Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

A woman wearing a white kimono was in the middle of the practice floor, with one of the smooth round staves called a bo in her hands. She was flowing through a practice routine that had the weapon whirling in an arcing blur around her and before her. The sound of the weapon cutting the air, faster than a vanilla human could have moved it, was a steady hiss.

She turned and faced me, still striking, spinning, thrusting at the empty air. Lara Raith had cheekbones that could split atoms, bright grey-silver eyes capable of boring through plate steel, and a smile that could turn crueler than a hook-tipped knife. Her blue-black hair was long and would have fallen to the small of her back if it hadn’t been bound up into a messy bun. She froze in the midst of her routine, body coming to an utter halt, transforming her from a dervish into a mannequin. The demonstration of perfect control was more than a little impressive. And interesting.

But that was Lara. I had never been in her presence without feeling an intense attraction for her, and I wasn’t at all sure it was because she was a vampire of the White Court, and the closest thing to a succubus that you could find this side of Hell. It had more to do with her. Lara was as beautiful and dangerous as a hungry tigress, and very, very smart.

She met my eyes for a second and then gave me an edged smile. “You want to talk to me right now, Harry,” she said, “take off your shoes and pick up a bo.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

She arched an eyebrow. “I don’t give anyone my practice time,” she said. “This is my house. You came to me. Take my terms or leave them, Dresden.”

I exhaled.

Doing what she asked was an acceptable way for her to get around the traditional protections of my guest-right. After all, if we were in the dojo, training, and something bad happened to me, it could be a regrettable accident. Combat training is dangerous in its own right, after all. Or, I supposed, she could claim I had attempted to assassinate her, just as Thomas had tried to take out Etri. In fact, I could see a sort of hare-brained logic in Lara attempting to muddy the waters around Thomas’s situation by creating a similar one with me, and then casting blame at a wider conspiracy. Cockamamie nonsense, but someone desperate enough to help family might reason themselves into it.

I chewed on my lip. But not Lara Raith. Not her style at all.

Lara was the slipperiest and cagiest vampire in a basket of psychotic sociopaths. I didn’t really see her as the same kind of hedonistic monster as many other White Court vamps I had met—she was something much more dangerous than that. She was disciplined, rigidly self-restrained, and she didn’t give way to either the demonic parasite that made her a monster or anyone else who would try to force her into doing something she didn’t want to do.

If Lara wanted me dead, it would have happened already. It would have been abrupt, swift, and well executed, and I probably wouldn’t have had much of a chance to respond. I might never realize it had happened. I’d seen Lara fight—and she’d seen me do the same. Neither one of us would be interested in giving the other a chance to fight back.

But I was on the clock here. Wasting time wrangling with Lara over protocol wasn’t going to help my brother. So I set my jaw and kicked off my sneakers.

Lara watched that and her smile turned a shade wicked. “Good boy.”

“Now you’re just being obvious,” I said, and sat down to take off my socks. I rose, left my duster on, and picked up a bo of my own from a simple wooden rack of them to one side of the training floor. I flexed my injured hands and winced in discomfort. The pain was already growing more distant as the Winter mantle flooded distressed nerve endings with the distant sensation of nothing but cold.

I walked around Lara to stand in front of her and took up a ready position, gripping the staff loosely, with most of it extended out in front of me at waist level, like someone holding out a pitchfork of hay.

Lara turned to me and bowed at the waist, smiling. “European.”

Murphy’d shown me plenty of Asian stuff, too, but I didn’t want to let Lara know about that. “I learned in Hog Hollow, Missouri,” I said. “But my first teacher was a Scot.”

“I spent much of the eighteenth century in Japan.” She took up a ready position of her own, staff held vertically with the lower end angled out toward me.

“I thought it was closed to all outsiders then.”

She grinned and moved her hip in a little roll that made me want to stampede. “Have you looked at me?”

“Uh. Right,” I said.

Her smile turned warmer. “What do you want, Harry?”

I snapped my staff at her in a simple thrust. She parried easily and countered with a hard beat that came so fast that it nearly took the weapon out of my hand. I recovered the weapon and my balance, retreating from a strike that hit the mat where my bare foot had been an instant earlier. The blow landed hard enough to send a crack like a home-run hit through the room.

“Hell’s balls, Lara!” I said.

“Pain is the best teacher,” she said. “I don’t pull hits. You shouldn’t, either.”

She came at me in a hard, fast strike at the level of my ankles. I caught it on the end of my staff in the nick and flicked her weapon back. “You heard about Thomas.”

“And your visit to him, and your visit to Justine later, yes,” she said. “What did he tell you?”

I shook my head. “All he said was ‘Justine.’ And he barely said that. They’d busted up his mouth pretty good.”

I launched another exchange from outside Lara’s reach and drove her across the mat. She was tall for a woman, but I’m tall for anybody. I probably had most of a foot of advantage in reach on her, and I started using it. The staves cracked together over and over, and I barely avoided getting my knuckles shattered. She was faster than me, and more skilled in a purely technical sense. But that wasn’t the only thing that decided real fights. This was bear versus mountain lion—if she got caught somewhere I could put my power and endurance to good use, she’d be the one in trouble. I kept pressing her toward the corners of the mat, and she kept slipping to one side without ever leaving it, one step ahead of me.

But there were other ways to slow people down.

“My people are covering Justine,” Lara said. “She’s as safe as I can make her without sequestering her here.”

“She’s pregnant,” I said.

Lara missed a step, and I was ready. I thrust the tip of my bo at her knee. She avoided it, but only by taking the hit in the meat of her calf, through the kimono, and she hissed in pain. She countered with a strike to my head that I ducked, and then she came back up onto one leg, weapon ready to defend or attack, her eyes narrowed.

If this had been for real, the fight would be over in moments. Or at least, the foreplay would. We’d both be shifting toward using supernatural abilities, and God only knew how that kind of chaos would play out. I drew back, grounded the end of my bo, and bent at the waist in a slight bow.

Lara regarded me warily and then mirrored me as best she could on one leg, which was excellently. “You’re sure?” Lara demanded a moment later, rolling the ankle on that leg several times.

“Thomas was,” I said.

“And they didn’t tell m …” Lara pressed her lips together. Then she shifted her grip to a more aggressive stance, something like mine, and I came onto guard to match her. We thrust and parried for a moment, circling. “Have you told his grandfather about him?” she asked.