Tempest, page 16
“Are you coming back to training tomorrow?” Kai asked.
I nodded. “I have to if I plan to be a warrior next year.”
Standing, he held out a hand to me and tugged me to my feet. “You will, and you’ll be a great one.”
“Because it’s in my blood,” I joked as we left the gazebo. I’d lost count of how many times someone had told me that.
“Because you’re you,” he said. “Sometimes, when I watch you in training, I wonder if you pretend not to be better than the rest of us to save our egos.”
“Why on earth would you say that?” His words were so close to what Ronan had told me. It was strange the two of them had mentioned it within a day of each other.
I was floored when he said, “It’s the way you move. We’re all great fighters, but you make it look effortless. Naomi said once you remind her of a lethal ballerina, and that stuck with me.”
I let out a short laugh. “Trust me; I am not protecting anyone’s ego, especially Dimitri’s. But thank you for saying that.”
We reached the manor, and I said, “Thanks for being so nice about everything. We’re still friends?”
“Always.” He waved at the door. “Are you coming in? I think the others are watching movies in the common room.”
“Next time.” I felt weird about the two of us joining our friends when we’d just broken up. It wouldn’t feel as awkward in training tomorrow.
“Want me to walk you home?”
“I’m good.” I leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Night, Kai.”
“See you tomorrow,” he said and turned to go in.
I started in the direction of home but changed course and went to sit on the riverbank. Lying back on the grass, I stared at the stars and tried to unwind my jumbled emotions. I was glad Kai had taken it well, but I was also a little sad it was over. He was my first boyfriend, and we’d had a lot of fun together.
I threw an arm over my eyes. What was wrong with me? I was thinking about boyfriends while Summer could be going through all kinds of horrors. At the very least, she was a captive. At the worst… I tried not to think about what that could be.
The only thing that allowed me to sleep at night was knowing my father was personally heading up the search for her. Working with David and Kelvan, he would turn over every rock and follow every trail to figure out who had taken her. No one was better than the two hackers, which was why they worked exclusively for us and were well compensated for it.
I pulled my arm back to look at the stars, but some of them were missing. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. They focused, not on the stars, but on the dark shape blotting them out.
I rolled away and came to my feet with my knife in hand. Heart racing, I glared at Ronan more out of embarrassment than annoyance. “Are you trying to get stabbed?”
His eyebrows rose. “Are you expecting an attack at Westhorne?”
“No. Sorry.” I sheathed my knife. “Out for your nightly walk?”
“I prefer to run.”
“I like to run, too,” I said, and then I realized he meant running as a wolf. He started toward the woods, and I fell in step beside him. A few days ago, I would have walked in the other direction. “How far do you go?”
If he didn’t want my company, he didn’t show it. “Five miles or so. I try to stay out of the wyvern’s territory.”
Was that amusement in his voice? I slanted a look at him, but I couldn’t make out his expression from this angle.
“His name is Alex, and that’s probably a good idea. Alex leaves people alone, but anything on four legs is fair game – except for the hellhounds. Not even Alex will mess with them.”
When Ronan didn’t respond, I explained how we had a wyvern living in the mountains. “I think he stays because of my mother. He saved her life again after the attack on Westhorne. She and my father were in the woods surrounded by vampires. Alex swooped in, killed two vampires, and flew away with her.”
That got a reaction. Ronan turned his head to look at me, and I laughed at the incredulity on his face. “It’s all true. Mom has that effect on animals, even grouchy wyverns. They’re drawn to her. How do you think we came to have two hellhounds?”
“And you have this ability, too?” he asked as if he had discovered the answer to a confusing puzzle.
I made a so-so gesture. “Yes, but it’s nothing compared to hers, at least, not since I suppressed my magic. You’re wondering if that’s why I was with Alex the day we met.”
“It did baffle me,” he admitted.
I grinned. “Now you know.”
We stopped at the edge of the woods, and I was taken aback by a sudden reluctance to part ways with him. What was up with me lately? I needed to ask Mom if releasing my magic could mess with my emotions. It was the only explanation that made sense.
“I better go so you can shift.” I took a step toward the trees, and his voice stopped me.
“You shouldn’t be in the forest alone at night. I will walk you home.”
Laughing, I turned to him. “I am home, and this is my backyard. I know every inch of these woods, and this way is faster than taking the road.” At his skeptical look, I said, “I’ll be halfway to my house by the time you undress and shift.”
He made a sound between a grunt and a laugh.
“Good night,” I said lightly and entered the woods. I didn’t wait for his response before I set out at a run, picking up speed when my vision adjusted to the deeper darkness. The familiar rush of adrenaline filled me, the unbridled joy of moving as swiftly and freely as the wind through the trees.
The crack of a twig and a soft chuff told me I was no longer alone. My breath quickened, and my surroundings became more vibrant as the competitor in me awakened. “Race you to the lake,” I called and put on an extra burst of speed.
I used to run with Summer and my other werewolf friends in the Knolls, but it hadn’t filled me with the exhilaration I felt racing side-by-side with Ronan. We weaved fluidly through trees and over obstacles as if we shared a consciousness, and all my heavy thoughts and worries fell behind me. Even my Mori fluttered in excitement.
When the lights of my house peeked through the trees, I pushed myself even harder, determined to win. It wasn’t enough. Ronan sprinted past me, reaching the lake a full three seconds ahead of me.
Stopping beside him in a small clearing by the water, I tried to control my breathing so he wouldn’t see how winded I was. “I let you win this time.”
Ronan snorted, and I was tempted to push him into the lake until I thought of all the ways he could get payback in training.
He headed back into the woods to continue his run. I waited until he was almost out of sight to say, “See you in class tomorrow.”
His reply was a short guttural bark as the forest swallowed him up.
Chapter 10
“DANI, YOU’RE UP,” Claire called as Dimitri jogged around the corner of the large barn wearing a self-satisfied grin.
Cheers went up for Dimitri as Kai patted my back. “Good luck.”
I shot him a smile and went to join Claire. We walked over to the base of a thirty-foot tower with a small platform near the top. A thick rope dangled from the platform to the ground.
“You remember the instructions I gave you earlier?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She held up a stop watch. “Go.”
I gripped the rope with both hands, locked it around my feet, and began to climb. After running, climbing was my best activity, and I reached the top in less than fifteen seconds.
Standing on the platform, I had a clear view of the obstacle course and the surrounding farmland. The forty-acre property in Butler Falls had been a dairy farm until it closed two years ago. Grandfather bought it this summer to use as an additional training location. The townspeople thought Westhorne was an eccentric private school, so they didn’t question our need for an outdoor exercise facility.
A narrow balance beam connected my platform to another one twenty feet away. I sped across the beam and stopped briefly on the platform to study the next obstacle. At the other end of a rope bridge hung a life-size dummy blocking access to the next platform. A red target was painted on the dummy’s chest, and three throwing knives lay at my feet.
The dummy jerked and started toward me on a pulley system above the bridge. I snatched up a knife, aimed, and threw it. The blade sank into the dummy’s shoulder, but the dummy kept coming. Crap. I had to hit the target before the dummy reached me, or I was out.
I grabbed the second knife. Taking a breath, I lined up my aim and threw the knife at the dummy, which was already halfway across the bridge. The knife hit the center of the red target.
Yes.
For a second, nothing happened. Then the dummy swung back to its starting position. I ran across the bridge and leaped at the pole beside it. I slid down the pole to the ground and found myself in a walled structure. On the ground was a fencing foil. I picked it up and continued through the only door into a room with another door on the opposite wall.
No sooner had I entered the room when a hooded, masked figure in dark clothes stepped in front of me, holding a foil. Like the dummy, he had a red target over his heart.
My opponent raised his foil in a brisk salute. I repeated the gesture and launched into an attack. He deftly parried my thrust, but he didn’t make a counterattack. I realized the goal was for me to land a strike to the target, not for him to hit back.
I attacked again, and he blocked it with a circular sweep of his foil. I followed it with a series of rapid lunges and feints, but he expertly blocked every move.
It took half a minute of sparring with him to know whose face was under the mask. Since that day in the dining hall, things had changed between Ronan and me in training. I’d taken his comments about me holding myself back to heart, and I worked hard to be as good as he said I was. The more I improved, the more he pushed me, but I no longer mistook his criticism for dislike. I soaked up everything he said to us and closely watched his demonstrations to improve my own technique. I’d know his swordplay anywhere.
Although I worked with him every day in class, neither of us mentioned our run two weeks ago. Or the six times we’d run together since then. If I wanted a running partner, I waited for him at the edge of the woods when he went for his nightly run. No words were exchanged. I smiled a hello at him and set out, and a minute later, his wolf caught up to me. We always parted ways at the lake, but I wished we could run like that for hours.
If I was honest with myself, our shared love of running wasn’t the only reason I enjoyed those nights so much. Although he was all business in class, a camaraderie had developed between us. I didn’t know if it was because of our talk or our nighttime runs, but the more time we spent together, the more I looked forward to the next time.
Despite all that, Ronan wasn’t making this obstacle easy for me. I was very aware of the ticking clock as he blocked every one of my attacks. I remembered one of our classes when he’d shown me several ways to adjust my technique when fighting a larger person. His words that day came back to me. “It’s a natural reaction to underestimate a smaller opponent. That flaw is another weapon you can use against them.”
I feinted a strike to his chest and went for his stomach. As I expected, Ronan anticipated the move. What he wasn’t expecting was for me to stumble. He paused for a second, but it was all I needed to slip through his defenses and press the tip of my foil to the target on his chest.
“Gotcha,” I whispered, stepping back.
He gave a slight head shake, and I pictured his eyebrows rising. Ronan was one of those people who could speak volumes without uttering a word – when he wasn’t wearing his stoic face. He raised his foil and saluted me. Then he stepped aside to let me pass.
Dropping my foil, I ran through the doorway. I smiled in glee at the twenty-foot climbing wall and grabbed the first handhold. Scaling a wall was as easy as climbing a tree, and in thirty seconds I was over the top and sliding down a net to the ground.
In front of me was a shipping container with a padlocked door. Gavin had warned us there could be locks in our exercise today, so we’d all remembered our pick sets. I took my case from my pocket and went to work on the heavy-duty padlock. After two attempts, the lock clicked and the bolt opened.
I tossed the lock aside and opened the door. Inside the shed, a dummy lay on the floor. I snickered at the sign on the dummy’s shirt, which read RESCUE ME. Hoisting the heavy dummy over my shoulders in a fireman’s hold, I left the shed and ran around it to the other side where Claire waited for me behind the barn.
She clicked the button on her stopwatch and gave me a nod of approval. “Good job, Dani.”
“What’s my time?” I dropped the dummy at her feet and tried to look at the stopwatch.
Claire laughed, holding it out of my reach. “You’ll find out when the exercise is over.”
I gave her my best pout and ran around the barn to where my friends hooted and clapped for me. Gavin called for Kai, and we slapped hands as he passed me.
“Damn, girl,” said Victoria, who’d already had her turn. “Did you fly over the course?”
I shrugged, grinning at her. I had noticed an improvement in my speed and coordination since I’d started racing Ronan, but I wasn’t telling her that. It all came down to how much time I’d lost fencing with him and picking the lock. Overall, I felt great about my performance in the exercise.
The mood was light and playful as my friends and I joked around and speculated about who had been the fastest. We weren’t supposed to discuss the course until everyone had gone through it, so a few of us hinted at difficult obstacles that didn’t exist. By the time Elsie went last, she expected to dodge flying knives and swing on a rope across a pit of flames.
I hadn’t realized how much I needed this until now. Summer had been missing for over three weeks, and the last lead we had was dead, literally. We had tracked down Reese’s friend Iris Morgan in Chicago, only to discover her body had been pulled out of Lake Michigan three days after Reese’s interrogation. Whoever had hired her was leaving behind no witnesses and wiping out any connection to them.
Elsie finished the course, giving us dark looks for misleading her. A few minutes later, Ronan, Gavin, and Claire appeared from behind the barn and walked over to us. We quieted as we waited for our times.
Gavin looked at the phone in his hand. “The fastest time was three minutes and eleven seconds.”
“Wow,” Sean said in a low voice. “Guess that rules out me.”
“And me,” said a few others.
“And the winner is…” Gavin did a dramatic pause. “Dani.”
I had expected him to call Dimitri’s name. I didn’t register what he said until Dimitri whooped and grabbed me in a one-armed hug.
“Way to go, Sis.”
Claire waved her stopwatch. “Impressive, Dani.”
Naomi said something to me. I started to turn my head in her direction when Ronan said, “Well done.”
My gaze flew to him. He wasn’t smiling like Gavin and Claire, but there was a flicker of admiration in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. He tipped his head at me, and my chest swelled like he’d sung my praises. I was on such a high I paid little attention to Gavin as he called out everyone else’s times.
When it was time to go, Naomi and Luis sidled up next to me, and she murmured, “Well done, Dani. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Ronan say that to anyone.”
“Me either,” said Luis.
We walked to the vehicles, and I went to the six motorcycles parked beside the SUVs. One of the perks of being a senior was being allowed to ride our motorcycles to town if we were accompanied by a warrior. Dimitri and I got our bikes on our sixteenth birthday. He’d chosen a Ducati, and I’d gone with a Kawasaki. I’d wanted red, but I got a black one because it didn’t stand out as much.
We donned our jackets and helmets and mounted our bikes as the other trainees piled into the three SUVs driven by Ronan, Claire, and Gavin. Claire took the lead with the seniors following her and the last two vehicles taking up the rear.
“I wish they’d let us ride ahead,” Dimitri grumbled over my helmet speaker as our caravan stopped at the last intersection in town.
“Maybe if they didn’t know you so well, they would,” I retorted. His love of driving fast was no secret to anyone at Westhorne.
Sean’s voice cut in. “Way to go, Dimitri.”
“Hey,” Dimitri protested, and we all laughed.
The light changed. Dimitri was ahead of me, and I gave him a slight lead before I followed him through the three-way intersection.
“Dani, watch out,” Kai shouted.
I turned my head to the left, and everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I saw the large blue pickup run the red light, and I hit the gas, but it was too late. The truck slammed into the rear of my bike.
The force of the impact whipped me around and sent me through the wooden guard rail. I saw the deep ditch below me, and the only thing I could do was jump free of my motorcycle in the air.
I hit the rocky embankment on my feet, but my ankle twisted painfully, and I went down. My helmet protected my head as I tumbled, but my body took a beating on the rocks. I landed hard on my right side, and a sharp pain in my chest stole my breath. I’d never broken a rib, but I was pretty sure I’d just made up for it.
I rolled onto my back, and searing pain arced through me. My chest felt like it was on fire, and I couldn’t catch my breath. People shouted from a long way off as darkness crept across my vision.
Someone opened my visor and touched my face. I jerked involuntarily as my body thrummed with electricity, which sent my heart racing. My magic. I’d freed it somehow, and it was going to hurt someone.
The warm touch disappeared, and a wave of anguish threatened to suffocate me. My Mori was in pain. Was I dying?
