way, and tried to nail him with the cutlass at the same time. I succeeded at the first two, but my left hand is not as quick as my right. He had no trouble sliding away from my blade, even putting in an unnecessary somersault in the air and landing on his feet like a performer in Cirque du Soleil.
It might have given him the opportunity to show off, but my cutlass swipe did keep him far enough away from me that I could roll back to my feet.
I have speed. It is my best superpower. I am as quick as the werewolves, probably as fast as the vampires. I was not as fast as that goblin was. It was a good thing, then, that I didn’t have to defeat him. All I had to do was keep him from escaping until the others emerged from the barn.
Unhappily for me, from the sounds I was hearing from the barn, it might take a while for my compatriots to fight their way free of the hay. Mary Jo and Larry were alive, I’d heard their voices, so that was something.
The goblin smiled at me. “Ah, it has teeth, does it?” He displayed his own, sharper and greener than human teeth. “That’s fine. I like a bite or two with my dinner.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as he made a little throwing gesture toward me. Magic, I thought, though I couldn’t tell what it had done. I couldn’t afford to worry about it either, because, smiling broadly, he whipped out a long copper knife, maybe two-thirds the length of my cutlass, and struck.
I met his blade—his attack had been ludicrously forthright and slow, especially given the speed he’d already demonstrated. Almost, I thought, as though whatever magic he’d thrown at me should have taken care of the need to pay attention to my blade.
Steel bit into the copper as I absorbed the interesting and surprising news that, for once, my weird semi-immunity to magic seemed to have (finally) worked on something that was really trying to hurt me.
The impact of the blades made him hiss in what sounded like surprise. But he didn’t hesitate, changing his trajectory and his weapon in midattack. He opened his mouth and lunged for my throat with his big, sharp teeth.
Not for nothing had I endured a month of pirate-loving, self-styled-expert werewolves determined that I would wield the blade as well as any aspirant to Anne Bonny’s title of Pirate Queen ever had.
I freed my blade from the weak final throes of his knife attack and backhanded him with the cross guard in the same motion. Sadly, the cross guard was silver (because werewolves) and not iron like the blade. Cold iron, even in the form of steel, would have gotten his attention.
My blow knocked him back, but he grabbed me by the shoulder and knee and took me down to the ground.
Down to the ground is bad when you are dealing with humans. When dealing with creatures of preternatural strength, it is deadly. I managed, somehow, to bring up the cutlass between us without cutting myself. The flat side of it pressed against me from hip to opposite shoulder. Which meant it did the same thing to him in reverse.
Iron is a problem for most fae to one degree or another, but it varies. The goblin screeched, a sound that made my ears ring, and the smell of scorched flesh abruptly hit my nose.
I was hopeful for a moment, but there was no flash fire. All the blade did was singe him a bit.
My martial arts instructor, my human one, recommends against going for a man’s testicles under most circumstances, despite the advice of movies and novels. Most men over the age of puberty have a lifetime of protecting that area, so it is difficult to get a clean shot. And if you don’t nail the man hard enough to incapacitate him, all you’ve done is really tick him off.
The same thing, evidently, is true of goblins and steel.
“Thou wilst die,” he growled at me, pinning me with one arm and lifting the battered knife he still held with the other. Expecting, as most reasonable homicidal goblins would, that since I was not strong enough to break free, I would have to just lie there and die.
Hah.
I shifted to coyote and, while he struggled to parse what had just happened, I wiggled out of his hold, leaving my clothing behind but