Helen lowered her daggers, put her legs together, and bent her knees in an ancient vampire bow.
Ilemina laughed. “My goodness.”
Helen straightened.
“Are those your daggers?” Ilemina asked.
“Yes.”
“Are they sharp?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think they are sharp enough to cut a cookie in a half?”
Helen paused. “Yes.”
“Come show me.”
Helen turned to Maud.
“Yes,” Maud said. “Be polite.”
Ilemina offered Helen her hand. Helen put her daggers away, took Arland’s mother’s hand, and walked away with her. “What kind of cookies…”
Maud slumped over. Suddenly Karat was there, holding her up. Maud retched, spat out blood, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand.
People were staring at her.
“Everything hurts,” she murmured.
“No shit,” Karat said. “Look at yourself.”
Maud glanced down. Cuts and slashes crisscrossed her armor, so many of them, it was no longer black. It was blood red. Across the field, Ilemina handed Helen a cookie. Her armor was crimson as well.
Karat gently lowered Maud to the grass. “The medic is coming. Just sit here and rest a bit.”
Konstana thrust into her view with field med unit. “Here.”
“Are you going to poison me?”
“Shut up and take the pain killer.” Konstana held the unit up. Maud pressed it against her neck. A stab and then a cool rush flooded her body, lifting the pain.
“Drink this.” Karat stuck a glass pitcher under her nose. Mint cordial. Of course. Maud gulped.
“Where the hell did you learn to fight?” Konstana asked.
“At my parents’ inn.”
“Humans don’t fight like that.”
“I couldn’t let her kill me,” Maud said. “I couldn’t leave Helen.”
Karat stared at her.
“You’ll get it when you have your own,” Konstana told Karat.
Maud leaned back against the stone. She didn’t win. But she didn’t lose either. The day was looking up.
Every step hurt. Maud walked down the hallway, trying not to wince, aware of Karat hovering by her side.
The medic had arrived and quickly confirmed three cracked ribs. He offered a stretcher. Getting onto that stretcher and being carted off would undo everything she’d just fought for. She had sparred with Ilemina. She hadn’t lost. She had to be seen walking away from the fight without any help.
It took another agonizing quarter of an hour before Lady Ilemina retired, and the older sentinel had come to collect Helen, who still had some scrubbing to do. Maud made it through by sheer will, but walking hurt like hell, and her will was quickly growing thin.
Two middle-aged women strode past them, eyeing her red armor. An awful lot of people had found an excuse to either cross or walk through the hallway. Word of her match with Ilemina had gotten around. They probably filmed it, Maud reflected. When it came to violence, the vampires filmed everything.
The harbinger on her wrist chimed. She glanced at it, and the harbinger tracked her eye movement, projecting a holoscreen over her wrist. It flashed and focused into Arland’s face. The beginning of a spectacular shiner swelled around his left eye. A long, ragged cut crossed his right cheek. His eyes blazed. He bared his teeth. She’d seen that look before on his face and recognized it instantly. Battle rage.
“Are you alright?” he growled.
“Are you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Karat grabbed her wrist and raised Maud’s arm so she could look at the screen.
“Don’t you dare show up here,” she hissed. “She’s walking on her own power and we have an audience. What the hell happened to you?”
“Otubar,” Arland snarled.
What?
Karat swore.
Maud took her arm back. “You had a fight with your mother’s consort?”
“We had a spirited practice,” Arland said. “I’ll find you as soon as I’m done speaking with my mother.”
“Don’t say anything stupid,” Karat barked, but the screen went dark. Karat rolled her eyes. “What is happening in our House?”
They made another turn and walked into a room filled with medical equipment and curved cots surrounded by metal and plastic arms bearing an array of lasers, needles, and what surely had to be tools of torture. The door blissfully hissed shut behind them. The room tried to crawl sideways. Karat grabbed her arm and steadied her.
The medic, a lean male vampire with dark gray skin and long mane of dark hair pulled back from his face, pointed at her. “Out of the armor.”
Maud hesitated. The armor was protection. In enemy territory, it determined life and death. Taking it off would make her vulnerable and she was feeling vulnerable enough already.
“Do you want to walk out of here in two hours or do you want to be carried out?” the medic asked.
She couldn’t afford to be carried out.
Maud hit her crest. The armor split along the seams and peeled off her, leaving her in the under-armor jumpsuit. The sudden absence of the reinforced outer shell took her by surprise. The floor rushed at her, yawning, dangerously close. Strong hands caught her, and the medic carried her to a cot. A scalpel flashed and then her jump suit came apart on the right side. The cot’s arms buzzed and hovered over her, as if the bed was a high-tech spider suddenly come to life. The cushion supporting her rose, curving, sliding her into a half-seated position. A green light stabbed from one of the mechanical arms, dancing across her bruised ribs in a hot rush.
“How bad is it?” Karat asked.
The medic met Maud’s eyes. “You’ll be fine. If you get to me in time, I can heal almost everything. Except stupid. You’re on your own with that one.”
“What are you implying?” Karat demanded.
“Going toe to toe with Ilemina was stupid,” the medic said.
Karat fixed him with her stare. The medic swiped across his harbinger. A huge holographic screen flared in front of them. On it, Ilemina kicked Maud across the lawn. The memory of the foot connecting with her ribs cracked through Maud. She winced.
“Stupid,” the medic said.
Maud sagged against the bed. The cushion cradled her, holding her battered body gently. The bed’s upper left arm pricked her forearm with a small needle. A soothing coolness flooded her.
For some inexplicable reason, she missed her father. She missed him with all of the desperate intensity of a scared lonely child. She would’ve given anything to have him walk through the door. Heat gathered behind her eyes. She was about to cry.
A sedative, she realized. The medic must have given her a mood stabilizer or a mild relaxant with her cocktail of painkillers. It was probably standard practice for vampires. Once the pain was gone, most of them would decide that they were fine now and likely try to dramatically kick free of the medical equipment and destroy the door to finish the fight.
Gerard Demille wasn’t her biological parent, but he was the only father she ever knew. He came from a time when knowing how to use a sword meant the difference between life and death. His wasn’t the modern sword fighting as a sport or an artform, but a brutally efficient skill, a way to survive. When she was six years old, she’d picked up his saber and swung it around. He’d watched her for a couple of minutes, stopped what he was doing, got up, and delivered her first sword lesson. The lessons came every day after that, and when she beat him, he hired others—some human, some not—to teach her.
Maud sighed. Mom always thought it was part of her magic, her particular brand of power. That’s why Mother spent most of Maud’s adolescence worrying that an ad-hal would come to the door.
The ad-hal served as the Innkeeper Assembly’s enforcers. While the innkeepers were bound to their inns, capable of almost unlimited power on the inn’s grounds and able to do almost nothing outside of it, the magic of the ad-hal came from within them. They served the Assembly. Safeguarding the treaty that guaranteed Earth’s protected status, they investigated, apprehended offenders, and punished them. Seeing an ad-hal was never a good thing. The last time she saw one was just a few days ago, when he walked into the battle for her sister’s inn and paralyzed every fighter on that field.
I could have ended up just like that.
There was a time when becoming an ad-hal hadn’t seemed so bad. She didn’t have Klaus’ encyclopedic knowledge of every species and custom in the galaxy. He was exceptional even by innkeeper standards. She didn’t have Dina’s green thumb, either. Her sister could plant a broomstick in the yard, and next summer it would bear lovely apples. All Maud had was an ability to read people and an innate understanding of violence and its degrees and uses. Within seconds of meeting an opponent, she knew exactly how to provoke or calm them and how much force she would have to use to stop, cripple, or kill them. Person or animal, Maud could take its measure and push them to the desired result. That’s what made her so good at navigating vampire politics.
She always thought that Klaus would inherit the inn, and Dina, who always wanted to live a normal life, would end up as a gardener or botanist somewhere, while Maud became an ad-hal. Motherhood and marriage hadn’t been on her radar.
Now her parents were missing, Klaus was lost, Dina was an innkeeper, and Maud lay in a vampire hospital bed after getting the living daylights beat out of her by a prospective mother-in-law.
The door chimed.
Now what?
The medic glanced at the screen to his left. “The Scribe is outside the door,” the medic said. “Do you want to receive him?”
Scribes kept vampire histories. Every genealogical quirk, every victory and defeat, every scheme gone wrong or right, they recorded it all. But she wasn’t a part of House Krahr. There was no reason why he would want to see her.
Delaying wouldn’t accomplish anything and refusing the meeting would be unwise. The Scribe held enough power to force a meeting if he wanted and she had precious few allies as it was. No reason to alienate him.