When two true predators meet, they do not fight.
Not at first.
They circle. They test. They learn.
They dance.
The echo of the crossbow bolt faded into the oppressive silence of the ruined monastery.
Lysandra did not move. She stood with her back to the cold stone wall, a statue of silver and shadow. Her twin swords were held in a low, ready guard. Her eyes, the color of a frozen lake, scanned the darkness.
She was not breathing heavily. Her heart was not racing.
She was a professional. And the unprofessional part of her, the part that had been surprised, was now caged and silenced.
She was listening. Waiting.
"A clumsy trap for a clumsy beast," a voice whispered from the darkness above.
The voice was young, but it was laced with a coldness that did not belong to a boy. It was the sound of old hatred and fresh grief, scraped raw.
"But you are no beast, are you, Huntress?"
Lysandra's head did not move, but her eyes darted upward, trying to pierce the gloom of the shattered rafters.
"Show yourself, ghost," she said, her voice a calm, level counterpoint to his. "This game of shadows is beneath us both."
"Is it?" the voice mocked. "I find it rather fitting."
A shape detached itself from the deepest shadows of the roof.
It did not climb down. It dropped.
Adrian landed twenty feet from her on the stone floor, his knees bent, silent as a falling shroud.
He rose slowly, his two daggers held in a low, reversed grip. The faint moonlight caught the amber of his one eye, making it glow with a feral, predatory light.
The boy and the woman. The wolf and the huntress.
The dance was about to begin.
She moved first.
She did not charge. She flowed.
She advanced into the center of the hall, into a wide patch of moonlight that fell from the broken tower above.
It was a challenge. An invitation. Come out of your shadows. Fight me in the light.
Adrian accepted.
He stalked out of the darkness, his movements a low, predatory crouch. He circled her, a wolf sizing up a silver-backed wolfhound.
For a moment, they simply moved in a slow, lethal orbit, their eyes locked.
Then the orbit collapsed.
Adrian lunged, a blur of black leather.
He was impossibly fast. He did not aim for her chest or head. He went low, his dagger flashing toward her thigh, a move designed to cripple, to maim.
Lysandra was faster.
She did not retreat. She pivoted on the ball of her foot, a dancer's move. Her left sword came down in a silver arc, not to block his blade, but to intercept his arm.
Steel met steel with a sharp, piercing shriek that echoed through the hall.
CLANG!
Sparks flew. The force of the impact sent a tremor up Adrian's arm.
He recoiled, surprised by her strength. She was slender, but her entire body was a weapon, her core as strong as forged iron.
She pressed the advantage.
She was on him, a whirlwind of spinning, silver blades. Her style was not the hacking and slashing of an Order knight. It was a fluid, continuous stream of motion, each parry flowing into an attack, each attack setting up the next parry.
Her swords were a cage of steel, forcing him back, giving him no room to breathe, no room to think.
Adrian was on the defensive, his daggers a desperate, clanging defense against the storm.
He was being driven back, toward the center of the hall.
Toward the weakened floorboards.
Toward his own trap.
A faint smile touched Lysandra's lips. She saw it. The boy was skilled, but predictable. He was leading her to his trap, and she was turning it against him.
She feinted high with her right sword, forcing Adrian to raise his guard.
Then she lunged low with her left, aiming to sweep his feet out from under him and send him sprawling onto the weak floor.
But Adrian was not the boy she thought he was.
He had felt the shift in her balance. He had seen the trap in her eyes.
He did not try to block the low sweep.
Instead, he jumped.
He leaped into the air, using the top of her sweeping blade as a springboard, a move of insane, acrobatic desperation.
For a split second, he was airborne, above her, a dark angel of vengeance.
Lysandra's eyes widened in genuine shock. No one had ever done that.
He came down behind her.
Before she could turn, his dagger was at her throat.
He could have ended it. Right there.
But the pain in his broken ribs, screaming from the impact of her blades and the acrobatic leap, made him hesitate for a fraction of a second.
It was all she needed.
She dropped, her body falling away from his blade, and spun on the ground, her own sword slicing upward.
Adrian jumped back, but not fast enough.
The tip of her blade caught his left forearm, a line of searing, white-hot pain.
Blood, dark in the moonlight, welled instantly.
He growled, a low, animal sound of frustration and pain.
The dance had claimed its first blood.
They broke apart, circling each other once more, breathing heavily.
The pretense was over. The testing was done.
This was a real fight.
"You are good," Lysandra admitted, her voice no longer calm, but tight with adrenaline. "Better than the reports suggested."
"And you," Adrian snarled, his eyes burning, "are a monster in a prettier package than the others."
He charged again, but this time, he was different.
He was no longer just a wolf. He was a goblin, a creature of shadow and spite.
He kicked up a cloud of dust and debris from the floor, momentarily obscuring her vision.
He used the broken pillars as cover, darting in and out of the shadows, forcing her to constantly turn, to never be certain where the next attack would come from.
This was his world. The world of the gutter rat. The world of the ghost.
He lunged from behind a pillar, his blade aimed at her side.
She parried, the clang of steel echoing again. But as she blocked the first dagger, his other hand, filled with dust, shot toward her face.
She jerked her head back, avoiding the blinding attack, but it gave him the opening.
His boot lashed out, catching her in the side of the knee.
Her leg buckled. She cried out, a sharp sound of pain.
She was wounded. Slower.
He pressed, seeing the kill. He was on her, his daggers a flurry of strikes, forcing her back, overwhelming her perfect defense with pure, chaotic aggression.
She was stumbling, her leg giving way, her silver swords a desperate, failing wall of steel.
But she was not defeated.
As he drove her backward with a final, powerful push, she allowed herself to fall.
She fell onto her back, and as he lunged down for the killing blow, she kicked both her legs up, catching him square in the chest.
The impact was like being hit by a battering ram.
The fire in his broken ribs became an inferno.
The world went white. He flew backward, landing in a heap ten feet away, the air driven from his lungs, his daggers skittering across the stone.
He gasped, trying to draw a breath that would not come, his vision swimming.
Lysandra was back on her feet in an instant, despite her injured leg.
She limped toward him, her swords held ready.
This was it. She had him.
But as she advanced, she saw it.
The look in his eyes. It was not fear. It was not defeat.
It was pure, undiluted hate. And it was a look that promised that even in death, he would take her with him.
She saw the tensed muscles in his body, ready to spring, even through the agony.
And she knew.
She knew that to kill him now would cost her own life. A direct fight to the death was suicide. For both of them.
She stopped.
They stared at each other across the moonlit hall, both wounded, both breathing heavily, both locked in a stalemate of mutual destruction.
She was a perfect sword. He was a shattered, jagged piece of glass. Both were equally deadly.
For the first time in his quest for vengeance, Adrian faced an opponent he could not simply overwhelm.
He faced an opponent whose skill, whose discipline, whose sheer will to survive, mirrored his own.
He respected her.
And for that, he hated her more than any man he had ever killed.
Lysandra lowered her swords, just an inch. It was a sign. A tactical pause, not a surrender.
She took a slow, deliberate step backward, into the shadows.
Then another.
She melted back into the darkness from which she came, her silver hair the last thing to disappear.
She was gone.
Adrian lay on the cold stone, the pain in his ribs and his arm a symphony of agony.
He had survived. He had made the Silver Huntress retreat.
But he had not won.
And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him more than the cold stone beneath him, that this was only the beginning of their dance.