“No, I don’t,” she said calmly. “My sister says you’re all right in a bad spot.”
“Sister?” I asked. “Oh, Sigrun Gard?”
“Obviously,” she said. She offered me her hand. “Freydis Gard.”
“Harry.” I took her hand. She had a grip like a pneumatic clamp, and my bandaged hands were sensitive. “Ouch, be gentle with me.”
She laughed again. “I’ve heard some about you, but you must be something special. Lara doesn’t let anyone interrupt this part of her day.”
“It’s probably easier than replacing the landscaping,” I said.
“That must be it,” Freydis said. She came to a door, stopped, and gave me an utterly incongruous Vanna White kind of gesture toward it. “And here we are.”
So I opened the door and went through it, into the Raith Dojo.
I mean, when you’ve got five gazillion rooms in the house, one of them obviously needs to be a dojo. Sure.
The room was brightly lit, a stark contrast to the rest of the place. The walls were white and had a number of white silk banners hanging from them, marked with black kanji that had been painted on. I knew enough to recognize the lettering but not enough to read it. The practice floor was smooth wood with tatami matting over much of it.
A woman wearing a white kimono was in the middle of the practice floor, with one of the smooth round staves called a bo in her hands. She was flowing through a practice routine that had the weapon whirling in an arcing blur around her and before her. The sound of the weapon cutting the air, faster than a vanilla human could have moved it, was a steady hiss.
She turned and faced me, still striking, spinning, thrusting at the empty air. Lara Raith had cheekbones that could split atoms, bright grey-silver eyes capable of boring through plate steel, and a smile that could turn crueler than a hook-tipped knife. Her blue-black hair was long and would have fallen to the small of her back if it hadn’t been bound up into a messy bun. She froze in the midst of her routine, body coming to an utter halt, transforming her from a dervish into a mannequin. The demonstration of perfect control was more than a little impressive. And interesting.
But that was Lara. I had never been in her presence without feeling an intense attraction for her, and I wasn’t at all sure it was because she was a vampire of the White Court, and the closest thing to a succubus that you could find this side of Hell. It had more to do with her. Lara was as beautiful and dangerous as a hungry tigress, and very, very smart.
She met my eyes for a second and then gave me an edged smile. “You want to talk to me right now, Harry,” she said, “take off your shoes and pick up a bo.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow. “I don’t give anyone my practice time,” she said. “This is my house. You came to me. Take my terms or leave them, Dresden.”
I exhaled.
Doing what she asked was an acceptable way for her to get around the traditional protections of my guest-right. After all, if we were in the dojo, training, and something bad happened to me, it could be a regrettable accident. Combat training is dangerous in its own right, after all. Or, I supposed, she could claim I had attempted to assassinate her, just as Thomas had tried to take out Etri. In fact, I could see a sort of hare-brained logic in Lara attempting to muddy the waters around Thomas’s situation by creating a similar one with me, and then casting blame at a wider conspiracy. Cockamamie nonsense, but someone desperate enough to help family might reason themselves into it.
I chewed on my lip. But not Lara Raith. Not her style at all.
Lara was the slipperiest and cagiest vampire in a basket of psychotic sociopaths. I didn’t really see her as the same kind of hedonistic monster as many other White Court vamps I had met—she was something much more dangerous than that. She was disciplined, rigidly self-restrained, and she didn’t give way to either the demonic parasite that made her a monster or anyone else who would try to force her into doing something she didn’t want to do.
If Lara wanted me dead, it would have happened already. It would have been abrupt, swift, and well executed, and I probably wouldn’t have had