Page 109 of The Star's Sword

I grinned. “Good to see you standing to fight rather than running, so I can kill you.”

Her jaw dropped. “The audacity.” She put a hand on her hip but it was shaking slightly. “This isn’t a trial to the death, just a trial for Morningstar.”

“It can be to the death, though,” Simon added helpfully, raising a finger in the air, earning a glare from Vasara.

“Shut up, you little leech,” she shot at him, stepping forward slightly as he merely stared at her with a bored expression.

My hand was on my sheath in an instant as I got between them. “What did you call him?”

She instantly pulled back, raising both hands and going over to another rack of weapons. “Nothing I could do, with Simon favoring you from the start, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, walking to the racks with her. She was a few inches taller than me, and wearing a light-blue celestial tunic with silver pants and gossamer thin chainmail over the top. “Simon has been nothing but gracious to you since you’ve stayed, despite you being a fraud and turning his vamps against him.”

“His problem,” she said lightly. “He should keep a better hold on his thralls.”

“Thralls are difficult to control,” Simon said mildly. “Something you should remember, Vasara.”

“If you want to keep your humans when vampire redistribution happens, then you’ll want to shut the fuck up,” she said, grabbing for him as he shot back against the rack, looking disgusted.

I’d had it with her desire to avoid the person she was actually facing to involve bystanders.

“Stop trying to fight innocent people and my friends, Vasara. It’s not going to keep me from kicking your ass.”

She rose to her full height and tried to intimidate me, glaring down at me and grabbing a sword off the rack to wave in my face.

I just smirked, because after being decapitated countless times by the world’s most legendary slayer, her movement felt glacial.

Inexperienced.

Nice.

“Perform miracles, Vasara!” a well-dressed elder vampire called from the sidelines. Vasara had a huge crowd assembled on her side, with the richer vampires in front and then the lower vampires on the sides and making up the back rows.

I had only a handful of my own friends.

“Vasara! Miracles! Vasara! Miracles!” A chant began, the vampires pumping their fists as Vasara looked through the weapon racks.

She finally selected a long sword that was lighter and thinner than usual, and a shield that really would never make a good second-hand complement, and headed through a door in the forcefield into the arena. She raised her hands, as the chants grew louder.

“Go Vasara, kill the fake Morningstar! Go Vasara! Miracles!”

The only miracle she was going to see was how much she could hurt before I finished her.

She finally turned to face me, both of us standing about ten feet apart in the sand, a line separating us. “Aren’t you going to pick a weapon?” She looked out at the side where my friends sat. “Oh, and Simon, remember the wager! Make sure Samael is imprisoned during the trials, you know, for when I win.”

My jaw went tight. “You can’t just win people.” I looked over at Samael, who nodded as a group of vampires came over to talk to him and Cayne. Surprisingly, a tall, see-through cylinder rose at the edge of the fighting arena, just inside the boundaries and at the end of the middle line through the sand.

The vampires gestured for Samael to join them and he just put up his hands and let them walk him into the arena.

He gave me a confident smile as he went, so gorgeous, so mine, I could barely see straight. “Give ‘em hell, Morningstar.”

A panel opened and they pushed him inside of the cylinder and then closed it. I wasn’t sure what it was made of.

“Aegean crystal,” Vasara said, as I saw Sam test the glass with his fists. “Unbreakable. He’ll only get out when one of us has won.”

“If this is about being the Morningstar, why are you trying to take him?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Should be helpful on my rise, should it not? I’m only taking him as an ally.”

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