CVU2

Chapter 2: Part 3

3

"I'm going to duel him," Zvera said, in a pub a few blocks from the Jersey City wharf in Paulus Hook, a normal pub where everyone else was living, where their powers of mental manipulation bought the drinks. They had claimed a back booth and leaned together to hiss their conversation, two blue eyes and two brown eyes close together.

"Ideally you and Tzaraa would be two of my three seconds, but I can't promise places for both of you when my tribe's upper pricks suck the life out of things. If there's just one opening, will it be you or her?"

"It has to be me," Karet whispered at once. Giving such a blunt demand to an effective noble was a rare thing to do, so rare that Zvera grinned for the first time.

"In a perfect world you'd be attacking him first. You might only get the satisfaction of handling one of his seconds - if that recluse even has any."

"Doesn't he need three seconds for the duel to be kosher?" Karet abused the religious word without a thought.

Zvera leaned back, a grimace and grin fighting each other on her pale face. When she was very angry or distracted she sometimes swept hair out of her eyes that wasn't there, and her hands on the table lifted an inch for just a moment to almost do that.

"By some interpretations of that law he can't even be challenged, but there are many tribes, and it's an international and united world, so we'll pick our interpretation. He might be technically entered into the stewardship of his sire's tribe, and they might be forced to give him token seconds - I'm getting resistance just with figuring out who she was." Zvera gulped from her glass to hide her rage and collect her thoughts.

Karet liked only part of that, and he let his irritation show far too much, his eyebrows coming together. "You still don't know who bit him?"

Zvera snapped, crushing the glass in her hand. Her rage at his exasperation was not stupid, and she gave her subordinate - who was never to totally forget his place - a demonstration.

She let her heartbeat out, unmuffled. It hit Karet's eardrums and they almost burst.

"Do not think-"

Another pulse, rattling their drink glasses until they danced off the table, cracking the glass covering the picture of a lazy Manhattan cityscape on the wall above their booth.

"-that I have been casual in this, Karet -"

The next pulse made the table between them resonate painfully. Zvera had adjusted her muffle so that this terrible deep sound didn't reach out further to crack and break all the glass and plates in the pub, which it easily could have done.

"- even for a single night."

She closed her eyes, and restored the muffle, leaving them in silence for a long moment. Karet was pressed deep into his seat, ears aching, eyes wide. He felt very much like a human.

What ridiculous, incredible exercise could do this? A vampire was stronger than a mortal, and they could make themselves stronger and faster in time, but still! None of his schooling suggested anything like this kind of pure physical power was possible for someone who did not look back upon a century. He knew Zvera's true age: she had been turned twenty-three years ago. He had been turned twelve years ago, and the vogelfrei was just five years old as a vampire - so why was she this strong, and why did she need to be this strong to duel him?

"I'm sorry, Karet ... I'm still getting used to masking the pulse all the time." Zvera scowled again. She wasn't used to acting like a noble, and afterward always second-guessed herself.

With wonder and maybe just a drop of condemnation, he said, "You went off-lesson. You trained yourself." It wasn't necessary to say that his superior had found an incredible shortcut in self-improvement.

"Because that's what he did," Zvera said simply, psychically commanding a waitress to give them another pair of drinks.

"It's what he did before we even fought, and what he's been doing for the last five years on his own. I suspected back in Toronto that Belie's training program is delayed and narrowed in some ways, and that's probably the story in every part of the Circle. They want us coming to our power on a schedule, never causing trouble as a freak like Mozart or Bruce Lee. The vogelfrei was just six months turned against your seven years, but he wrecked you and Tzaraa and came to a draw with me. After Toronto, he certainly wouldn't stop whatever it was he was doing. So I said fuck the book."

Karet tried to hide his dismay with a neutral face, though his hands were gripping each other tightly under the table. That was an easy thing for someone at her station to say. But worse: how could he even win in a fight against the wayward bastard if what Zvera said was true?

"Do you know how capable he is now?" he asked her.

Zvera nodded quickly once, looking down at the table. Her face had gone grim, and there was something else? Troubled? Nervous? What had the vogelfrei done in Montreal?

"In the summarizing report they explicitly said that he is an approved Proofing opponent ... for me. For my 'final exam'. So I cheated, and read the 'question' ahead of time." She sighed at her own failed joke. "He is disposable, unconnected to anyone, and dangerous enough. If I duel him and win I can grow my hair back. I can dress up in fine jewelry and long gowns and schmooze with other Circle assholes and pretend not to know you as a Lady, not just a Daughter."

"A five-year-old is a Proofing opponent for a twenty-three-year-old? But it would be normal for you to wait many more years for this test!" Karet protested.

"You're not wrong," Zvera said quietly. Karet was risking a more familiar and casual tone despite the heartbeat demonstration, which Zvera half-liked because it made him totally honest and half-hated because this wasn't how nobles were supposed to be treated. "But they still said: he's fit for a Proofing."

Karet had a flutter of useless thoughts in his head - worse than telling Zvera to wait, the dangerous idea that they could let someone else kill the bastard. He asked a rather silly token question:

"He didn't truly kill anyone, did he?"

"Of course not - even the Circle couldn't hide that kind of story. Speaking informally, they're not the grand manipulators of information you've heard of."

Trained by masters on reading faces, she smelled the unacceptable thought of letting someone else kill the bastard. Zvera managed to drop it this time. Nobles had to be tolerant to those with lesser schooling and a more casual sense of honor; Karet already accepted someone else killing the vogelfrei, so of course he could accept Zvera also not being the one to kill the bastard.

"But if he's a Proofing opponent for you, this had to be more than a simple barroom brawl," Karet whispered, looking purely studious. Biting his tongue, covering questions, and mixing facts and compliments together - oh, lovely. Zvera still hated the potential insincerity within the complement, and silently wished Karet's sire had been in the Circle like hers.

She summarized flatly. "He incapacitated more than thirty opponents, none particularly soft, inside a secure room. And like his first encounter: he put two in near-death comas. One impaled through heart and brain, another lobotomized and skinned."

"Wait ... all physical?"

Zvera's eyes twinkled, and her voice filled with glee. "Yes!"

For once Karet and Zvera smirked with superiority at someone else, and there was no thought of class between them.

Physical attacks! The vogelfrei still had so much to learn!