Metal tapped stone with every step. Then a man stepped into the light from the house and stopped.
He wore a Stetson and pearl-handled revolvers at both hips, gold rings on every finger. "Hephaestus." His Calabrian accent rolled through the cold air. "We need to talk."
I drew my katanaand went for him before the sentence finished.
My babushka used to say that the wolf always announces himself three times before he eats you. First knock, second knock, third knock. Rhadamanthys had announced himself by existing in this courtyard, and I was done waiting.
He moved faster than a man in a Stetson with pearl-handled revolvers had any right to move. The hat was ridiculous. The guns were ridiculous. The speed was not. He cleared my swing by inches and stumbled back with one hand on his hat like that mattered more than his throat.
"Now, wait just a second."
I swung at his neck. The angle was Prague, Istanbul, the cargo hold outside Gdansk where I'd opened a man because he'd reached for a phone. The muscle memory ran clean and fast, and the relief of it buckled through me. This I knew. This was simple. Ten minutes ago I'd been on my knees in the wet grass with my daughter's fists in my jacket, and the raw place she'd torn openin my chest still throbbed with every heartbeat. The blade fixed that. The blade always fixed that.
He drew both revolvers and caught my blade between the barrels.
The impact shot up through my wrists into my elbows. The guns were decorative, but the steel was functional, and he handled the weight like he'd done this before. The shriek of steel on steel split the courtyard. He turned my blade, redirected me past his shoulder, and put three steps between us before I could come around.
"Hephaestus." He kept both guns wide, barrels down. "I am not your enemy tonight."
I came at him again because I knew what a Judge was and I knew what a Judge did. Standing in a courtyard with my daughter behind me while one of Zeus's dogs explained himself was not going to happen.
He blocked with the left revolver. The jolt ran harder this time, and I lost feeling in my thumbs for half a second. I adjusted my grip and kept swinging.
He could have shot me. I'd given him four clear angles, and he'd taken none of them. I kept moving anyway because seeing it and trusting it were different things.
Eight came from my left, fast and low.
She buried her knife in his thigh before either of us could stop her.
Rhadamanthys buckled. He caught himself on one knee and stared down at the blade in his leg, then looked up at the girl who'd put it there.
"Brava, piccola," he said. The pain tightened every word. "You earned that one. Only one, though."
She backed toward me with her chin down and her hands open for the next weapon. She'd stabbed a man three times her size, and not one adult in this courtyard had stopped her.I was going to have a conversation with her about engaging armed targets alone. I was going to lose that conversation. She was her mother's daughter and also mine, and neither of those bloodlines had ever listened to reason.
The thought landed differently now. An hour agominehad been a word I kept behind my teeth. Now she'd written ? ???? in the dirt and hit me until she ran out of anger, andminesat in my chest like a bruise I kept pressing.
I put her behind me and went at him with everything left.
I drove him back across the courtyard. The stones were uneven under my boots, and I compensated without thinking, weight forward, blade high. He blocked and gave ground. He fought the way old professionals fight: nothing wasted, every movement a negotiation instead of a commitment.
A door slammed behind me. Romani voices cut through, then boots on stone from every direction. I swung, and he blocked. I came around for another and someone grabbed my arm from behind. I yanked free and drove my elbow back into whoever had grabbed me. Two men caught my shoulders. A third caught the katana at the hilt, and my grip was good, but three men pulling in different directions was better.
They hauled me back by my arms, my jacket, my sword hand, until my boots scraped across the stones. Just as many people held Rhadamanthys six feet away. The shouting cut off. The grip on my arms stopped pulling and just held.
My pulse kept swinging. The adrenaline had nowhere to go, and it banged through my chest and my wrists and the backs of my knees, all that momentum slamming into stillness. I held my breath until the courtyard stopped tilting.
Rhadamanthys knelt with blood running down his leg. His Stetson sat crooked on his head. Two men pinned his arms behind his back. His revolvers lay on the stones where someone had kicked them.
He spoke before I could decide what came next. He pitched it past me, at every person holding him.
"You need to listen to me. Because if you don't, everyone here will be dead by dawn."
The men holding my arms squeezed tighter. A woman near the kitchen door crossed herself and grabbed the doorframe.
The worddochkastill sat behind my teeth from the olive tree. His sentence cut through it. I'd spent enough years inside the Pantheon to know what it cost a Judge to walk away from his post. Rhadamanthys knelt in his own blood and offered his death as a credential, and that kind of currency only spent one way.
I jerked my arms free, and they let me go.
