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Barrett’s eyes widened. He clenched his fists and pushed with everything he had.
One turn, two, three. I kept spinning. Turn, and turn, and turn, ten, fifteen, eighteen…
Uncertainty shivered in Barrett’s eyes. The three knights were staring at the vampire like they had never seen one before.
Twenty-four, twenty-six…
He must have thought of himself as an unstoppable force but, in the mind of an undead, I was truly an immovable object.
Thirty…
The pressure eased just a hair. It was barely less than it had been, but it still meant surrender. Barrett was running out of his magic reserve. I won.
I finished the last fouetté, landed, and raised my right arm, inviting applause. Nobody clapped. Party poopers.
I let go. The transition back to only one pair of eyes and ears was always slightly nauseating. I stayed still in the armory, listening.
Barrett would’ve grabbed the undead instantly, but we both knew what had happened. He didn’t win. I let him have his undead back.
“I don’t know who you brought in,” Barrett said, his voice low and full of contained menace. “But I’ll find out.”
A door swung open. I waited. A minute crawled by. Another…
“He’s gone,” Claudia called out.
I opened the door and trotted out. “You didn’t clap. My feelings are hurt.”
Claudia gave me a slow golf clap, and the other two knights followed. They were looking slightly freaked out.
Claudia squinted at me. “Who are you?”
“Someone who really wants to talk to Isaac Silverstein.”
Claudia got up. “I’ll ask him. No promises. Sit tight.”
I sat in a client chair. Claudia opened a door leading to an interior staircase and left.
How was it that she didn’t know who I was? My file in the Order’s database should’ve been a mile long.
Unless they had sealed it. I had seen that before, during my tenure with the Order in Atlanta. The file on my father was invisible to me. I didn’t have the clearance to know it existed. Andrea, my best friend and, at the time, a high-ranking knight, could only see a very brief summary that amounted to a warning sign and had to call in favors to learn more.
As a knight-protector, the head of her own chapter, Claudia should’ve had a high enough clearance, but then Wilmington was a lot smaller than Atlanta or Charlotte.
I wonder how tightly they have my file locked up...
I heard Claudia coming down the stairs. The door swung open, and she emerged. “He’ll see you.”
“Thank you.”
“I hope you’re ready for Barrett,” Claudia said. “He won’t let it go. You didn’t see his face as he walked out. That man was pissed off. He’s going to make it his purpose in life to find you and make you suffer every humiliation his psychotic mind can think up.”
“He won’t find out, unless one of you three tells him.”
“He will find out,” Claudia said, “because you enjoy screwing with him. Sooner or later, you’ll slip up.”
Slipping up wasn’t in the cards. I planned to keep Barrett ignorant for as long as I could. “Thank you for the warning.”
“Take care,” Claudia said.
3
Isaac Silverstein looked like a knight-pathfinder. A shade under six feet tall, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, he had the lean build of a long-range hiker, a perfect balance between flexibility, endurance, and moderate calorie needs. His navy sweatshirt hung off his shoulders, and his dark brown lightweight pants were tapered to his legs, loose enough to allow freedom of movement but tight enough not to snag on the brush. He wore serious hiking boots that looked like they had seen a lot of miles in a rough terrain. We weren’t anywhere near a hiking trail, so he must be wearing what he felt comfortable in.
Isaac’s tousled hair, cut short on the sides and slightly longer on top, was a cooler shade of brown, more ash than red. His skin wasn’t that pale naturally, but it didn’t have even an echo of a tan, which told me he’d stayed the whole summer inside the chapter.
His hooded blue eyes still held a hint of the “woods” stare, however. Human eyes were expressive. We communicated with our glances as much as with our mouths. When shapeshifters hunted in the forest, their eyes lost emotion and communicated nothing. They simply watched, observing their prey, tracking it, cataloguing danger and weakness, and if you happened to meet their gaze, your mind might not even recognize that you were looking at a human. Isaac’s eyes were a bit like that.
I paused in the doorway.
“Come in,” he said.
I stepped inside.
Isaac’s office was square, with a window in the wall opposite the door. On both sides of the window, mounted weapons waited—a bow with a quiver and an assortment of knives and bladed weapons that doubled as tools: axes, tomahawks, and machete-style short swords.
A desk sat on the left, filled with neat, orderly stacks of papers. Behind it, floor-to-ceiling shelves held books, rolled-up scrolls, chunks of twisted roots, jars of dried herbs, and other assorted things an outdoorsman might find in the woods and drag home.
