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Which probably meant they weren’t going to try to drag me off against my will or violently assault me in front of passersby. Some stone-hearted New Yorkers might ignore a woman in danger, but I felt certain someone would stop and call the cops if five men attempted to beat me up in broad daylight.
Since we were in the sun, they weren’t vampires, which also meant I was in a good position to take one or two of them out if they started something.
I was good. I don’t mean for it to sound braggy or anything, but in order to make up for the missing strength I’d lost when I became human, I had spent the last five years doing a variety of training, from working with a female UFC fighter to hone my hand-to-hand skills, to taking years’ worth of Krav Maga, and spending six months in Malaysia to learn silat from a mahaguru.
I’d taken self-defense, knife defense, kendo—to properly learn how to use my katana and not just slice at things willy-nilly—I’d worked on gun skills that made my immediate close-range target practice look like something out of John Wick but with less puppy murder.
Basically, I had addressed my weaknesses. I wasn’t a master in any one discipline, but I’d taken time to learn a lot of things in the past years. Things that had kept me alive and had broken the bones of many people who wanted me dead.
I might be small, but what is that saying? No, not the Shakespeare one, the Yoda one.
Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?
No one kicked ass like Yoda kicked ass.
So yeah, I had a good feeling about my odds taking on five guys who seemed like they got through life by looking serious and assuming people would be afraid of them for their bulk.
I’m here to tell you, if you kick a man in the back of the knee, it doesn’t matter if he’s five feet tall or seven feet tall, that motherfucker is going down.
Things just happened to get a lot trickier when it went from one-on-one to five-on-one, but I had trained with that in mind, so now was my chance to put it all into action.
“Gents, I know you’re here to beat the tar out of me, or kill me, or kidnap me, or some combination of the above, but I think we’re rather conspicuous standing out in the open like this.”
As if to illustrate my point, two women jogged past us pushing fancy baby strollers designed for running, and a bike zoomed by them in the opposite direction. The swish-swish-swish of the joggers’ ponytails was a soothing rhythm as it faded out the farther away they got.
The five men exchanged glances before the dude clearly in charge crossed his arms defensively and said, “You think we care about witnesses?”
Aw, false bravado was so cute.
“Yeah, I absolutely think you care about witnesses, and here’s why I know that. For one, you haven’t come any closer to me yet. For twosies, there are a bunch of you, which means someone has sent you, because they know I’m not the kind of person who can be beaten up, kidnapped, or killed very easily. So you guys have a boss. Probably someone who can’t come out on their own in the daylight.”
They exchanged uneasy glances.
I pointed at my head. “I know the whole blonde-hair thing can be misleading, but you know that’s just a v
icious stereotype, right? I’m actually pretty smart.” Depending on who you asked. And whether or not we were talking about book smarts versus Batman-like crime scene awareness.
Not that I was Batman.
“You can tell Davos you tried really hard.”
The main guy, the one who had followed me through the park, gave a thin, humorless smile. “You don’t know Davos well if you think he’ll accept that.”
“In the first hour I met him he almost kidnapped me to use me as demon bait, and it’s been about twelve hours and now he’s sent a bunch of sad goth thugs out to spirit me away. I know all I need to know about Davos.”
“What you might not understand is that he doesn’t take no for an answer.”
“My opinion on being used as a blood keg for your demon party is still a pretty firm hell no.”
“Don’t make this difficult.”
“Not to crib your line here, but you don’t know me very well if you think I’m not going to be difficult. That’s sort of my signature move.”
A young couple passed us, obviously laughing at a shared joke.
“Let’s speak somewhere privately,” the man suggested.
“Sure, just drive your white van up, I’ll climb in. Do you want me to put the hood over my head while I wait?”
