Pain exploded. I threw out a curse and clenched my eyes against the pain.
“Never drop your guard,” Catcher unrepentantly warned. I looked up, found him back in the starting position, bokken bladed. “And never take your eyes off an assailant.” He bobbed his head at me. “You’ll heal, and you’ll probably have worse injuries than that when it’s all said and done. Let’s go again.”
I muttered a choice curse about “my assailant,” but bladed my body again and adjusted my grip on the handle of the bokken. My biceps throbbed, but I was a vampire; I’d heal. It was part of our genetic deal.
He may not have been a vampire, but he was good. I was fast and strong, but I didn’t have either his natural knack or his experience at sparring. I was also injured. And I was trying, as hard as I could, to fight without fighting. To tamp down that coursing rush of adrenaline and anger that would bring her to the surface—in front of a crowd of combat-trained vampires. And loosing a half-formed vampire into the world, and in front of an audience, couldn’t be a good thing.
But it was a tough line to walk.
As a newbie vamp, and a former grad student at that, I was still just reacting to whatever Catcher threw at me: spinning to get out of the way or slashing my own sword down when he failed to block rather than carrying out my own plan of attack. He was moving too quickly for me to both react defensively and take offensive strikes of my own, although I tried. I tried to analyze his moves, tried to watch for weaknesses.
The longer we sparred, the harder that analysis became.
With each arc of my bokken, each slash and spin, my limbs loosened and my mind relaxed, and I began to fight back.
Unfortunately, the second I began to really fight back, to let the adrenaline rush me and let my body dance with the bokken in my hands, the vampire inside began to scream for release.
As I spun, bokken before me, she stretched through my limbs, and my eyes fluttered with the sensation of it, like warmth spilling through my veins as she moved. The warmth was fun enough—it was hard to come by in a vampiric body—but then she went a step too far.
Without warning, she pushed forward and took control, as if someone else had stepped inside my body. I watched events play out before me, but it was she that moved my arms, that prompted my sudden speed and agility. Speed and agility that were unmatched even by a sorcerer whose expertise, whose magical raison d’être, was weaponry.
She had little patience for the maneuverings of a human. Where I’d fought defensively, she advanced, slashing at Catcher and forcing him around and backward nearly to the other edge of the mat. It played out like a movie before me, as if I were sitting in a theater in my mind, watching the fight happen.
When my bokken grazed the side of Catcher’s head, millimeters away from skull and scalp, the thought that I might have hurt him, and severely, pushed me—pushed Merit—back through. I blew out a breath as I spun away from another strike, forcing her back again.
When I’d sucked down oxygen and glanced back at him again, I found something unexpected in his eyes. Not reprobation.
Pride.
There was no fear that I’d nearly taken a swipe at his throat, no anger that I’d gone too far. Instead, his eyes shone with the thrill of a man in battle.
I think that look was almost worse. It thrilled her, that pride, that eagerness in his eyes.
It terrified me. I’d momentarily loosed her, and I’d nearly concussed my training master. That math was pretty simple—the vampire was going to stay repressed.
Unfortunately, although repressing the vamp decreased the chance that Catcher would lose a vital appendage, it also decreased my ability to keep up with him. Just like Yeats predicted, things began to fall apart. The parts of my brain that had been focused on fighting back and keeping her down now also had to think about how close I’d come to taking his blood, to battering the man who was trying to prepare me for combat.
And expert in the Second Key or not, Catcher was tiring. He knew how to use the weapons, sure. How to and where to swing his bokken for maximum effect. But he was still human (or so I assumed), and I was a vampire. I had more endurance. What I didn’t have—when I was struggling to keep myself together—was any skill at sparring. Which meant that even if he was tiring, I was getting worse. I endured his criticism, humiliating as it was. But the shots were harder to take.
Twice, he swung his bokken around in a kind of halfhearted arc. Twice, I got whapped with it. Once across my left arm—which still burned from the last contact—and once across the back of my calves—a shot that put me on my knees in front of my colleagues.
“Get up,” Catcher said, motioning with the tip of his bokken. “And this time, at least try to move out of the way?”
“I am trying,” I muttered, rising off my knees and blading my body again.
“You know,” Catcher said, slicing forward with the bokken in a series of moves that backed me to the opposite side of the mat. “Celina isn’t going to give you a chance to warm up. She isn’t going to pull her punches. And she’s not going to wait while you call for backup.”
He half turned, then brought the bokken around in a sweeping move like a backhanded tennis shot.
“I’m doing,” I said as I avoided one strike and tried to maneuver my way back to the near side of the room, “the best”—I swung my katana, but he stopped it with his own steel—“that I can.”
“That’s not good enough,” he bellowed, and met my bokken with a two-handed strike that whipped the wood from my sweaty hands. As if embarrassed by my clumsiness, the bokken flew, bounced on the mat once, twice, and finally came to a rolling stop.
The room went silent.
I risked a glance up. Catcher stood in front of me, bokken in one hand, skin damp from his exertions, bewilderment in his expression.
I wasn’t interested in answering the question in his eyes, so I bent over, hands on my knees, my own breathing labored. I wiped sweaty bangs from my face.
“Pick it up,” he directed, “and give it to Juliet.”
I walked over to where the bokken lay, bent down and picked it up. Juliet stepped forward, and after a sympathetic glance, took it from my hand. Assuming I’d been dismissed, I turned away and rubbed sweat from my eyes.
But Catcher called my name, and I glanced back to meet his gaze once again. He searched my eyes, scanning my irises in a preternatural way I’d come to expect of the answer-seeking sorcerer. Seconds passed before his focus sharpened and he was looking at me again, instead of through me. “Is there anything you need to tell me?”
My pulse pounded in my ears. He had forgotten, apparently, that we’d broached the subject before, that I’d tried to talk to him about my malfunctioning vampire. I was more than happy to keep it that way. I shook my head.
I could tell he wasn’t satisfied by that, but he looked at Juliet and prepared to fight.
Catcher worked Juliet through the same seven katas, her moves practiced and precise, the daintiness of her form belying her skill at wielding the lengthy weapon. When he was done with her, he asked us for critiques. The guards, at first with trepidation and then with confidence, offered their observations of her performance. Generally, folks were impressed, thinking that an enemy’s underestimation of her slight form would work to her advantage.
Peter was also given a workout before Catcher called the session to an end. He ended with a few parting comments and generally avoided eye contact with me, before shaking Luc’s hand, pulling on a T-shirt, grabbing his weapons, and leaving the room.
I gathered my sword and stepped into my flip-flops, intent on catching a post-training shower. Lindsey walked over and put a hand on my arm as she toed into her shoes.
“You all right?” she asked.
“We’ll see,” I whispered back as Luc crooked his finger at me.
“Ethan’s office,” was all he said when I reached him. But given the irritation in his voice, that was plenty.
“Should I shower first? Or change?”
“Upstairs, Merit.”
I nodded again. I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d done to deserve a visit to the principal’s office, but I was assuming my performance during training had something to do with it. Either they’d been impressed by the minute or two I’d allowed the vampire to take control, or they’d been unimpressed by the rest of it. Or, given the shots I’d taken and the fact that I’d actually dropped the bokken, actually offended by it. Either way, Catcher and Luc would have had questions, and I assumed those questions had been sent upstairs.
Scabbard in hand, I trotted up to the first floor and headed for Ethan’s office, then knocked when I reached the closed door.
“In,” he said.
I cracked the door and found him seated at his desk, hands clasped together on the desktop, gaze on me as I entered. That was a first. It was usually the paperwork that had his attention, not the vampire at the door.
I shut the door behind me and stood before him, stomach fluttering with nerves.
Ethan made me stand there for a good minute, maybe two, before speaking. “Word travels.”