Chapter 129: Closed Hand

Chapter 129: Chapter 129: Closed Hand

Sylvia stayed behind.

She didn’t argue about it. When Donald told her what the messenger had said about Leo, she went quiet for a while, and then she went downstairs and moved her bed into her brother’s room. By the time the airship left the roof the next morning, she had made the whole forty-fourth floor into a nest of shadows that nothing could cross without her knowing.

"Bring her back in one piece," she told Donald at the ramp, with a glance at Evelyn. "And bring me his head, if there’s anything left of it."

---

The Republic of Saren was two days south across open ocean, and the first thing Donald noticed about it was the heat.

It came in through the airship’s door when the ramp lowered, dry and heavy and smelling of salt and hot dust and the sharp leaves of the gray-green trees that grew along every street. Port Saren lay along a wide blue harbor under a hard white sky. Low sandstone buildings and glass towers stood side by side along the water, and beyond the last of the suburbs, the land turned red and flat and ran away to the horizon with nothing on it at all.

"Seven nights," Evelyn said, standing beside him on the landing platform with her sunglasses on. She was looking down at the harbor, where a long steel bridge crossed the water from one shore to the other. "Aris says the anchor is under the south end of that bridge. And the Blood Father’s court is in the Red Quarter, right on top of it."

"Then we start in the Red Quarter," Donald said.

---

They went at dusk.

The Red Quarter was the oldest part of Port Saren, a tangle of narrow lanes behind the harbor, full of bars and gambling halls and music. Red lanterns hung over every doorway. It was crowded and loud and very cheerful, and every few streets Donald’s Lesser Mana Perception brushed against something cold and slow and red moving through the crowd, and then lost it again.

"They’re everywhere," he said quietly.

"They own the place." Evelyn had left her sunglasses at the hotel and pulled a light jacket over Starfall’s sheath. "Nobody here seems to mind."

They had walked for an hour without learning anything when the screaming started.

It came from a side lane behind a shuttered bar. By the time Donald and Evelyn reached the corner, a small crowd had gathered at the mouth of the lane, and nobody in it was moving to help.

A young woman lay against the wall at the far end, with both hands pressed to her throat and blood running between her fingers. A tall man in a gray cloak stood over her with his hood pushed back, licking his lips. His red eyes turned toward the crowd with lazy interest.

Before Donald could take a step, someone pushed past him into the lane.

She was a woman of perhaps thirty-eight, tall and long-limbed, barefoot on the hot stones. She wore loose black training trousers tied at the ankle and a gray sleeveless top that showed her arms and shoulders, and the body under it was the strong, dense body of someone who had trained every day of her adult life. Her shoulders were broad and her arms were lean and corded with muscle. Under the thin gray top her breasts were full and firm, her waist was narrow and hard, and below it her hips curved out into long, powerful thighs and a high, round backside that the loose trousers couldn’t hide. Her skin was brown from the sun. Her dark hair was cut short at the back of her neck.

It left the scars on her neck bare. There were two of them, small and round and white, close together just above her collarbone. A long, twisted burn scar ran from the same shoulder down to her left elbow.

The System window opened before she had taken three steps.

[Investment Target Detected.]

[Name: Mara Cole]

[Age: 38]

[Class: Hand-Fighter (B-Rank). Level: 52.]

[Status: Former blood-thrall. Blood Mark on the neck, dormant, held down by force of will.]

[Potential: S-Rank.]

[Investment Recommended.]

"Leave her," Mara said to the vampire.

The vampire looked at her, and then laughed. "Go home, teacher. This is none of your business."

"It’s my street," Mara said. "That makes it my business."

The vampire grew a blade of red blood out of his right hand and came at her.

---

Donald had watched a lot of people fight in the last few months, but he had never seen anyone fight a vampire the way Mara Cole did.

She didn’t try to block the blood-blade. She stepped inside it, so close that the vampire’s own arm was in the way of his swing, and struck him with the edge of her open hand on the inside of his right elbow. It was a short, sharp blow, no harder than a slap. The blood-blade wobbled, lost its shape and ran off his hand onto the stones in a red splash.

The vampire stared at his empty hand.

Mara hit him again, two fingers into the soft place under his right arm, then the heel of her palm into the side of his neck below the ear. With each blow, Donald saw the red mana in the vampire’s body stutter and stop where she had struck.

"Pressure points," Evelyn murmured beside him. "She’s closing off his blood. He can’t make the blades if it can’t reach his hands."

The vampire roared and swung at Mara with his left hand. Another blood-blade began to grow from it as he swung. She caught his wrist, turned it, and struck him on the inside of the left elbow too, and the second blade fell apart before it was finished.

He had no blades left. He tried to bite her.

Mara put her forearm across his throat, stepped behind him, and swept his legs, and drove him face down onto the stones with her knee in the middle of his back. Then she struck him once more, hard, at the base of the skull. The vampire went limp.

The whole fight had taken less than ten seconds.

Then three more gray cloaks came over the wall at the end of the lane.

Mara looked up at them, and Donald saw her face change. It wasn’t fear exactly. It was more like a tired kind of certainty, as if she had always known that one day they would come over that wall in threes.

"Evelyn," Donald said.

"I see them."

Starfall came out of its sheath, and the starlight lit up the whole lane. Evelyn went past Mara in a single long stride and took the first vampire off the wall before its feet had touched the ground. Donald stepped into the shadow of a rubbish bin, came out of the shadow of the second vampire, and drove the Pile Bunker into its ribs before it knew he was there. The third looked at the two of them, then at Mara, and went back over the wall the way it had come.

The lane was quiet. The crowd at the far end had vanished.

---

Donald went to the young woman against the wall. She was still pressing her hands to her throat, and the blood was still coming, because there was anti-heal in the bite and nothing would close it.

He put his right hand over hers and let Purifying Touch burn the curse out of the wound first. Then he used Soothing Hands, the weakest healing skill he had and the first one he had ever used on Evelyn, back when he had nothing else. The pale green light settled over the bite, and the torn skin slowly knit itself shut.

The young woman stared up at him, white-faced, and then burst into tears.

When he stood up, Mara Cole was watching him from the middle of the lane, with her arms folded and the unconscious vampire still lying at her feet.

"You burned the bite out," she said. "I’ve never seen anyone do that. Who are you?"

"Someone who’s looking for a vampire named Corvin," Donald said.

Mara didn’t move. But her right hand came up, slowly, as if she didn’t know she was doing it, and covered the two small white scars on her neck.

"Then go home," she said quietly. "I was in his court for six years. I’m the only one who ever got out." Her fingers pressed against the scars. "Corvin is the one who gave me these. And if he finds out I was here tonight, talking to you, he’ll come and take them back."