the crossway between the stairs, the hallway, the parlors.
Down the hall, his office door opened. He stepped out, took one look at me, and moved forward.
"You did this to me."
I don't know if he heard me, but his expression didn't change. He reached me, stopped, and his eyes widened, and he searched my own. "Jesus Christ, Merit. What's happened to you?"
My sword whistled as I unsheathed it, and when I gripped it in both hands, I felt the circuit close. I closed my eyes, basking in the warmth of it.
"Merit!" This time, there was an order behind the words.
I opened my eyes, nearly flinched, wanted instinctively to bend to the will of my Master, my maker, but I fought it and through trembling limbs, I forced back the urge to yield.
"No," I heard myself say, my voice barely a whisper.
His eyes widened again, then flicked to something behind me. He shook his head, looked back at me. His voice low, intimate, insistent. "Come back from this, Merit. You don't want to fight me."
"I do," I heard, in a voice that was barely mine. "Find steel," she advised him.
We advised him.
He stood there for a long moment, silently, still, before nodding. Someone offered him a blade, a katana that glinted in the light. He took it, mirrored my stance - katana in both hands, body bladed.
"If the only way you'll come back from this is to be bloodied by it, then so be it."
He lunged.
It was easy to forget that he'd been a soldier. The perfectly cut Armani, pristine white shirts, and always shiny Italian shoes were more the workaday wrapping of a corporate CEO than of the leader of a band of three hundred and twenty vampires.
That was my mistake - forgetting who he was. Forgetting that he was head of Cadogan House for a reason, not just for his politics, not just for his age, but because he could fight, knew how to fight, because he knew how to swing a sword through the air.
He'd been a soldier, had learned to fight in the midst of a world war. She'd made me forget that.
He was amazing to watch, or would have been, had I not been on the receiving end of the slices and cuts, the kicks and turns that torqued his body nearly effortlessly. The lunges and blocks. He was so fast, so precise.
But the pain began to ease, and repressed for so long, held back by my human perceptions, misgivings fears, she - the vampire - began to fight back.
And she was faster.
I was faster.
My body knifed toward his, and I swung, used the katana in my hands to slash, to force him to move, to spin, to slice his own sword in ways that looked comparatively awkward.
I don't know how long we fought, how long we chased each other in the midst of a circle of vampires on the first floor of Cadogan House, my hair wet and matted, tears streaking my face, bloodied hands and knees, broken ribs, the sleeves of my shirt in tatters from half a dozen near misses.
His arms were equally sliced, his twists and turns still not fast enough to avoid my parries. Where he'd once let me play the game, had moved in close enough to give me an opportunity to make contact before slipping away again, now he spun to save his skin; the expression on his face - blank, focused - told that story well enough. This wasn't play fighting. This was the real challenge, the fight I'd tried to bring to him months ago, the fight that he'd mocked. He owed me a fight, a real fight, in recognition of the fact that I hadn't asked to become a vampire but had acquiesced to this authority anyway because he'd asked it of me. This was less a challenge, I thought, than an acknowledgment. He was my Master, but I'd taken my oaths and he owed me a fight. A fair one, because I'd been willing to fight for him. To kill for him. To take a hit for him, if necessary.
"Merit."
I shrugged off the sound of my name and kept fighting, dodging, and swinging, smiling as I swung the blade at him, parried and countered, torqued my own body to stay out of the line of his honed steel.
"Merit."
I blocked his blow, and as he reoriented and rebalanced his body, I glanced behind me, just in time to see Mallory, my friend, my sister, hand outstretched, an