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My new vampire crouched behind a whiteboard stand I borrowed from the Order’s situation room, on the side of Claudia’s desk. I’d taken a fat roll of paper from there, too. English letters were a lot easier to write through a vampire than Shinar’s flowing sigils. There were few things better for training precision navigation than writing out your family’s lineage in a dead language while your aunt despaired over the sad state of your calligraphy.
“He looks pissed,” the other female knight murmured.
I’d locked myself in their armory, so the vampire was my eyes and ears for this little date. From my vantage point, I had an excellent view of Claudia, but the screen blocked the entrance and the windows, so I had to settle for imagining pissed-off Barrett marching across the street.
The door swung open, and firm footsteps announced Barrett approaching.
Claudia raised her head from her paperwork. “Well, this is a surprise. What can the Order do for you, Mr. Barrett?”
“You have something of mine.” His voice was light. You could almost hear the smile.
“Do I?” Claudia frowned. “Oh, the vampire. Is it one of yours?”
“All of them are mine.” Barrett chuckled and pushed the whiteboard stand aside. I twisted the undead into a picture-perfect impression of a person caught naked in the shower and tried to cover myself up with my undead hands.
The male knight made a strangled noise.
Barrett blinked.
I spun the vampire around, picked up the long roll of paper I’d been writing on, and held it out in front of Barrett. On it, in a beautiful cursive, I’d written a little song.
Old Barrett had a Farm
E i e i o
And on his Farm he had some cows
E i e i o
With a paw print here
And a paw print there
Here a paw print, there a paw print
Everywhere a paw print
Old Barrett had a Farm
E i e i o
And on his Farm he had some vampires
E i e i o…
I’d covered about five feet of paper with that nonsense. I’d mentioned the vampires, the journeymen, the cadre, and so on.
Barrett stopped smiling.
I handed the paper to him. He took it and looked at it. His face showed no emotion.
I lifted the vampire upright. It’d been undead for about fifteen years, and its hips had shifted to quadrupedal locomotion, but even the oldest vampire still possessed the ability to imitate the human posture. I put my arms down, slightly apart from my body, with the hands held up and turned around on my toes. Then I crouched slightly, bounced back up, put one hand on my hip, and held the other arm to the side, bent at the elbow, with my fingers together.
“What is this?” Barrett asked.
“I believe it’s a little teapot,” Claudia said, completely deadpan. “Short and stout. See, there is its handle and there is its spout.”
“Cute,” Barrett said.
His magic clamped on the vampire’s mind, gripping me in a steel vise and trying to force me out. Wow. Barrett packed some serious power.
In its unpiloted state, a vampire’s mind was an empty shell, a car without a driver rocketing forward at full speed and, like a runaway car, the undead wrecked anything it came across. Once a navigator took the driver’s seat, getting them out was a lot harder than simply grabbing an unpiloted vampire. It wasn’t a matter of skill but of raw power, which was why Barrett had dropped what he was doing and ran over here to see who had won the tug of war over his vampire. And the tech was up. Navigators, like shapeshifters, stored magic like a battery, which allowed them to navigate even when the magic was down, but doing this song and dance during tech was considerably harder.
The pressure intensified. He was really going for it now. This was what a walnut must feel like in a nutcracker. That wasn’t all of it though. He was still holding back.
Let’s see what you’ve got.
I shook the vampire and tilted it to the side. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out.
A blast of power smashed into me. Like being buried under an avalanche. A massive weight crashed into my mind, squeezing, bombarding me, trying to crush me out of the driver’s seat.
There it is. Welcome to the game.
Barrett’s power hammered at me. It was a good, powerful punch. It even drew some blood. But I was the daughter of the Builder of Towers. My father had brought the undead into existence. I had ignored this side of my power for years, but I’d used the last decade to make up for it.
The pressure ground at my mind. Barrett stared at the vampire with a terrible intensity.
It was time for a reality check.
I raised my arms, did a pirouette to build up momentum, extended my leg to the second position, whipped it to the back of the supporting knee, bringing it to the front, and turned en dehor. A fouetté.
