Around me, the silvered swords sang, the man moving with grace and speed that a dancer would envy. Fast as lightning and nearly as bright. He was faster than anything I had ever seen. Faster than a vamp. Two more wolves went down, blood pooling, looking black on the navy floor. There were more than twenty of them. Seven were dead or too wounded to crawl away.
Roul’s wolf leaped from a table and landed on my protector’s back. Claws scoured along his cheek, a right paw curved in and tore through his shirt, raking along his side. I couldn’t fire without risking hitting Zorro. With my injured hand, I stabbed up. Slicing along the wolf’s side, cutting deep. The wolf yelped and flinched. As if anticipating it, Zorro bent, took one step, and twisted; the motion threw Roul across the room. A long blade swung up and scored the wolf’s other side as he flew. Wolf blood and the blood of the swordsman flung into the air. Roul landed hard and slid, scattering tables and chairs.
I shot the wolf closest. A gray-black wolf with deep drown eyes. It skittered back, legs flailing, claws losing purchase on the blood-slick floor. I aimed at another.
The wolves drew back. Roul turned, tail down. He limped for the side door, the others racing with him, leaving behind their fallen. Seven lay unmoving. Five more crawled or limped for the exit. Five seemed mostly healthy and scattered, taking up the rear, growling at me and my savior. “My count was off,” I said. I caught the hint of movement to my side. An impact over my ear. And blackness closed in around me.
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.
