Free Biting the Bullet by Jennifer Rardin Page A

grape bubble and say with childlike wonder, “They are like ninjas from heaven.”
    Two of them swung on Uldin Beit with curved swords carved with runes that glowed in turns, as if the sword itself was somehow speaking as its wielder fought.
    Uldin responded with surprising speed, leaping from her stool and spinning her sticks like nunchakus. With each spin the sticks grew, until she held a couple of mallets with round heads sprouting sharp points. Medieval weaponry fans would’ve called them morning stars. I thought they looked too evil for such a pretty name.
    Two more light-coated warriors swarmed Sian-Hichan. This duet carried swords as well, only they were straighter, bulkier, built for heavy lifting. Sian-Hichan swung the guitar over his head, slammed it against the stage. Instead of scattering Gibson parts as far as the eye could see, he pulled back holding a double-headed battle axe. And damned if he couldn’t swing that thing like Paul Bunyan on a bet.
    The third demon had already fallen by the time I glanced at him. His three opponents were still beating him with what looked like miniature silver telephone poles. The Magistrate had uncoiled his whip in readiness to rescue his fallen bandmate when he was attacked himself.
    Built like a heavyweight boxer, his single foe didn’t seem to need or want assistance. He rammed into the Magistrate, making his eyes do a dance I called the oh-shit-blink-and-pop, widening the way they will when one has just encountered a force of nature.
    The two went down, trading punches, wrestling for control over the whip.
    The white fighter clocked the Magistrate solidly to the nose. Blood went flying as both it, and the Magistrate’s grip on the whip, broke. The fighter rolled free, armed now, and apparently well versed in the offensive capabilities of a tightly braided length of steel-tipped leather. He cracked the whip against the Magistrate’s side as he rolled to avoid the hit. Got him in the back too before the Magistrate caught the whip on the third strike. A brief tug-of-war followed, during which the whip broke.

    The Magistrate screamed in fury, a sound echoed by Uldin Beit as her attackers overwhelmed her, one of them skewering her as the other lopped off the lower half of her arm.
    Sian-Hichan still held his own, fighting with the mindless rage of a berserker. His axe blurred as he swung at his attackers, its bloody edge and their wariness both witness to his effectiveness.
    The wet slap of fists on flesh brought my attention back to the Magistrate and his opponent. Now they fought hand-to-hand, throwing kicks, blocks, and punches with a speed that astonished me. Honestly, you just don’t see fighting like that in the world. At least not outside of a movie screen. It looked almost — choreographed. The Magistrate jumped and spun, his kick just barely missing the white fighter’s skull. Only a late block by the fighter followed by a flurry of kicks to the ribs kept him in the game.
    The Magistrate tried a knife hand to the neck, missed high, and instead ripped the mask off his opponent, who looked at me with such alarm you’d have thought I was about to turn state’s evidence against him.
    My knees folded like the paper fans my sister, Evie, and I used to make from Granny May’s church bulletins. I don’t guess I hit the stage gracefully. That would’ve been too much to ask. I did land on my ass, and since I wasn’t corporeal it didn’t hurt. It wasn’t pretty either. But my mind had no room left in it for that kind of thinking. It was full. Brimming over, in fact, with the discovery I’d just made.
    My late fiancé was a ninja from heaven.

Chapter Seven
    Some things you just know. I’d stood at Granny May’s bedside as she’d drawn her last breath. I’d watched her eyes empty, and I’d known she was gone. Where she went, well, that we could debate all day long. But she’d left our realm, of that I was certain.
    So at my core, where I absolutely refused to