The Staff and the Blade

by Elizabeth Hunter

  Damien watched Sari when she was reading. He’d always loved watching her read. It wasn’t her favorite activity. It was too still for her taste. But she did it when it was necessary. Her lips moved along with the words she was reading. Her fingers played in her long hair. She couldn’t be completely still.

  Feeling his eyes, she glanced up. “What is it?”

  “We’re not going to find records of her here.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because as far as Ava knows—and as far as Rhys has been able to check—Ava has neither Native American nor Norse blood in her. And all Irin native to the US can track their line to one or the other. We could do a DNA check, but we’re not going to find the information here.”

  “Maybe her family immigrated.”

  “Then they wouldn’t likely be in these records.” He tapped a stack of more leather-bound journals. “Would they? They’d be in the modern ones that have been digitized.”

  Candice piped up from the corner. “I agree with Damien. I don’t think we’re going to find her records here.”

  Damien needed to freshen his mind with a topic that didn’t remind him of the massacre the Americas had faced during the Rending. Almost all the native Irin families had been decimated by the Grigori. The Norse American Irin on the northeastern coast had fared a little better, but not by much.

  “Candice, why did you come here?” he asked. “Aren’t there havens in the Americas now?”

  Candice glanced at Sari, who nodded before the singer answered.

  “There are. My mate has distant family here. Some of the scribes in the Oslo house. So I wanted my daughter to be closer to what was left of her people.” Candice smiled. “Perhaps at some point, some of them might find mates and have children of their own. It would be the closest she has to cousins.”

  Damien hadn’t known about a daughter. If she was young, then Candice hadn’t been widowed during the Rending. “Were you and your mate living in a haven in the Americas?”

  “No, he didn’t trust them.”

  Sari said, “Many don’t.”

  “Yes, but in retrospect…” Candice shook her head. “We should have gone to one.”

  “Looking back is worthless,” Sari said woodenly. “We cannot change the past.”

  “But we can learn from it,” Damien said.

  “What?” Sari put down the journal she was reading. “What can we learn from the past? Expect the Grigori to hunt us? Not to trust the scribes? Not to trust anyone? Strike before you are struck?”

  “You seem to have learned those lessons well,” Damien said.

  “I had to.”

  “I know.”

  Silence descended on the library, and Candice made no excuse when she rose and left them alone.

  “We can learn from the past,” Damien said again. “We can’t continue like this.”

  “It seems as if some of my sisters agree with you,” Sari said. “Try to keep this between us, but there is talk among the havens about trying to reform the council. Unless we get some kind of representation in Vienna—”

  “You and I.”

  “What?”

  He leaned across the table. “You and I, milá. That’s what I am talking about. Forget the havens and the council for a moment. You and I cannot continue like this.”

  She reached across the table and grabbed another journal. “I’ll talk to you about this when I’m ready.”

  “You told me yourself you were tired.”

  “Tired. Exactly. I don’t have the energy to deal with politics and still—”

  “Hate me?”

  She blinked. “I don’t hate you.”

  “Don’t you?” He could not keep the bitterness from his voice. “You blame me.”

  “Am I not allowed my anger?”

  Heaven above, yes. He deserved every bit of her anger, along with that of her sisters. The problem was, the anger wasn’t helping her survive anymore. It was eating his mate alive.

  “Anger drains you,” he said softly. “It’s a lesson I learned a long time ago.”

  Her eyes burned. “Does it? I’ve found that it feeds me.”

  “But then you feed it, and it grows. Eventually, Sari, it will consume you.”

  She walked over and leaned down to Damien’s ear. “Only if I don’t find meat to feed it,” she said. “You’ll have to live without me for a while. I’m going hunting.”

  Sari left that night. And Damien didn’t see her for weeks.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE waited, her back pressed to a wall in the dance club, music pumping like the blood in her veins. It was every club in any city she’d ever been to. They all smelled the same. They all sounded the same. The humans all pretended as if they were daring. They weren’t. In the vast span of history, Sari found modern humans to be absurdly bland.

  A small crush of them walked past laughing, then turned the corner and the hallway was empty again. Except for her. Except for the door leading to the basement rooms where she’d seen the Grigori and the human girl stumble. Sari was waiting. There was only one now, but there were two more out on the dance floor, drawing humans like flies to honey. Soon they’d lure their prey away, and she could strike them all.

  A lone figure walked down the hall. Sari could feel the rhythm of the newcomer’s heels tapping as she came to a halt beside her. A hint of familiar magic cloaked in carefully concealed power. The tall woman leaned back and rested her shoulders against the wall beside Sari.

  “I didn’t know you were hunting here.”

  Sari waited for a group of girls to squeeze past before answering her sister Renata. “I thought you were on your way back to the haven.”

  Renata was tall, dark, and striking. The pair of them were almost equal in size, but while Sari had never been slight, Renata could pass for one of the supermodels who posed for magazine covers now. Yet Renata was no pretty face. She was a wildly dangerous, on-edge, revenge-driven Irina hunter.

  “No reason not to have a bit of fun before I head home to mother.” Renata looked her up and down. “I didn’t expect to meet her in a club.”

  Sari ignored the implied question. It was no business of Renata’s why Sari needed to spill blood.

  “I count one in the basement,” she said. “And two on the floor.”

  “One in the basement and five on the floor,” Renata said. “Or there were when I walked though.”

  That was a noticeable increase from just fifteen minutes before. “Is there something I don’t know?”

  “I don’t know what information you have. Volund is in Göteborg.”

  “How sure are you?”

  Renata raised a cool eyebrow. “My source died loudly. I believe he told me everything.”

  A Fallen archangel in Göteborg. Twelve hours from Bergen. Only three by plane. Damien and his black knife could be within striking distance of the angel who had masterminded the Rending within a day. The hissing whispers of her ghosts liked the idea.

  “Don’t,” Renata interrupted her thoughts. “He has a veritable army of pretty boys around him. Even I’m not that crazy.”

  “Damien is at Sarihöfn.”

  “Well, that explains why you’re here.”

  Sari decided to ignore her. “Damien still has his knife.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She turned her head. “Why wouldn’t he have it?”

  “There are rumors that a heavenly blade was lost in Istanbul recently. I don’t know the details, but it could have been his.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  Sari felt them. She angled her head and opened her senses. Grigori soul voices scraped along her mind. She tugged Renata’s sleeve, and they faded back into the hallway, waiting for the monsters to come. Waiting for them to make their laughing way down the stairs with the women dangling on their arms. Sari listened carefully but could hear no telltale creaking on the stairs. If they were concrete or stone, the women were in
luck.

  Next to her, Renata’s breath picked up. She wound a black Kevlar-lined scarf around her neck and whispered under her breath as Sari buttoned up the black leather jacket she wore. The collar was reinforced with Kevlar and a fine steel mesh. Grigori always went for the throat first.

  Listening to the voices sink underground, Sari and Renata waited a few more minutes before they went for the door. Once inside, they paused on the landing. Sari turned and locked the door. The stairs were concrete covered in industrial carpet, no doubt designed to absorb as much sound as possible from the club above. Lights glowed in the basement lounge, but the stairwell turned and their view was blocked.

  Nodding at Sari, Renata drew a knife from her coat, a seven-inch black steel blade; her silver-coated stiletto would be tucked in easy reach. Sari carried nearly identical weapons. One knife to fight with. Another to send their souls to judgment. In this modern world, knives were more practical than swords.

  Grigori carried no weapons unless they were expecting scribes, but it was a mistake for any Irina to underestimate them. Even those power drunk on human souls could be dangerous opponents. In the centuries since the Rending, Sari had made it her mission to learn as much about her enemy as she could. If she’d known more—known how to harness her own magic effectively—she could have done more to prevent the slaughter of her retreat.

  Grigori were direct sons of the Fallen, and their natural magic was powerful. But they were untrained in formal magic. They did not scribe spells on their body as the Irin did. They could not speak incantations of power.

  But Grigori were also fast and inhumanly strong. They were vicious and had nothing to live for save survival and their own indulgence. They were selfish creatures who cared nothing for their brothers, abandoning them or even throwing them in the path of an attacker so they could escape.

  Sari listened and waited. The sounds of seduction and pleasure turned her stomach, but she held her peace until it was obvious the six men were occupied. Raising a finger, she began to walk down the stairs. She paused on the landing and peered around the corner.

  The lights were dim, but the room was crowded. Couches and chaises lined the walls. One alcove was entirely taken up by a round bed where a man lounged with two women writhing on top of him. The other Grigori were similarly entangled with their prey.

  Sari gripped Renata’s forearm before she could walk farther. She squeezed until her sister caught her eye.

  No humans, she mouthed.

  Renata frowned.

  No humans, she mouthed again firmly.

  Renata rolled her eyes and lifted one shoulder. Fine.

  Sari leaned close and whispered, “We go in fast. Clean up later.”

  Renata nodded. With so many humans, there would be no way of taking each Grigori quietly. The women would scream.

  But they would live, which was more than they’d had going for them before Sari arrived.

  The next second, Renata was gone and Sari ran after. Renata took out the monster guarding the door—his clothes were already falling in a dusty heap—before she moved to the left. Sari went right.

  “Domem man,” she whispered to the first Grigori she saw.

  The man froze where he lounged, his neck straining, but nothing else moved. The girl straddling him stopped her ministrations and grabbed his shoulders. She blinked and swayed but said nothing.

  “Irina!” the Grigori hissed between clenched teeth.

  Sari shoved the shocked—and likely high—human girl off the man’s lap, yanked his hair back, and slit his throat in seconds. Pounding music masked the grunts of pleasure that were quickly turning into dying groans. But she didn’t have time to plunge her silver stiletto into his spine and release his soul. No, too many other monsters crowded this den.

  The first shocked cries came from a blood-splattered girl straddling one Grigori’s legs. Her lover was limp below her, his throat cut but his mouth still trying to work. Renata stood behind him, a shadowed figure holding a dripping blade.

  “Help! Heeelp!” the girl screamed a moment before Renata punched her jaw, sending the girl flying to the ground and silencing her.

  After that, any hope of stealth was lost.

  Humans ran screaming, some heading straight upstairs with no thought of clothes, only to be trapped by the door that Sari and Renata had locked behind them to contain the mess. Other girls scrambled for the corners of the room. The three remaining Grigori shoved through the mass of panicking females, searching for their attackers and kicking aside those humans who were already passed out.

  “Ya fasham!” Renata shouted, throwing one off-balance and into a wall.

  “Shanda man,” Sari said under her breath, directing her voice at a powerful Grigori who shoved two human girls into a wall as he raced toward her. The spell caused him to stumble, but he was stronger than the others.

  “Ya domem.” She held up her hand and he froze.

  His lip curled up. His neck muscles strained. “You… can’t hold me… bitch.”

  “Yes.” Sari brought her black knife up and sliced his neck so deeply the blood poured like a river down his chest. “I can.”

  He went limp, though her magic held him upright.

  “Sari!”

  She spun just in time to see one charging toward her, tackling her legs and slamming her to the floor before he rolled to his feet and stood over her.

  For a brief, panicked second, she was the woman curled on a dirty floor, bloody and beaten by these cursed sons of the Fallen. She screamed, scrambling to her feet and lunging at the monster who’d knocked her down. No finesse. No strategy. She was pure fury and animal instinct.

  The Grigori wasn’t expecting Sari’s wrath. Or her weight. She was no slip of a girl, nor did this creature outweigh her. She knocked him to the ground and grappled until she had him pinned under her body, one knee high in his crotch, the other leg holding him down.

  Sari whispered no magic. She raised her arm and slammed a fist into the Grigori’s finely arched cheek. She felt the bone shatter beneath her punch, so she drew back and did it again. And again. His head lolled to the side and she let go. Gripping his hair, raising her other fist to smash the opposite cheek in.

  “Sari!” Renata’s voice cut through the deafening and satisfying crunch.

  “Stop playing,” her sister bit out. “These humans will figure out how to open the door in minutes.”

  “Clean up,” Sari said, spitting blood from her mouth.

  The Grigori below her was dead weight. She turned his neck to the side and drew the silver-tipped stiletto from a pocket near her left breast. The breast that had swollen with milk, even after this one’s brothers had killed the child in her womb. She drew the knife and plunged it into the base of his spine. Then she stood and went to the others in the room; they were still clinging to life but immobile from blood loss.

  Sari turned each head to the side and plunged the silver knife in, ignoring the pleading eyes of the one she’d cut first. She didn’t wait for the young Grigori to dissolve before she went to the second, whose chest was a river of blood. His eyes screamed his hatred, even as the light went out. His face turned gold, and he vanished under Sari’s bloody hands.

  Within minutes, all the monsters were no more than dust. She and Renata took turns drugging the women on the stairs. Most of them were drunk, high, and suffering from Grigori feeding anyway. When they woke in the empty lounge, the whole episode would be another bad dream.

  Sari and Renata climbed the stairs back to the club and walked arm in arm through the surging mass of humans.

  They were practiced and efficient. Cleanup had only taken fifteen minutes.

  ※

  …you feed it, and it grows. Eventually it will consume you.

  Sari let Renata drive back to the haven. She stared out the window as Renata babbled about the play she’d seen in Paris and the nightclub in Budapest where she’d tracked a nest of Grigori back to their house and killed them in their sle
ep. She joked about a persistent lover. Her thoughts about adopting a dog to keep at the haven. They drove through the night, and eventually Sari fell asleep.

  She found him in her dreams. When he enfolded her in his arms, Sari let the quiet tears come.

  “Milá, you must stop.”

  “I can’t. You know I can’t. Nor more than you can stop.”

  “Rest then. Or come with me so you do not hunt alone.”

  She let him hold her as she cried out the pain and the exhaustion. Her mate held her and kissed her forehead, her cheeks.

  “Come to me,” he whispered. “I wait for you. You do not walk alone.”

  ※

  The haven greeted Renata like the prodigal daughter that she was. Everyone in Sarihöfn knew she’d been called back, but none of them mentioned it. Orsala organized a sing for Renata’s return and to formally greet Ava, who’d been working for weeks to tame her magic. As the evening sky darkened, Sari’s house filled with people. There were few reasons to celebrate in their small commune. Irin children only celebrated birthdays until age thirteen. Mating ceremonies were few, and Midwinter holidays were still months away.

  Sari tried to greet the occasion with the same spirit as the others, but Damien’s presence was an open wound. Since he’d come, she couldn’t ignore the ache in her spirit or the emptiness in her bed. Even his presence that night seemed designed to torment her. The warm brown shirt he’d worn brought out the gold flecks in his dark eyes. His step was light and his voice soothing. Everything in her yearned to go to him and indulge in the luxury of his presence.

  “Why are you avoiding him?” Renata asked, leaning against a counter in the kitchen where Sari was making spiced wine.

  “Who?”

  “You did not just ask that.”

  Sari cut her eyes to Renata. “Did you see Maxim when you were on the continent? How is he? Are you over your ludicrous excuses yet?”

  Renata rolled her eyes. “Fine. Keep your secrets. But you should know the man is hunting for you, and he’s got better instincts than both of us combined.”