Chapter 215 : The Duellists
POV: Dante | Parliament steps, immediate aftermath
She is ash before I process that it has happened, which is the vampire body's response to a staked heart, immediate and complete, the biological architecture of a species that burns rather than persists, and I have watched vampires die before in my nine years as a hunter but I have never watched my sister die and the difference between those two things is not something I had a category for until this moment.
I have a category for it now.
The crowd is doing the thing crowds do in the aftermath of something large, which is fragmenting, some moving away and some standing still and some turning to the people beside them with the specific quality of people who need to confirm with another person that what just happened happened. The Parliamentary guards are still managing the scene with the professional attention of people whose job is to manage scenes regardless of what those scenes contain.
Mordaunt is on the platform.
Mordaunt is six hundred years old and he is the person who called the session and drove the vote and stood on the platform and narrated the price of rebellion while my sister died thirty feet away, and he is on the platform and I am on the steps and the distance between those two positions is the distance I am covering now.
"Duel," I say. I say it loudly enough that the crowd hears it and the guards hear it and Mordaunt hears it, and I say it with the specific pronunciation of someone who is using the formal supernatural challenge rather than simply expressing an intention, because the formal challenge carries legal weight in the same system that just executed my sister and I intend to use the system's own tools against the person the system just served. "Lord Silvain Mordaunt. I challenge you. Now."
Mordaunt looks at me from the platform with the expression I will spend the rest of my life remembering, which is the expression of mild amusement, genuine mild amusement, not performed amusement, not condescension performing as amusement, but actual amusement in the way that a person is amused by something small and unexpected.
"You want to die too?" he says.
The fight begins before his last word lands because I am already moving, which is the training coming forward without consulting me, nine years of hunter discipline that operates faster than grief and faster than the specific hollowness that has been growing in my chest since noon, and I close the distance to the platform in the time it takes Mordaunt to register that the amusement was a miscalculation.
He is six hundred years old. This is not a variable I am unaware of. Six hundred years of combat experience, six hundred years of a body that has been tested and refined and which knows what it is doing in the specific way that very old things know what they are doing. I am twenty-five and trained by the best hunter network operating in southern Europe and I have killed eleven vampires and I have never fought one that old.
What grief does to a fight, I am discovering, is that it removes the calculations. I am not managing the engagement. I am not assessing and adapting the way I was trained to assess and adapt. I am in the fight completely, without distance, without the protective layer of tactical thinking between me and what I am doing, and what that means in practice is that I hit harder than I should be hitting and I move faster than I should be moving and I do not stop when I should stop and this produces, for approximately forty seconds, a version of the fight that Mordaunt was not expecting.
He bleeds. I see it and I am not satisfied by it, which surprises me, because I expected satisfaction and what I feel is something closer to the absence of everything, the specific quality of fighting from a place that has been emptied out.
He adjusts. Six hundred years is six hundred years and the adjustment is rapid and thorough and what comes after the forty seconds of my advantage is a different kind of fight, the kind where he is in control and I am managing damage rather than inflicting it, and the damage accumulates in the specific way that damage accumulates when you are fighting someone who is very much better than you and who has decided to be efficient about finishing it.
I am on the ground on the Parliament steps with my ribs broken on the left side and my right arm not working correctly and Mordaunt above me with his hand at my throat when the weight of him disappears.
Someone has tackled him off me.
I roll onto my side and through the specific fog of broken ribs and the ground coming back up to meet my vision I see Callum. Callum who was in silver chains thirty seconds ago and who is not in silver chains now, who is between me and Mordaunt with the chains hanging from one wrist where he has not fully cleared them, and his right hand is wrong, the wrist wrong, and he is not registering it.
"Run," he says, and he says it to me with the specific quality he uses when he has assessed a situation and determined the optimal outcome. "Find Lucia."