++Different Lineages of vampire rarely get along well, but strange alliances have been known to happen…in the small scale, of course.++

  Book 2: Chapter 31

  Reggie didn’t quite manage to get a clean bite on the vampire’s neck, which was a shame since he’d been hoping to decapitate the bastard and end this fast. Instead he had to settle for tearing up his shoulder, locking his teeth around the meat and yanking his head one way and the other to drag razored fangs right along flesh and slice it up from the inside.

  This was apparently quite objectionable to the vampire in question, who started thrashing around and screaming shit as he aimed to force Reggie back. But the physical advantage Reggie enjoyed was still there, and with one arm rapidly being reduced to the strength of a really fucked up arm the vampire was having a worse and worse time of trying to free himself.

  Then he cheated, of course. One moment he was grappling him and the next he was gone, a black cloud of shifting shapes replacing him. Reggie yelled and batted his arms around as things he couldn’t see snagged his skin, his hair, his face and ears, and finally he pieced together what they were.

  Bats?

  The bats reformed into his enemy behind him, and Reggie caught some fancy spinning kick to the chest before he could fully turn and face him. The impact of it actually lifted him off the ground and flung him back to hit a house, which he promptly burst through and landed somewhere in the common room of. People screamed, pointing and praying as Reggie got up.

  “Shut up,” he growled in his garbled, transformed voice. “I’m one of the nice ones.” They did not seem to believe him.

  Which was about last on Reggie’s list of problems, because the bats were swarming him again. He spun, aiming to catch his enemy reforming at his back a second time. Instead he ended up turning right away from where he was reshaping, and putting himself in a prime position to be grabbed by the head and flung right out into the street again. Reggie hit the ground so hard that he bounced off it and kept spinning ten more paces before smashing hard against another building. This one was a bit more solid, and though its stone wall tragically perished in the effort, it proved able to arrest his flight.

  From the rubble, Reggie emerged caked in dust and growling. He wasn’t hurt as much as pissed off and humiliated, but the vampire ahead of him didn’t seem to be in very bad condition either. His shoulder still looked like the individual muscle fibres were trying to escape, but if it was impeding his movement Reggie saw no hint of the fact.

  He also saw that he was healing, though not especially fast. Maybe in another minute or two that damage would be fully undone.

  Fine by Reggie, a single minute was an age with the speeds he moved at now. He started bounding forwards again on all fours, ready for round…three?

  Ready to kill the asshole, anyway.

  His talons slashed out and hit nothing but air, six-inch blades held shy of their enemy’s skin as if there were some invisible hand guiding them away with each attack.

  There wasn’t, of course. It felt like magic, looked like magic, did the work of magic, but it was nothing but skill that kept Reggie from wounding this vampire. Every attack he made seemed to have been choreographed by the one he tried to land it on, and with the surprise of Reggie’s bite thoroughly faded his opponent was now putting all his focus into turning them away.

  And attacking, at once. Effortlessly. Just as his arms were everywhere they needed to be for smacking away Reggie’s strikes, so were they everywhere Reggie’s strikes weren’t. This vampire didn’t have talons like he did, or maybe just didn’t feel the need to use them, but his fists were hitting hard enough to feel like blades anyway.

  One impact after another rained on Reggie, all thrown with less Strength than he could muster but all aimed perfectly. Each one was a surprise, rocking him and sending him back a step. Each one left him no chance to wince and roll and let the collision diminish against him. He might as well have been a sandbag hanging from the ceiling, for all his ability to avoid these blows, and they just kept coming. Of course they did, vampires didn’t get tired.

  But they got hurt, and bit by bit, Reggie was getting hurt now. One of his lips burst open, an eye was crushed into the socket, an eardrum felt like it was perforated, and now he was on the backfoot. The punches didn’t stop.

  And yet Reggie wasn’t going down. Not easy to incapacitate a vampire, even if you knew what you were doing. Bruises didn’t do much to him and it was only really broken bones and torn muscle, things that mechanically limited the effects of his movements, that would do anything to impede him. A human being beaten like this would’ve felt his arms growing heavy and slow, the pain building up and driving him into inaction. But Reggie’s arms didn’t get tired and his pain was dulled by a crawl out of his own grave.

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  His enemy seemed to realise it, because he moved to break a collar-bone. Fragile enough to snap with their Strength and Toughness gap, but still needed for movement. It was the first predictable strike he’d made, and Reggie countered it by abruptly arcing his claws up and dragging them down the full length of his forearm. Blood hissed from the limb, though it wasn’t close to detached, and the vampire backed up. Reggie pressed in, kept swinging now that he’d—literally—smelled blood.

  On the defensive, this guy wasn’t nearly as good. Perhaps that was unfair of Reggie to think, there were, after all, only so many options an unarmed man had for turning away bladed instruments with a good six inches on his reach. All the same he was having skin parted and viscera slashed with each pass of Reggie’s claws.

  By the look in his eyes, though, you’d never have known. He seemed more excited than pained, and that scared Reggie more than his skill at arms ever could.

  “You’re nothing in a fight,” the vampire hissed as he fought. “But you seem to have some measure of talent. Untrained are you?”

  Reggie didn’t need breath to fight, so there wasn’t actually anything to lose by chatting away. It still felt off however. He wasn’t so long in the grave that he’d fully kicked all the old instincts of a living body.

  Better not to let the other guy know that, though.

  “Why would I tell you that?” he growled back, then cursed as the vampire managed to smack away what should have been a slice right across his under arm. That one might’ve cut a tendon if it’d landed. Slowly, the enemy was regaining his advantage and forcing Reggie back again. Whatever glint of victory he’d seen in the night was fading fast.

  “I’m just making conversation,” his enemy sighed. “You don’t have to be unfriendly.”

  It was one of the weirdest things Reggie had ever heard in his life, at least coming from a man who was actively trying to break all his bones. For once Reggie was completely speechless, so he just abandoned speech and focused on the fighting.

  Not that that was going much better for him, of course. He’d now thoroughly lost his edge and was taking hits again. Regeneration was knitting them back together, but slowly. There was nothing for it, he’d have to pull out his ace in the hole.

  In one quick motion, Reggie dragged a talon down his own arm and mentally hurled the blood from it right at his enemy. His new trick of holding it all together worked wonders now, and the blood smashed into its vampiric target more like a thrown brick than a torrent of liquid. He went stumbling, then cursed as Reggie took the chance to lunge forwards and slash along his upper thigh.

  Unfortunately, efforts to drag the ichor out of him were futile. Reggie was getting some, tiny droplets, but it was essentially nothing, coming slow enough that the fight would end long before it added up into something substantial. Vampires could store a shitload of blood in their tiny little human-sized bodies. Supernatural loads.

  “Blood Magic,” the vampire hissed. “Just when you were starting to impress me, you pull that out.” He sounded disgusted. That was fine by Reggie.

  “I’m not dying here just because you think it’d be cooler,” he shot back. Maybe if he made the guy angry, he’d start making mistakes. Reggie could use some mistakes right about now, if his enemy made a dozen in a row he might just have a chance of winning this.

  But the vampire didn’t get wrathful and sloppy, he simply…slowed down, paused even. “Dying?” he frowned. “You think I’m trying to kill you?”

  Reggie felt all of his bruises and cuts flare up a moment.

  “Are you not?” he asked cautiously.

  The vampire laughed. “Oh if I’d wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead.” There was something about the way he said that, a casual sincerity, that had Reggie believing him instantly. Apparently he’d been getting his ass kicked in an act of mercy, this whole time. Humbling if nothing else.

  “So why are we fighting?” Reggie asked him, awkwardly. The vampire laughed again.

  “To feel the thrill of crossing blades, of pitting skill against skill and strength against strength. So rarely do our kind meet one another, how could we not take this opportunity to extend the limits of our abilities in a glorious battle?”

  Ah, this was a lunatic. Reggie fancied himself something of an expert on the topic, for obvious reasons, and here was a man that was nuttier than squirrel shit.

  That didn’t make him dangerous though, not really. Just meant he thought about things a bit differently than people were used to.

  “I don’t think you were getting much glory from your fight with me,” Reggie pointed out. The vampire’s face fell instantly, but he looked more disappointed than annoyed.

  “A fledgeling, are you?” he asked. Reggie confirmed with a nod, and the vampire just sighed irritably. “I’ve been waiting to fight an elder of our kind for decades. One with more experience than even a Circumscriber.”

  “You know there’s one in Lorwick, right?” Reggie asked. “The Lady actually.”

  The vampire’s face soured. “A Velithean,” he spat. “Politicians and socialites, not warriors. If I was even able to reach her before being swarmed by her guards and slain by her Knight, she would likely have me mewling at her feet with a look sooner than fight me.”

  Reggie didn’t exactly empathise for the fucking weirdo swordsman who wanted to fight everyone for fun, but he was pleased to hear that. Apparently this guy’s Tier was a good deal lower than the Lady’s. Maybe he hadn’t been holding back that much, then.

  “So what brings you here?” The vampire asked Reggie, before he could draw any more conclusions.

  Reggie considered several possibilities, at that. Even telling the truth, ha! In the end he settled on a lie of omission.

  “I’m here to try and find a few ingredients for my…uh, studies.”

  “Studies,” the vampire echoed. His lip curled slightly. “You’re not an Irazhtan are you?”

  Reggie knew that was the Lineage that most often produced magic-type vampires, the wielders of Blood Magic and Necromancy.

  “I’m not.”

  “So where’d you pick up the Blood Magic?” The vampire seemed pressed about this, more than a little.

  “It seemed useful,” Reggie shrugged. “I had a rough siring. My sire fucked off, actually, and left me alone surrounded by assholes with torches and guns. I learned what I needed to survive. The best way to do that turned out to be turning into a Vital Arcanist.”

  It wasn’t wholly wrong, except for being a lot more controlled than Reggie had implied. There apparently wasn’t a name for his Lineage, whatever it was, just yet, and even he didn’t know why certain powers were natural to it.

  Fortunately, the vampire didn’t dig deeper than that.