spars with lara

“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.
I faltered at that, and Lara sent a thrust at me that hit me square in the belt buckle and shoved me off my feet and onto my ass.
I sat on the floor for a moment, eyeing Lara, who grounded her staff and bowed exactly as I had and regarded me calmly.
She knew about Thomas and me. I mean, I’d been aware of that, but she’d put together enough to work out who Ebenezar was, too. The White Court had a reputation for being insidious subversives. Connections to them, regardless of their source, were regarded with what most of the supernatural world considered healthy suspicion. If Ebenezar’s connection (and mine) to the White Court became public knowledge, the ramifications for our current situation were … sticky.
And Ebenezar didn’t just have issues with vampires: He had volumes and ongoing subscriptions. It had the potential for a real humdinger of a mess.
“I’ve known from the beginning,” she said impatiently, as if she’d been reading my thoughts. “I was here when my father was so obsessed with your mother. He made me play nanny to Thomas. I often heard them talk, because apparently no one in my family understands what a deadly weapon the ability to listen can be, and she left Thomas in my care once when she visited McCoy. And after she died, I helped Father hang her portrait in his psychotic little egomaniac’s gallery.”
I nodded. “But you never brought it up. Never used it for leverage.”
“No,” she said. “Because I’m also the one who changed Thomas’s diapers, after his mother escaped our father. Dressed him. Fed him his meals. Taught him to read.” She shook her head, her eyes focused on one of the banners. “I’m more ruthless than most, Dresden. But even for me, there are limits. Most of those limits involve family.”
“That’s why you didn’t use it against him,” I said. “How come you didn’t use it against me?”
“You never gave me a good reason to fight quite that dirty,” she replied. “And I couldn’t have used it against you without exposing my brother to trouble as well.”
“Then you know why I want to help him,” I said.
“We both do.”


Peace Talks Chapter 14, Page 129-132