want me?” I asked.
“Riding my cock,” Hector said, and laughed.
I ignored him as if he weren’t there and looked at Neva.
“Fill your eyes with the light between the stars,” Neva said.
I did what she asked, and suddenly I could see the red aura around Hector like a wound, and that he had a real wound in his back. I could see him bleeding internally from where Pierette had pierced his kidney. It wasn’t like X-ray vision, but almost like his aura had sprung a leak and the black and red were intermingling like paint spilling from two different cans.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked.
“We can use this one to find his master. We see him sitting in a hotel room, but we ca
nnot breach the darkness around him. It is a piece of Madre de la Oscuridad, and it stands as a wall between us and what needs doing.”
“My master had hoped you would have a child with one of your men by now. He says you owe him a son,” Hector taunted.
“He gave up Fernando to save his own life, and he loved him a hell of a lot more than he loves you,” I said.
“Only someone descended form Belle Morte’s bloodline would speak of love and moitié bêtes in the same breath,” he said, and his hazel eyes were solid brown and starting to shine.
“Do you know what hotel he’s in, can you see a name, a notepad, a card, anything for the physical location?” I asked Neva.
“Once you join your power to ours, you will see what we see.”
“How do we do that?” I asked.
“I am told that all your powers work better through touch, is that true?”
“Most of them.”
“Then kneel and lay hands upon his skin, and we will lay hands upon you. You will be our battering ram against his castle wall.”
“You carry so many of my beasts inside you, Anita, if you touch me, my power will take you over. You will be my creature as Hector is my creature.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“The darkness will consume you if you touch me.”
I smiled then, and he didn’t like that I smiled. The doubt on his face, the confusion, was an expression I remembered from his last visit. It was funny how facial expressions stayed the same no matter what body people were wearing.
“You got just a tiny piece of her power, Padma, I got the rest.” And I shoved my hand through the blackness and the red until I touched the bare skin of his chest and stomach, and I could see the cord like a metaphysical leash from Hector leading down into the floor, into the ether, into . . . Neva spoke next to my face. “Find the vampire, Anita, find me the vampire on the other end.”
My necromancy opened like a flower and the darkness parted before it, and I was suddenly seeing the room where Padma was sitting on the edge of a bed. It wasn’t a good hotel, more motel—oh, how the mighty had fallen. I felt Jean-Claude’s thrill of discovery before he backed off and hid his reaction. I knew without even thinking the question that he was telling Pierrot. The Harlequin would be hunting Padma. If we could hold him in place, they’d have him.
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