Sweep of the Blade (Innkeeper Chronicles 4)

“I would know.”

“Shut up.”

He grinned at her.

“What?”

“We’re like we were before. At the inn.”

She glanced at his face. “Beat to hell and bleeding out on the stairs?”

“No. You are talking to me again. Really talking to me. You’ve been so…distant since you arrived. I like when we’re like this.”

They started up the second flight of steps.

“If I had to fight nine knights every week…”

“Don’t say it,” she warned him.

“…to keep you talking to me…”

“I will throw you down the stairs, Arland. I mean it.”

“No, you won’t. You like me. You are impressed.”

She rolled her eyes. “That you can’t walk, unassisted, up a flight of stairs? Yes, my lord, very impressive.”

He grunted and swayed. For a moment they tottered on the last step, careening back and forth, and she thought they would lose their balance, but they pitched forward and conquered the final stair.

“As I was saying,” Arland said, a sheen of sweat covering his face, “if I had to fight nine knights every week for the pleasure of you berating me, I would do it gladly.”

“You are an idiot. I abandoned my sister and a perfectly good inn and traveled halfway across the galaxy for an idiot.”

The door slid open in front of them. The breezeway stretched in front of them, suffused with sunshine and impossibly long. They would be watched by the vampires on the lawn for every step of it.

Arland grunted again, gently pushed away from her, and stood on his own.

“You can do it,” she told him and slid her arm in the crook of his elbow.

They walked into the sunlight side by side, as if out for a leisurely stroll.

“If I fall, don’t try to catch me,” he warned.

“You are not that heavy.”

“Yes, I am.”

They kept strolling. One step at a time.

One step.

Another.

Another.

“Did it have to be nine? Couldn’t it have been five?” She knew the answer but talking would distract him.

“It had to be more than there were at the Lodge. Beating seven again wouldn’t be as exciting. I already did that.”

“You make me despair, my lord. Is there no common sense in your head? None at all?”

He gave her a dazzling smile. “No, not right now.”

Maud sighed. “Figures.”

“You should stay with me. Here. You and Helen. Don’t leave me. I don’t want you to go.”

Her heart sped up.

“Marry me, or not, I will take what you’re willing to give me. Don’t leave.”

There it was. He just came out and said it. He went for it. She had to give him an answer and this time it couldn’t be a maybe. “Lord Arland?”

He sighed quietly, his voice resigned. “Yes, my lady?”

“I’m not going anywhere, you fool. You are mine. But if you decide to fight nine random knights again because you want to make a statement, I swear, I will leave you bleeding right there and walk away.”

“No, you won’t. Next time you can help.”

She swore, and he laughed.

Twenty feet from the fork in the hallway that led to both their rooms, Arland’s harbinger chimed. He glanced at it and continued. She was almost carrying him now. The unit chimed again and again.

“Soren,” Arland told her.

They reached the spot where the hallway split. They had a choice, his room or hers. Soren likely had a direct channel to Arland’s quarters with priority access. If they went to Arland’s room, they would get no peace.

“Does Lord Soren have an override code to my quarters?” she asked.

“No.”

She turned right, to her room, and he went with her. The last fifty feet of the hallway were pure torture. Her knees shook and her back burned from the strain.

The door whispered open. They stumbled through and it slid shut behind them. His full weight hit her. His face had gone blank and almost soft. He was done.

“Bathroom,” she squeezed out. “We have to get you into the bathroom.”

His face jerked, and he staggered to the bathroom, fueled by pure will.

“Medbed!” she ordered as they crossed the threshold.

A shelf shot out of the wall and she half-lowered, half-dumped Arland on to it. He landed on his back, his mane of blond hair fanning over the bed. His right leg hung off the edge. Maud heaved it on to the shelf.

Arland tapped his chest. The syn-armor cracked along its seams, pieces of it falling off. Maud pulled parts of the breastplate off him, dropping them on the floor.

“First aid kit!”

A tray slid out of the wall, offering the usual vampire assortment of stimulants, antibiotics, wound sealants, and anesthetics. She got the last piece off of him. Arland was built like a vampire hero of legend. Saying that he had wide shoulders, a chiseled chest, and a washboard stomach didn’t do him justice. He was big. There was really no better word for it. Hard, powerful muscle sheathed his massive frame. When you looked at him, you saw pure force in physical form. A large, athletic human male would look like a fragile teenager next to him.

All of that muscle came with a price. He had endurance and could deliver bursts of devastating power, but he couldn’t run for hours the way Sean, her sister’s boyfriend, did. Sean, being an alpha strain werewolf, had almost unlimited speed and stamina. Arland was designed to stand his ground. And that’s exactly what he had done. His entire left side was an oblong bruise. His right bicep bled in two places, where something had punctured the armor. His right hip had turned dark red, the result of blunt force trauma. He’d gotten hit in the back too, but she would deal with it later.

Maud took a smooth nutrient cartridge from the tray, slid it into the injector with practiced ease, found a vein on his left arm, and shot it. Vampires healed faster than humans, but they required a lot of fuel to do it.

“Scanner.”

A mechanical appendage slid from the wall with two prongs about eight inches apart. She pulled it forward, positioning the prongs horizontally over the bruise on Arland’s left side. A screen shimmered into existence between the prongs, showing her a black and silver view of Arland’s bones. Two hair-line fractures. Not great, but not awful. She had half expected to find broken ribs puncturing vital organs. If he had been human, she would have.

Maud moved the scanner to his right arm. Whatever punctured it had missed the major blood vessels. The bleeding had already slowed.

His right hip was next.

“A little to the left and down,” he said, his voice quiet.

“Do keep in mind that I have a whole tray of tranquilizers.”

“That would be nice, too.”

The pain killers would have to wait until she finished evaluating the extent of his injuries.

The hip offered her a muscle contusion, bruised bone, and hematoma. A lump had formed as a pool of blood saturated the injured tissue. It hurt like hell, which had contributed to him limping, but wasn’t fatal.

She grasped his shoulders. “I need you to sit up.”

He sat upright. She moved the scanner over his back. He’d taken the blow on his left shoulder blade. Fractured scapula. Crap.

“Lift your left arm.”

Arland raised his arm a couple of inches out to his side and stopped. “No.”

“Does it hurt to breathe?”

“I’ve had worse.”

“You need a medic.”

“I’m fine.”

Human, vampire, werewolf, didn’t matter. If they were male and severely injured, they all thought they could just “walk it off.”

“Take a deep breath, my lord.”

“We’re back to ‘my lord,’” Arland said dryly.

Right. Misdirection was a wonderful strategy, when it worked. Maud smiled and clapped her hand on his back. Arland jerked forward, sucking in a sharp breath.

She plucked a heavy-duty pain reliever cartridge from the tray.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to be sedated. It will make me slow and sleepy. I don’t have time for a nap.”

“You have a fractured scapula and two cracked ribs. You’ve lost the full use of your arm and every breath is torture. You need some quality time with a bone knitter.”

“Maud,” he said.

“No. You aren’t a teenager. We both know you require sedation and a visit to a medward. Why are we even having this con—”

He reached out with his left arm and caught her wrist in his fingers, drawing her close. Suddenly they were face to face and he was looking at her. His eyes were very blue.

It would have been easy to pull away. A part of her, the part that panicked and kept her alive on Karhari, warned her to be cautious. But she was so damn tired of being careful and prudent. Something wild swept through her like a scorching sariv.

She kissed him.

His lips were warm on hers and she opened her mouth and let him in. He tasted just as she’d imagined, hot and male, and he kissed her like she was the only thing that mattered. It started tender, then turned hungry, as if they both couldn’t get enough. Her whole body strummed with need. He kissed her until she could think of nothing except stripping off her clothes and climbing on top of him to feel him against her skin.