Mercy Blade

CHAPTER 4 Yeah. Sure. Strip, Zorro.

I came to in the open air, looking up at the stars and the sliver of a one day moon, Beast-talk for the first moon after a new moon. I’d have smiled but the pain hit me, an electric agony that tore through me like a red-hot spear. A hand caught my nape and eased me to my side where I threw up on the grass. “Crap, that’s bad,” I gasped.

“The pain or the regurgitation of stomach contents?”

“Both.” We weren’t on civilized grass, like the sod near Booger’s. Beneath me were rough cut weeds, like the parish might mow on the verge of a secondary road. And the world was dark, no artificial light. Yet I smelled hot pavement and exhaust and heard the pinging of Bitsa’s engine, a sound I’d have recognized anywhere. The bike should be cooled off, still parked at Booger’s Scoot. The bike should have been impossible to kick-start for anyone but me, what with the witchy locks activated. But Bitsa had been ridden here, wherever here was. And I had to guess that I’d been transported here too. On Bitsa? Over Zorro’s shoulder, my boots dragging on the ground? The mental image was farcical and I chuckled, my tone as sour as the taste in my mouth.

“I have healed you as much as I am able,” Zorro said from close by. “My magics, they are few in this world. And you are not fully human. Though I have protected you from contagion by the wolf-taint, I dare not try more.”

I rolled back, face to the night sky, concentrating on breathing. The one day moon, sharp pointed and thin, was perched in a live oak tree, half hidden by the leaves. On the night air was the faint stink of swamp, the vomit, blood—a lot of it mine—and were-stink. I have protected you from contagion by the wolf-taint, he’d said. At least I wasn’t going to howl at the moon in a couple of weeks.

“Did you hit me? There at the end?”

“No. Regrettably, we both missed one wolf in human form. He hit you. I hit him.” Zorro shrugged, the motion looking odd in the moonlight, as if his shoulders didn’t work right.

I sat up. Slowly. My body creaked and spasmed with the motion. I was breathing hard, sweating in the heat, even with my jacket unzipped. He offered me a bottle of designer water and opened it when I nodded. My fingers worked to close over the bottle. Huzzah. Fingers worked. I drank. The moisture cleared my head, enough to know I was still hurt, though not quite so badly. I stretched out the arm that Fire Truck had worried like prey. My elbow was in less salutary condition, but it would heal next time I shifted. I cleared my voice to ask him his name and, instead, what came out was, “Where the heck were you? There weren’t any rafters.”

Zorro chuckled softly and stretched out his legs on the night-dark grass, crossed his feet at the ankles, and leaned back to brace his upper body on locked arms. On the night air I smelled jasmine and pine as he moved, and the commingled scents settled my stomach, but vanished before I could draw another breath. “I was perched on the horizontal ventilation shaft. Dusty.” He brushed at his silver-studded clothes.

The ventilation shaft had been twelve, fifteen feet over my head in the old Esso station of Booger’s Scoot. That was some drop.

I tried to roll to my feet and pain ricocheted through me, but it was the dull pain of healing, not the fresh pain of new wounds. “Thanks,” I said, “for the medical help and the water. But mostly for the fancy sword work. You saved my butt.”

“And other parts of you as well.” There was humor in his voice, a clean and fresh amusement, nothing dark in it. When most people laugh, there is a wry, insulting, sardonic, or cutting edge, a dark aspect to the humor, or falsity, a polite laugh. Not so with this guy; his laughter was joyful, like a kid in a park, and I found myself smiling with him for no good reason.

“And other parts of me as well,” I agreed.

“And you saved me from more serious injury at the end, when you gutted the large wolf on my back. My thanks returned.”

I hadn’t gutted Roul, more a surface cut, but I didn’t argue. “Jane Yellowrock.”

“Yes. The hunter of insane vampires. Have stakes, will travel, à la an old television show, back when everything was black-and-white.”

I had a feeling he was alluding to a different world and not just the technology of the day when he said, “everything was black-and-white,” but I didn’t quite follow.

He held out his hand and said his name. It sounded like Sjheedmeircy, but before I asked he said, “It is a shortened version from Girrard DiMercy,” and offered its spelling when I still looked confused. “The first syllable of my first name, Gi, with a French accent?” he prompted as if I was a little slow after being wounded. Which I was. “Mamá was French, and the name was her choice. Papá raised me, and he was Castilian Spanish.”

“He taught you to fight? The sword style looked Spanish.”

“He did, it is. And your style is American gunslinger combined with street knife fighting. With, perhaps, a bit of mixed martial arts in your background.”

“A bit.” And though he had insulted my fighting technique as being crude, rough, and inelegant, it didn’t feel like an insult. It felt friendly, like his laughter. I tried out his name and settled on a simple Jhee sound, trying to approximate his French-Spanish Gee.

He moved and again I scented jasmine and pine. And I realized it was coming from him. From Gee. Underneath the floral and tree scent I smelled heated copper—blood. I breathed in slowly. He smelled of plants and his blood of odd metal. Weird. “You aren’t human,” I said.

“I certainly hope not.” It was a laughing slur, words that might have sounded insulting had they come from anyone else.

“And you’re bleeding.”

“I am. When you are well enough, perhaps you would be so kind as to bind my small wounds. My magics do not extend to self-healing here, I am afraid.”

“Not in this world,” I said, remembering his words as I came to.

“Indeed.”

I made it to my feet, wondering what he was. He wasn’t vamp, witch, shaman, or werewolf. I was sure he wasn’t a were of any kind. I found medical supplies in Bitsa’s saddlebags, and took them to where Gee sat. That small activity drained me. I needed to shift and heal, but that would have to wait. There was too much unsettled for the moment, and no privacy at all. “Pull off your shirt.”

“Be gentle with me,” he said.

I laughed, the sound breathy. “Yeah. Sure. Strip, Zorro.”

He unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it aside with much the same abandon as the wolves had shown, but with far more grace. “Pah. Zorro was a lover of young boys and a dancing master. I bested him three times in the rings. He was never my match.”

My brows raised at his laughing insult of a national icon—his suggestion that he had lived in the time of, and fought with, the real Zorro—and the sight of his naked chest. In spite of my lingering pain I knew he was beautiful, exquisite, lovely even, in the way of a man who danced a lot, rode horses a lot, worked out a lot, and loved a lot. Smooth skin of a pale very-milky-chocolate color, a V of chest hair framing his torso, and a faint film of pale energies running on and under his skin. Black hair. Pretty. Crap. This was the guy Leo had sent me to find. Not the wolves. Unless they had been a lucky bonus. Vamps are sneaky. Everything they do has layers of purpose and meaning.

Leo’s enemy had saved my life. And ... he wasn’t human.

Beast pushed me aside and stared out through my eyes. In her vision, his energies looked blue with swirls of pale lavender and pale pink, like watercolors painted on silk. Nope. Definitely not human. And his magics looked odd, like maybe he was wearing a glamour, or even layers of glamour. As I thought that, the perfection of his torso vanished. Blood-clotted lacerations appeared along his ribs, spoiling the effect.

I frowned and looked at his face, speckled by dim moonlight through the leaves overhead. He was bearded with a carefully shaped Vandyke, black hair against the soft chocolate of his face, dark eyes that might have been deep green. I blinked and his right cheek appeared crusted over with dried blood. “Neat trick. They did a number on you, Zorro.”

“I will have lovely scars to charm the ladies, no?”

“I have a feeling the ladies will never see them.” I tore open packages and laid them out on the grass: gauze, sterile cleansing wipes, packets of Betadine, pads and bandages, Cling Wrap, and a pair of small scissors. I travel prepared for trouble of all kinds.

I cleaned his wounds, finding them less severe than I first expected, all except one on his side, where a rib was exposed. I smeared the wound with antibacterial ointment. “You’ll need stitches,” I said, covering it with a sterile pad and wrapping his chest with the Cling Wrap, which was like a combo of rolled gauze, ace bandage, and tape, all in one, holding everything in place.

He shrugged, his frame moving under my hands as I wrapped his chest. The mellow blue, lavender, and pink energies swirled over my skin. In Beast-vision, I saw them crawl over my hands and up my arms. Beast pressed her paw onto me and her retractile claws punched deeply, pulling me out of his glamour. I growled and pinched him, hard. “Stop that.”

He flinched away with that mesmeric laughter burbling in his voice. “Forgive me, senorita.” He covered my hands with his. “I cannot help myself in the presence of such beauty.”

“Cut the crap, Zorro, or I’ll leave you here to bleed.” The energies receded. His glamour might have worked if not for Beast and for the fact that I knew I wasn’t a beauty. Interesting, maybe. Not beautiful. And then I realized that my jacket was unzipped. He’d unzipped my jacket ... I held out one zippered side and said, “You unzipped my riding leathers. Just how much were you unable to help yourself in the presence of my beauty?”

“I would never take advantage, senorita. Well, not much. I peeked, I admit,” he said, his tone roguish and teasing.

I wanted to belt him one, but it seemed ungracious to punish a guy after he’d saved my life. Just for looking. Nothing was unbuttoned or unsnapped or missing. I touched my gold nugget necklace, finding it hanging around my neck just like it was supposed to be. But painful abrasions marred my nape, in the shape of wolf fangs, where Fire Truck had tried to rip out my throat and gotten the silver necklace instead.

“You are lovely all over,” Gee whispered. He lifted a hand and smoothed a strand of hair back from my face. “We could have such delightful times together.”

“Not gonna happen. What are you? You aren’t anything I’ve ever smelled before.”

He breathed out his disappointment. The energies of the spell he wove withdrew as he stood, picking his shirt off the ground and using it to button away all that luscious skin. The glamour faded further when he had himself covered. “Nor I you, though you smell of times long gone and beings long dead.”

“You’re Leo’s persona non grata, yes?” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Fine. Why were you in the ceiling, watching, and why did you help me when things got hairy? And for that matter why did you wait so freaking long to help me?”

“I was watching to see if Leo would really come to the place he was invited. To see if old loves and old enemies might have lost their hold over him. The enemies have not, it seems. I must wait to determine about the loves.”

It clicked into place. Leo had been invited here, alone, to meet Zorro—something he had left out of my orders and explanations and maps and addresses—and Zorro had also invited the weres. As if he was doing an intervention, or something. “Go on.”

“I am Girrard DiMercy,” he shrugged, “once Leo’s misericorde, the blood-servant who brought peace to the clans’ long-chained scions when they did not wake from devoveo.”

“Peace ...” I added that to the foreign word misericorde, a picture forming. The word was the name of a weapon, the mercy stroke or mercy blade, a long knife used in medieval times to deliver the death stroke to a knight who had received mortal wounds but would lie dying, in great pain, for a long time. But a mercy blade in conjunction with the devoveo was something new to me.

When first turned, vamps went into a state of prolonged insanity, forcing them to be restrained and imprisoned for years, sometimes decades, until they regained their sanity and self-awareness. It was a mental state from which some did not ever return. “You killed the long-chained,” I breathed.

He nodded once, the gesture formal as a bow. “When the decade of devoveo, or sometimes two, had passed for a Mithran scion to regain sanity, the Master of the City would summon me, sending me to the scion-lair of the master whose child would never recover. I would seduce the master to drink of my sweet blood. It has been said”—he splayed a hand over his chest—“to be as intoxicating as the finest wine. And they would sleep while I performed the onerous duty and put the scion out of his misery.”

Gee lifted his swords and began to reweapon. That was the first moment I noticed my own were missing. A hot flush of anger and fear shot through me, a painful jolt. And then I saw my weapons lined up neatly on the grass, the blades shining and clean, the shotgun and handguns beside them, even the stakes from my hair that I’d never had time to draw.

Stiffly, I stood and reclawed, putting the blades into their respective sheaths and loops, the stakes into my hair. Several were missing; I wasn’t surprised. Beside the weapons was a card. The light was too dim to read, but it felt like a business card, and I tucked it into a pocket. I pulled the Benelli’s harness over my jacket, pain lancing up and out from my partially healed elbow. As we both worked, Gee talked.

“Before the last vampire war in 1915, the Master of the City, Amaury Pellissier, who was Leo’s uncle in the human flesh, called me to bring peace to Leo’s daughter. The girl had not found herself; she had raved for over twenty years. But Leo met me at his scion-lair. He resisted the taste of my blood, resisted the seduction that would have made the loss of his child easier to bear, and he fought me.” A trace of surprise flowed beneath the words. “No one had ever fought me before. Begged, yes. Pleaded or raged, yes. But never fought.

“Leo refused the proper dueling tools of swords or pistols, and attacked me with his bare hands.” Gee shook his head in wonder. “He wounded me. Rather badly.” He cocked his head at me and I felt his magics questing out; I wondered briefly what he looked like beneath the spell that covered him. “Would you care to see my scars?” he asked as if he had read my mind.

“No.” I said dryly. I was beginning to sense Gee’s magic was all about sex, compulsion, and glamour—in opposition to the job he’d described, which was all about death.

“Pity. I was forced to leave for a time to heal.”

“Leave this earth.”

“Precisely,” he said with that lilt of laughter. But his delight died when he continued, “By the time I returned, the war had begun and ended and Leo was Master of the City, his uncle and most of the previous clan masters dead. The ones who remained were not of the old ways. Like Leo, the new masters did not wish their young brought to true death by the blade of a stranger, at a time chosen by another. They wished to face that mercy-gift alone. The old ways were dying away.

“Leo banished me. He banished the weres. There were many reasons for his enmity,” he said. “They sided with the wrong faction in the war. They broke their own were-laws with impunity, as wolves have always done.”

I wondered which law they had broken. Maybe the one about biting humans, because they sure had bitten the crap out of me.

“Perhaps it was partly a whim; he had always hated the two-natured and Leo was always the passionate one, sensitive, fervent, full of intense emotions. Perhaps he will never allow them to return.”

I gave a half shrug, remembering Leo raving mad after I killed the thing masquerading as his son. But before that he had healed me from a wound that would have maimed a human. I had seen a different kind of passion then. I set my hair-stick stakes in place, the silver tips scraping my scalp. I picked up my cell, checked to see that I had missed three calls and several text messages. Those I ignored for now and brought up my location on the GPS map app and then brought up directions to see me back to a main road. I was only a mile from Booger’s. It was a handy little device.

“When I left, Leo’s prime blood-servant went with me.”

“Uh-huh.” I checked my ammo. Not much left.

“Magnolia Sweets. His sweet Magnolia.” When I didn’t react to the name, he went on, while I changed out empty magazines for full ones. “He loved her to distraction, but she could not stay with him. Within the year, she was gone.”

Blood-servants who no longer sip of their master’s blood age rapidly. Magnolia would have died of old age soon after leaving. Gee however, a self-proclaimed blood-servant, had lived. Yet, he didn’t smell of vamp blood, so his longevity wasn’t part of a new vampire relationship. The youth was his alone and not something he had shared with Magnolia to keep her alive. Maybe it didn’t work that way. What’d I know?

“Leo brought his daughter to peace some few years later, but he never summoned me back. And since that time, the Mithrans have suffered greatly.”

I straddled Bitsa and sat. “How so?”

“To kill their own children? Would it not bring you to the brink of insanity?”

I saw an image from Beast’s past, a vision of dead kits. Their bodies had been ripped and torn apart by claws and teeth. I started. She had never shown me this, and at first I thought, wolves. But then I saw the prints in the soft soil and pooled blood. Mountain lion. A big one. And I smelled his scent in her memory. Our memories. We had tracked the male. Leaped down upon him from a high rock as he lapped at a river, the roaring water and cold wind hiding our presence from him.

I felt the impact as we landed. Driving the breath from both of us. Felt the fierce delight as our claws dug into his flesh. As our fangs bit into his spinal column just above his shoulders. And shook once, hard. The sound/feel/taste as his spine broke. The body collapsing beneath us falling into the water. The shock of cold as we followed him in and under. Released the kill and swam up through hated cold water to the surface. To the bank. Where we shook. And screamed our conquest to the jagged rocks above.

The memory faded and dispersed like a mist under a hot sun, leaving me with the taste of the kit killer in my mouth and the fury of vengeance in my mind. “Yes,” I said softly. “It would.” I puffed out a breath, not liking my next words even before they left my mouth. “But Leo isn’t ready to ask you back. He sent me to tell you to get out of his territory or face the consequences.” I couldn’t read his expression, but giving him that message after he saved my life was wrong on every level I could name. “He said to use whatever measures I thought necessary to make sure you left. That part of the message I’m refusing.” I tried to smile and couldn’t, as something akin to survivor’s guilt trapped me. “I’m sorry.”

“Until the Master of the City returns me to my rightful place in the clans, there will be no peace for him. None for them. No balance in their souls. No tranquility. I am necessary to them.” He tilted his head. “But then ...” He walked around me on the bike, graceful as a flamenco dancer, considering. “I have heard you have killed young rogues caught in devoveo. Perhaps you are the new Mercy Blade of the Mithrans.”

Kit killer, Beast hissed deep inside me.

“No,” I said to them both. I stood and brought my weight down on the kick start. Bitsa roared to life. “No way.” I left him there, on the side of the road. I was miles away, in the city, the lights of vamp headquarters lighting the night, before I remembered several things. Gee had never told me what he was. Gee had started Bitsa as if the witchy locks weren’t there at all. Gee had carried me, somehow, from Booger’s. And my silver chain-mail collar was still missing. I touched my throat, finding only the gold chain and nugget. Gone. The lacerations were healed, but the protection of the collar was absent. Replacing it was gonna cost me dearly. “Crap.”

My official cell rang while I was crossing the bridge and again just as I got to the far side. I pulled over on a patch of worn-out grass and smiled when I saw Molly’s number displayed. “Molly-girl, what’s cracking?”

“Nothing is cracking, Aunt Jane.”

I chuckled and said, “Does your mama know you’re using her cell, Angie Baby?” Angelina was my goddaughter, Molly’s daughter, a scary-strong witch who had come into her powers a decade too young. She lived with those powers battened and corded down and yet, she still knew things. Could do things. I’d seen her.

“No. I’m bein’ a bad girl. But you gots to stay away from the blue man.”

Shock thudded through me. “Okay, Angie Baby. I promise.”

“Cross your heart?”

I dutifully crossed my heart. “And hope to die.”

“No. Don’t do that! You be careful! I love you, Aunt Jane.”

Tears stung my eyes. “I’ll be careful. I promise. I love you too, Angie Baby.”