So I wasn’t as ready as I should have been when a man in biker leathers emerged from the brush at my side and slammed a baseball bat into the base of my skull. My legs turned to jelly and I went down hard, landing on my chin.

I sort of flopped over onto my back, dazed, lifting my hands in a vague and useless defensive gesture. I took the tip of a motorcycle boot directly to the testicles, and my whole world went bright with confusion and pain.

“Yeah,” snarled the man. He was of medium height, and had curly dark hair and a short goatee. “That’s right, bitch. Who’s crawling on the ground now?”

Asking the question seemed to infuriate him. He slammed a kick into my ribs, then another right into the breadbasket, and I curled around myself gasping.

I had to move. The Redcap was coming. I hadn’t made any noise to tip Thomas off that I was in trouble—but even as heavily boosted as I was, it wasn’t enough to instantly overcome the stunning pain of those blows. Shots like that mess around with your nervous system, disrupting the machinery that sends signals around your body. I wasn’t going anywhere for a few more seconds.

“Nail him,” the man spat, and those frozen spikes of raw agony I’d felt before blossomed into my body from my right arm, my left calf, and somewhere in my lower back. I heard the buzz of little wings as my attackers zipped past me, driving nails in like harpoons into a floundering whale. It hurt so much that I could barely open my eyes and look up at my attacker.

I recognized him.

Ace, a changeling, one of his parents mortal, the other fae. He was the onetime victim of Lloyd Slate, the onetime betrayer of Fix and Lily and a girl named Meryl. He stared down at me with hate-filled eyes and bounced an aluminum baseball bat a few times in his hand. “I’ve been waiting years for this.”

And then he started clubbing me over the head.

Chapter

Twenty-six

Taking a beating well is not for amateurs.

You have to get started early, maybe by getting beaten up a lot as a child in school. Then you refine your raw talent by taking more beatings as you get older. Generally, you can seek out almost any crew of athletic types, and you’ll find several willing to oblige you, under one guise or another. True craftsmen then seek out gifted individuals with a particular skill set to deliver the most skilled and professional beatings.

That’s how you learn to fight, really. You take beatings, and you get tougher, and if you don’t start avoiding all the fights, you continue taking beatings until you learn how it’s done. Or they kill you.

Some guys are born lucky, with mad natural fighting skills, and they hardly ever take a beating—but that’s never been me. I’ve had to learn the hard way.

Like every other kind of pain, beatings are educational.

Ace started swinging the aluminum bat, and I learned two things about him right away. First, he wasn’t any stronger than any other guy about his size—don’t get me wrong; that was plenty strong enough to kill me at the moment. But he wasn’t going to deliver the coup de grâce by dropping a forklift on my head. Second, he was emotionally invested.

See, beatings have only a couple of purposes. You are either deterring someone from something—flirting with your girl, stealing your wallet, strangling you, whatever—in which case the point of the beating is to convey a very simple message: Stop it. The second “reason” to deliver a beating is to simply inflict pain. There’s no actual reason involved, of course. It’s all an emotional drive, a need to make someone hurt. Sometimes that kind of drive is well justified. Sometimes it’s misdirected rage. And sometimes, maybe more often than we really want to believe, people just enjoy making someone else feel pain.

The third motivation for a beating is to kill someone. There’s some bleedover, ah hah, between the second reason and the third.

Ace was handing me a beating of the second kind. He wasn’t thinking. He had a need to make me feel pain. And I was obliging the hell out of him.

The nails were the worst, like frozen points of pure fire in my flesh. Beside that agony, the first couple of blows from the bat were a dull ache. I got my arms between my noggin and the bat, getting the meat of my forearms in the way wherever I could. Arm bones are considerably less robust than broomsticks, and a solid swing with a club will snap them. Get the muscle and soft tissue in the way, though, and it spreads out the impact, both in surface area and in duration. It disperses the force—and hurts like a son of a bitch.

He swung at me several times. I blocked some. One clipped my forehead. I wriggled out of the way of the rest, the bat throwing up chips from the concrete sidewalk. I kicked at his knees with my feet, though I was in a poor position to do it. That was the part of the conflict that was important to me.

Meanwhile, I gave Ace the part that was important to him. I screamed. It didn’t take a lot in the way of Method acting to make it convincing. The nails hurt so badly, I was pretty much going to start screaming anyway. So I screamed bloody murder, and he all but frothed at the mouth as he kept after me, swinging faster, more powerfully—and more erratically.

Swinging a club down at a struggling target is harder work than everyone thinks it is, and doing that and dodging clumsy kicks at the same time is the kind of aerobic workout you just don’t get at the gym. The longer it went on, the heavier he would be breathing, and the more intently he would be focused on me.

Screaming, howling, very noisy me.

See, surprises like this are exactly why you bring backup in the first place. I knew I couldn’t last more than a few seconds against Ace’s onslaught. I also knew how fast my brother could run.

But someone else got there first.

I heard a pair of light steps and then Ace grunted. I looked up through my impact-numbed arms and saw him swing the bat again, this time at a standing target.

The bat lashed out and never stopped moving in its arc, but suddenly there was a small figure rolling up close to Ace, coming between his chest and the bat in his extended arm. They whirled in a circle, following the spin of the bat, and Ace’s heels abruptly flipped up into the air over his head and he landed empty-handed on the concrete with a gasp of pain.

A woman stood over him. She was five nothing, and built with the kind of lithe, solid power that you’d expect in an Olympic gymnast who had stayed fit as she aged. Her blond hair was cut short, to finger-length. She’d had a pert upturned nose the last time I’d seen her. It had been broken since then, and while it had healed, I could see the slight bump the break had left. She had on jeans and a denim jacket, and her eyes were blue and blazing.

Ace started to get up, but a motorcycle boot much smaller than his own slammed down on his chest.

Karrin Murphy scowled at him, tossed the bat into the bushes, and said in a hard voice, “Stay down, creep. Only warning.”

It was difficult to translate frantic thought into verbalization through the pain of the cold iron piercing my skin, but I managed to gasp, “Incoming!”

Murphy’s eyes snapped around her, scanning in every direction including up, and she saw the first of the armored Little Folk diving down at her. Her hand snatched something out of her jacket pocket, and with a flick of her wrist she snapped out a small, collapsible baton. The Little Folk darted down upon her like a squad of angry wasps.

She didn’t try to evade them. She planted her feet and began snapping the little baton with sharp, precise motions. There wasn’t really time for her to aim at anything—she was running on pure reflex. Murphy’d been a martial arts practitioner since she was a child, mainly in aikido along with several others. Aikido included all kinds of fun areas of study, and one of them was learning how to handle a sword. I knew that she’d also been spending a lot of time training with a gang of ancient Einherjaren, postdead Norse warriors of Valhalla. I doubt any of her teachers had trained her for this situation.