by Dean Murray
It wasn't going to bleed him out quickly, but it was a start and I'd just managed to confirm that his scales had been weakened in the process of deflecting my first attack. We were back to being even.
I picked the pace up even more in an attempt to stress him, but slowed down after just a few seconds. He didn't have the shoddy footwork that had allowed me to take down one of my earlier opponents, which meant that I couldn't count on bringing him down that way either.
He stepped into me with even more speed than he'd shown so far, and slammed the claws on his right hand home in my stomach. I flowed into a technique that Carson had showed me. It was an arm bar designed to take an opponent down to the ground and hold him there.
I'd executed it correctly—I could feel that much as I grabbed the outside of Pal's hand and flipped it over so that I could apply pressure above his elbow—but something went wrong. Maybe it was because Pal was just too fast for me, or maybe the pain, dull though it was because of my hybrid nervous system, just slowed me down. It was even possible that Pal was just too strong.
Whatever the reason, I felt the hold start to go sour a split second after I started to apply it, so I changed courses instantly and rammed the claws on my left hand into his back where his kidney would have been located if he'd been a human.
I still had control of his wrist, but I didn't make a clean escape once he tore his hand out of my grasp. All he managed was another shallow slash on my arm though, so I counted it as a fair trade. He was probably still ahead, but I was hanging in the fight much better than I'd been worried I might.
We danced back and forth again, but while he was still fast, the blinding speed he'd shown earlier didn't make another appearance until the next time that he stepped into me and slammed his hand home again.
This time he tore a scream out of me. His claws had penetrated a lot deeper, deep enough that even as a hybrid the blow had been excruciating. Despite the pain I reacted with a smoothness that surprised even me.
I dropped my inside knee slightly and brought my full weight down on the inside of his arm in an elbow strike that could have splintered a small tree. The force of my blow brought him down and slightly forward, so I turned into him and threw him into the ground with everything I had.
It was the same hip throw that I'd used against Nicolas, but this time I was using it against someone who'd never learned how to take a fall. Pal hit hard, a lot harder than I expected, but apparently lamias were built even more solidly than I'd realized.
Hitting the ground that hard would have snapped a hybrid's neck. Maybe it would have done the same thing if I'd used it on a worker, but Pal simply bounced and then rolled back to his feet.
"Is that all you've got? A real fighter would have killed me rather than throwing me at the ground."
Pal's words were full of contempt, but I could see the worry in his eyes. I'd just hit him with a technique that was completely outside of his experience and we both knew that if he'd landed a little differently the fight would have been over.
More importantly, I'd just realized that he was a glory hound. He wasn't interested in being a better fighter as much as looking like a better fighter. He was fast and strong, and his technique was good, but he'd honed that one technique—stepping into his opponent and driving his claws into their stomach or chest—to blinding perfection, and I was pretty sure that he'd done it solely to be able to drop werewolves with a speed that nobody else could match.
It worked perfectly if you were injecting someone with poison, but otherwise it wasn't as effective. He would have been better off hitting me somewhere else that last time, but his reflexes were too wired into that one attack to deviate from it. He probably didn't even consciously think about throwing that punch, he just launched it whenever he saw the opportunity.
I could use that.
We slowly moved back towards each other and I smiled at the way he was opening and closing his right fist. He was trying to work feeling back into his arm. My elbow strike might not have shattered the bones there, but it had still affected him.
I let my hands drift ever so slightly apart and he reacted just as he had twice already. He blurred forward, claws seeking my guts, but this time I wasn't where he expected me to be. I'd already started moving to the right and turning my body counterclockwise. It left my back exposed to his left hand, but he never got a chance to take advantage of that fact.
My right hand shot forward and I took him in the forearm, spearing him with my claws as I stepped into him. The pain made him pull his arm back, but that was exactly what I wanted him to do. I latched on with my left hand as well and pulled against him as I sank the talons on my feet into his legs and side.
It was the exact same attack that I'd tried to use against the Coun'hij enforcer back in the first fight we'd had after leaving Alec and the others, but this time it worked. I straddled his arm with one foot buried in his chest and the other deep in the meat of his shoulder, and wrenched his arm with every ounce of strength I possessed.
He tried to resist, but he failed. Maybe it was the numbness from my elbow strike, maybe it was the fact that blood was still pouring out of his arms where I'd stabbed him. In the end it didn't actually matter that much because the net result was the same.
I kicked off of him, propelling myself a safe distance away from him, and hit the ground rolling. I came back to my feet to find that his right arm was hanging limply at his side.
"It's over. You can't beat me now, not with your arm dislocated like that. Yield so that I don't have to kill you; the enclave can't afford to lose another consort right now."
Pal shook his head at me and hissed something unintelligible at me before responding in English. "I'm not going to give Set the satisfaction of executing me for failing to finish the fight. You'll have to come kill me yourself."
"Is that true, Set?"
I asked the question without taking my eyes off of Pal, but Pal attacked anyway in the hopes that I'd be too distracted to stop him. He was wrong. I knocked his claws away, forcing them across his body as I stepped forward.
The momentum of his charge tried to carry him past me, but I didn't let him get far. I checked him with a glancing blow from my shoulder to slow him down slightly and knock him off balance, and then I stepped around behind him and wrapped my right arm around his neck at the same time that I wrapped up his left arm.
This wasn't something that Set had taught me, it was pure old-fashioned hybrid combat. It was a textbook kill position, and I felt Pal go instantly still as he realized that I could easily open up all of the major veins along the side of his neck with a flick of my wrist.
"Is it true, Set? Are you going to kill him if he surrenders?"
"I'm sorry, Isaac Nazir. I can see what you are trying to do, but it is our way."
I opened my mouth to tell him that their practice was wasteful and bloodthirsty, but I never managed to get the words out.
I'd wrapped Pal's left arm up, but I'd wrapped it up the way that I would have wrapped up a hybrid. For this hold with another hybrid the primary concern was stopping them from raking your other arm. The way that our shoulders were hinged made it almost impossible for us to strike down and back around our own bulk, but apparently lamias didn't face the same kind of restriction.
Pal reached back and slammed the claws on his left hand into my leg. At first I didn't think anything of it. It wasn't a killing blow, and it didn't change my desire to find a way for us to both walk away from this fight.
I started to readjust my hold on his left arm, and then stopped as fire entered my bloodstream from the place where he'd just stabbed me. I screamed in pain, but the agony wasn't enough to completely shut my mind down.
He'd violated the code of the fight and used poison on me. I was as good as dead.
Pal tried to break free of me, but I hadn't lost control of my voluntary muscles yet and I wasn't going to let him win like this. My claws cut into the side of his neck, and then the two of us collapsed to
the sand together.
The poison was incredibly fast-acting. It had already reached my chest, burning my heart at the same time that it consumed everything else from my shoulders down, but the thing that really surprised me was the fact that I was already hallucinating.
Set was moving toward me, but that somehow paled in significance compared to the soothing heat that was moving up my arms. I had a split second to wonder why my venom-addled brain had picked a different kind of heat as an escape from what I was going through and then Set reached me and plunged his claws into my chest.
As the blackness claimed me I wondered at the sheer scope of my foolishness. In the end even Set had turned on me.
Chapter 27
Isaac Nazir
The Lamia Enclave
Death wasn't anything like I expected it to be. Despite my best efforts, I was gradually pulled out of the quiet, numb void that had been cradling me and into a different kind of darkness.
It was cold here and hot, all at the same time, but the really terrifying thing was the sheer amount of pain. Onyx's ability had been a constant, all-consuming thing that had left no room for feeling anything other than agony.
This was different. It came in waves. I always hurt, but there were times when the pain was small enough that I could still think. Those moments of lucidity were few and far between though. Instead I spent most of my time in such torment that I felt like I couldn't even breathe. Just when I thought I'd taken all of the suffering I could endure, the pain would ramp up even higher and I would find out that my capacity to endure was somehow greater than I'd thought.
Knowing that there was even more pain waiting for me made it even worse than what I'd endured at Onyx's hands. There had been a limit to how long he could hurt me before I would just finally die. There didn't seem to be any such limit inside of my new existence. I was in some kind of afterlife of suffering and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't remember anything that I'd done that was bad enough to merit this.
I hadn't been some kind of mass murderer. I hadn't molested children or robbed anyone. It didn't seem right that my eternal reward was this, but then again I couldn't seem to remember anything truly great that I'd accomplished during my time on Earth. I'd been as strong and powerful as any superhero, but somehow that hadn't been enough for me, not when faced with villains every bit as strong and deadly as I was.
Maybe that was the reason I was cast off into the blackness. All of the superheroes I'd grown up reading about had been up against villains who were their match in almost every way, but that hadn't stopped them from trying to make the world a better place. I'd had the ability to make a difference, a real difference, but I hadn't.
Maybe I'd misunderstood all of the religions that I'd studied as little more than an academic exercise. It wasn't just about doing no harm, that wasn't enough to earn you nirvana or paradise. You had to accomplish something worthwhile before you died.
It felt like I'd been floating in the darkness for forever, but eventually I realized that the lucid times were growing longer and more frequent. They'd been filled with clips of violence that were only fractions of a second long before, but now they became case studies in fighting. I saw every possible way there was to throw a punch and learned what made a good punch in almost any conceivable situation. The same with the use of my claws, talons, and feet. It was like when professional athletes watched themselves on slow-motion film.
There is a limit to how much violence a human, or shape shifter, mind can watch without becoming desensitized to it, and I passed that limit long before the blackness finally let me go. It should have turned me into some kind of psychopath, but it didn't. It didn't because somewhere along the way I realized that I could feel someone's hand on my arm.
That contact reminded me that there was more to existence than just violence. Those long, gentle touches anchored me with the knowledge that violence wasn't an end, it was a means. Violence was a way of dealing with those who refused to honor the natural law that all sentient beings had a right to survive and be free.
As time went by, I worried that I'd lose contact with whoever was touching me, that they would leave or I would lose the ability to feel, but that wasn't what happened. The feeling that there was someone at my side continued to get stronger until I finally felt the urge to open my eyes.
I'd somehow forgotten that I'd ever had eyes—that I hadn't been blind from birth—but when I finally opened them I found that I was back on my bed in my room in the enclave. That surprised me for some reason. I'd somehow thought that Set and the others would just leave me there in the sand where I'd fallen.
Even more astonishing was the fact that I wasn't alone. I was sitting on the far edge of my bed and Celeste was there with me, curled up next to me with her hand on my arm. She looked terrible and perfect all at the same time.
She looked like she'd showered and changed her clothes recently, but she was obviously exhausted. There were deep worry lines on her forehead that hadn't been there before Pal had poisoned me, and she looked like she'd aged more than a decade since then.
Jax was right. It didn't matter how good a liar someone was, if you spent enough time around them you could eventually put the pieces together and start to see what they were like underneath all of the false pretenses. Celeste was worried about me, she cared about me—much more even than I'd realized.
That new understanding of the depths of her feelings made me wonder how many of her past actions would lend themselves to a new interpretation now if I were to go back through them in my mind.
I resolved to do that the first chance I got, but it would have to wait until after I finished studying her. It was hard to say whether I was more overcome by the fact that I was still alive, or if Celeste being at my side was more shocking.
I drank in every square centimeter of her features and marveled at the fact that she could look so different and still be gorgeous. Her brow furrowed in concern, and I found myself reaching over to smooth away the wrinkles without thinking.
Amazingly, it didn't hurt when I moved, and even more amazing, Celeste didn't wake up when I touched her. Instead she relaxed so completely that the wrinkles smoothed away. She instantly looked nineteen again.
Satisfied that I hadn't robbed her of the sleep that she so obviously needed, I relaxed back onto my back and took a few deep, experimental breaths. Everything seemed to be working correctly. The massive hole that I'd been expecting to find on the right side of my abdomen wasn't there; I seemed to be fully healed and rested.
As much as I wanted to stay there with Celeste forever, I knew that the world wasn't going to just stop turning while we rested. I needed to find Set and find out how long I'd been out.
I started to move off of the bed, trying not to disturb Celeste, but as soon as I tried to slide my arm out from under her hand I got an unexpected response. She grabbed hold of my arm with all of her strength and then a second later her beautiful gray eyes popped open. She looked at me with a sleepy kind of astonishment.
"Isaac. I just dreamed that someone was trying to take you away from me."
"No, I'm still here. You can go back to sleep and we can talk later if you want."
"Screw that. How are you feeling?"
She was entirely awake now. She sat up on the bed and tugged at her top to get it back situated like she wanted it.
"On the whole, surprisingly good. What did I miss out on?"
"Pal poisoned you, but you killed him before his venom started throwing you into convulsions. Set ran over to you and injected you with some kind of anti-venom, but I'm pretty sure none of the lamias expected that to work."
I rubbed my forehead as I tried to get past the memories of fighting that had been a recurring theme while I'd been unconscious. It was hard to pierce the veil of darkness, but I remembered at least some of what had happened.
"I thought he was trying to pump even more poison into my system."
"Nope. The consorts produce an anti-venom in th
e glands that drain into their pinkie fingers. He stabbed you, but that was just so that he could deliver the anti-venom as quickly as possible into the area directly around your heart. He saved your life."
I nodded. "I should have known that he had my best interests at heart. He's always come through for me."
"Yeah. He and I have spent some time talking over the last few days. I can see why you're so attached to him."
I started to nod, but then the full implication of what she'd just said sank in. "Wait, how long have I been unconscious?"
"I'm not sure, more than a week, maybe nine days now."
She said it with such casualness that I knew she was lying to me. She knew exactly how long I'd been asleep for, she was just hoping that I wouldn't know what it meant.
"I thought you said you didn't want to lie to me."
One instant she was sitting on my bed facing me, completely collected and calm, and in the next she crumbled into my arms.
"You're right, I just didn't want you to feel guilty too. Onyx has been killing my people for days, but I didn't know what to do. Set has been administering the anti-venom to you at least a couple of times per day. I was going to just go back by myself to stop Onyx from hurting my friends, but Set told me that any males left here without a queen would be killed. I begged him to make an exception for you. He seemed genuinely sad, he even went to his queen to see if she would overrule tradition, but she refused and he wasn't willing to dishonor himself, even for you."
"You stayed for me."
She wiped away tears with the back of her hand and then nodded. "I don't know what I was thinking. I know that you don't love me, that you can't love me as long as I'm willing to surrender your friends to save my own, but I couldn't bring myself to let you die."
The magnitude of her sacrifice was almost incomprehensible to me. She'd sacrificed everything she was, everything she had, in an effort to protect the submissives in the New Orleans pack. She could have fled just like Ash had, but she hadn't. She'd stayed because they were her people. They were hers in a way that most people didn't understand, but I understood. In a way she was saying that I was hers too. She probably didn't even understand that yet herself, but after all this time I knew her at least that well. She'd stayed for me because she loved me, but even more than that, she'd stayed because I was hers.
