A new man entered the fray. Big Daddy had finally caught up. He was an older, bearded version of his son, with the same warrior bracelets around his wrists, armed with a dagger and a similar gun-in-holster setup. Of course, he just used the dagger, not the gun. Gee, why carry it at all?
He stepped between us, and with a few simple blows and elegant dagger thrusts, he took the two men down cleanly and easily. The remaining bandit, unarmed, turned and ran.
“Glad you could join us,” I said. “I imagine your son could use your help.”
“Stay here.” He turned to go.
“Here.” I tossed him my sword. He caught it, and without a hitch in stride, entered the fray.
I did as he said, I stayed there. Not because he’d told me to, but to watch the two of them for a moment. In battle, they were breathtaking to behold, moving as a unit, complementing one another. It was fighting as I’d never seen before, like poetry in motion. And the way the father wielded the sword…it made what I’d done with it as merely hacking away—all I knew to do. In his hands, though, the sword sang. A lethal song, but a mesmerizing one, whirring through the air in the hands of a master.
Surprisingly, the dad left the sword-wielding bandit leader engaged with his son instead of taking him on as he could have. Dad fought the two dagger-armed rogues and the other swordsman, although fought implied an even match. It wasn’t. He took two of them down as easily as drawing in breath—and just as quick—leaving a last trembling rogue holding a shaking sword to face him.
The son held his own more easily now, facing just two bandits instead of five. But held was the proper term. They were evenly matched. The boy kept his opponents away from him, agilely dancing away from their blows, but he did not cut any of them down.
I began a backward retreat. The boy was fine now. I could leave and should, before the battle was over and it was too late to slip away. I’d fought beside the boy, given the father my sword, but that didn’t make them my friends. Just my temporary allies until the threat of the bandits was neutralized.
As before, the boy seemed aware of my movements, even faced away from me as he was and engaged in battle. “Don’t,” he said, turning his head slightly to look at me.
One bare moment of inattention, and the bandit leader’s sword slipped past the boy’s guard and ran him through.
I cried out—not the boy, he was silent—and leaped for them, moving fast. But not as fast as the father. The big man threw his dagger, burying the blade in his opponent’s throat, taking him out. Then he turned, and with one powerful downstroke, cut off the leader’s arm—the arm holding the sword that had run his son through. With fast-flowing economy, the downstroke turned into a side slash, slicing open the last remaining bandit in a ruby splash of blood. Three simple moves and the battle was over.
He stepped in front of his fallen son, sword in hand, but did nothing more. Just watched as the wounded bandits dragged themselves away.
The bandit leader cautiously stooped down and retrieved his severed limb and weapon. “Don’t come back here again,” he snarled, retreating. His men, those that were able to stand, threw their fallen comrades over their shoulders and followed him.
I ran to the boy’s side, dropped down beside him, muttering, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
“I know,” the boy said, his voice strained with pain. “I let him past my guard.”
“Not you,” I snapped. “Me. For coming back to you.” His hand was pressed over the wound in front. I laid my hand over the back exit wound, which was spilling out blood like a dam with a high-pressured leak. The moment my palm came in contact with blood and flesh, that deep cycle of energy within me came up and out, called forth by the pain of another, easing it as my mole tingled and warmed, searching out the depths of his injury. Miraculously, it had punctured cleanly through, missing his intestines and other vital organs. Lucky son of a bitch. Of course, he’d probably have been able to heal those wounds as well. He was a Full Blood Monère, after all. What the hell was I doing?
“You took the pain away. Are you a healer?” the boy asked. My face softened when I looked down into his. Young, so young, even though he was taller than I by a good five inches.
“Not really.” Not in the usual way. I could heal, yes, but through sex. And that wasn’t called for here. Injured though the boy was, he would heal without my intervention. But I was trained as a nurse; there were other commonsense things you could do, like decrease the loss of blood.
“Give me part of your shirt or something to staunch the blood with,” I snapped at the father, who was gazing down at me with curious attention. Without a word, he ripped off a shirt sleeve and handed it to me. I folded it into a compress and gently pressed it against the rear exit wound. He tore off his other sleeve, and I used it for the entry wound.
“Why didn’t you use your damn gun?” I demanded.
“They had no guns. It would not have been an equal fight,” the big man said.
“It wasn’t an equal fight once you got here,” I snapped back.
I sacrificed my own two sleeves, tore them into strips, and bound them into one long piece, tying it around his waist to hold the two compresses in place.
Sitting back, I glared up at the big man. He still held the sword I’d given him. “Two questions,” I said, my tone a rock-hard contrast to the softness with which I’d spoken to his son. “What did you do with the Mixed Blood boy you had tied up near my home?” With Wiley. The wild fear and anger on his face when I last saw him flashed again in my mind’s eye.
“I knocked him out then uncuffed him.”
So Wiley should be fine. Just angry and frightened after he awakened, but essentially unharmed.
“What is your second question?” he asked.
Oh, that was an easy and obvious one. And you could say my tone was more than a touch hostile. “What the fuck do you want with me?”
The man laid down the sword, away from me, I noticed, and crouched down so that we were more of an equal height. It was his injured son, however, who answered me.
“My lady, please. My brother, he needs a Lady of Light. I beg of you, please save him before it’s too late.”
FOUR
WE WERE BACK once more in the car, but I was sitting up, free. No silver handcuffs. I’d have felt better if I had been restrained but, nope. I was here of my own free will. By my own stupid volition. We were crossing out of my Louisiana territory into the bordering state of Texas, and I was sitting there doing nothing about it.
The rogues, it seemed, resided along the fringe of my territory. And they were not the only rogues who plagued me. Father and son were rogues as well, something that came as almost a shock to me. I hadn’t thought of them as such. They were dressed better and seemed, I don’t know, somehow honorable…even though they’d knocked me unconscious and taken me from my people. Which went to say just how screwed up my judgment was…continued to be. Maybe I could blame it on being hit in the head. It just knocked the sense right out of me, you know?
I don’t think that was going to go over too well with my guys when I got back home. If I got back home. I was trusting the word of two rogues—that they would return me safely back after my look-see, even if I decided not to help Dante, the reason for this all. How stupid was that? Very stupid, because I believed them. That was why I was here, playing the nice, sedate passenger.