by Ellie J Duck
“Everything is fine. I’m a little offended that you all think I’m such a liar, but I’m fine.”
“You told him you didn’t even get hurt” Mitch points out. “Even though you’re still oozing blood right now.”
“Maybe because I’ve been hurt worse and this is nothing?” I suggest, eyeing him in the rear-vision mirror.
“Maybe she doesn’t realize the seriousness of the situation,” Brody suggests suddenly. “We should test her. Tell us something and let us decide whether it’s a lie.”
“Are you joking?” I demand. “You want me to practice lying on you, all because you think I don’t grasp the horror of the situation that vampires will now be able to find me with more ease and will more easily manipulate me into being their next meal? I grasp the situation just fine. That vamp tagged me and now he’s going to report to the coven leader about how there’s a human on this team. One that can be manipulated. To be honest, I’m a little surprised that none of you have taken me out yet to protect yourselves.”
I glance at Hilton when I say those words, since he’s the one most likely to kill me over it.
“I did warn you this would happen, Greg,” Tobias says into the awkward silence that follows.
I glance over at Greg when he doesn’t speak, and I see that he is staring out the window as though he’s not even listening.
“Are you pouting because I said I’m doubting your sanity, boss?” I ask him, guessing at his mood when he makes no move to respond to any of us.
“I’m contemplating my life and whether all I’ve done has been worth it and how that will affect my chances for death when Magnus finds out you lied to him and I let you,” Greg answers, still looking out the window.
“Oh, get over it,” I grumble as the sun begins to rise above the forest.
“Excuse me?” he demands, spinning back to face me.
“You’re acting as though I can’t handle this and I’m already sick of it, so get the hell over it. I didn’t lie to Dad when I told him everything is fine. Sure, I got tagged and vampires might be able to get their fangs into me. Big deal! I’ll bet that being on this team will land me in water a lot hotter than this. It’s not like I’m going to just lay down and take whatever these leeches do to me. I’ll deal with it. Which is why Dad doesn’t need to know. So, quit worrying that you lied to your friend and suck it up!”
“I still can’t tell whether she’s lying,” Tara comments. “What about this? Anna, how old are you?”
“Eighteen,” I answer, resigning myself to the fact that the cat is not going to let it go.
“Have you ever fantasized about killing someone?” she asks me.
“Yes,” I answer honestly. “More than I’d care to admit, if I’m honest.”
“Has anyone besides your parents ever seen you naked?” she asks me next.
“Probably,” I respond. “Maybe some doctors.”
“You don’t know?” Mitch asks, sounding intrigued suddenly.
“How would I know?” I ask, baffled.
“Oh, now I have to ask,” he purrs. “Anna, are you a virgin?”
“Isn’t the answer to that already obvious?” I ask.
“Oh my God!” Tara says in a hushed whisper and I turn to see that she’s staring at me like she’s just found a unicorn. “You got through military school and all the way to eighteen still holding your v-card?”
“No loose ends,” I hear Greg murmur from beside me and I glance at him to see him watching me, too.
“Got that right,” I reply.
“What does that mean?” Brody asks. “’… No loose ends? What is he talking about?”
I bite my lip; not sure I want to admit that fact about myself to the team when I’m trying to befriend them.
“That means she was raised by the world’s deadliest assassin and taught from birth all the reasons that she is a liability to him should she ever be captured and tortured to punish him for the things he has done. The apple never falls far from the tree,” Summers tells the team.
They all stare at me with wide eyes and I decide I don’t like this game anymore. I turn in my seat to face forward again, hating myself when my eyes jump to the rear-vision mirror and clash with an unsympathetic copper pair. Tobias doesn’t say a word as he guides the car around the many bends on the way back to the base, but I see something flash is his eyes for just a moment when they meet mine.
“So, let me get this straight,” Mitch clarifies. “You’ve never slept with anyone in case they’re someday tortured to get back at you for the things you’ll do as an assassin?”
I don’t answer but that seems to be all the answer they need.
“Holy shit,” I hear Brody breathe quietly.
The remainder of the drive back to the base takes place in silence and I can’t help wondering what the rest of the team are thinking of me. Do they pity me? Do they think I have emotional baggage because I didn’t have any friends to leave behind at school all because I was too concerned over the safety of others to make them? Do they trust me less, knowing that I might not be able to care for them as perhaps one should on such a small, close-knit team, lest they someday be captured and tortured to get to me?
“I still want to see you try and get away with a lie,” Tara announces eventually, and I glance over my shoulder at her to see that she has absorbed that little fact about me and moved right on with life like it’s not all kinds of messed up.
“I once tap danced with a donkey,” I lie to her, saying the first thing that pops into my head.
“Holy shit, I still can’t tell if she’s lying. Lie to me,” Mitch exclaims, and I see that he’s moved on with it too.
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a hooker,” I tell him, lying through my teeth.
“Well, now I hope you’re lying,” Greg inserts with a chuckle.
“These are silly things though, it’s easy to lie over silly things,” Tara says. “Tell us a lie about something important.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Were you afraid when we got to the crime scene?” She asks seriously, and I wonder whether I was. I don’t know. Would they be able to smell if I was?
“With the bodies, you mean?” I ask. She nods.
“No. The dead don’t scare me,” I answer her.
“True,” she murmurs. “When the vamp tagged you, did it hurt?”
“No,” I lie.
“Lie,” she says. “But I only know you’re lying because I’ve been bitten, and it hurts like a motherfucker.”
“Tell us your darkest fear,” Mitch suggests, and I can tell they are enjoying delving into my life.
“Growing a second head,” I lie to them, holding the truth of my darkest fear close to my chest and refusing to give it breath.
“A legitimate fear, but I don’t think it’s your darkest,” Brody answers, his gaze ponderous as he watches me. Meanwhile, I wonder just what kind of horror stories shapeshifters are told that growing an extra head can be considered a ‘legitimate’ fear.
“I can’t tell,” Tara says, also eyeing me.
“Guess you’ll never know,” I grin at them.
“I’m going to catch you in a lie,” Mitch vows. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to do it. You just wait.”
“Good luck,” I murmur as the car pulls to a stop back at the base, making me realize I wasn’t even paying attention when we stopped at the gates to be scanned in.
“Alright, everyone,” Greg says as we all pile out of the car. “Grab a shower. Tara; Tobias; I want a full report of the kills you made tonight by midday. Everyone else get some shut eye. Anna, get a bandage on that wound. Training starts after lunch.”
∞ ∞ ∞
I groan when I find myself on my back on the training mat for the seventeenth time, realizing my wake-up call is now complete. After what happened on the hunt this morning, Summers is insisting I must train harder, longer and faster to catch up to the new world I live in. And let me tell you, I’m not
happy about it. I’ve gone from being the best in my class at the Academy to the punching-bag of the group all because I’m human. It’s like I went from being what I considered to be skilled, to being utterly pathetic, all in the span of twenty-four hours.
All the human training in the world couldn’t have prepared me for the need to fight off a hundred-and-sixty-pound tigress-Shifter. I mean sure, it helped more than not having any training, but I’m not keeping up with her. And I get the feeling she’s going easy on me, so she doesn’t hurt me.
“Oh, I hate you,” I grumble, rolling back to my feet and trying to shake the dizziness away.
“You’d hate me more if I went easy on you,” she tells me.
“I thought you were going easy on me!!” I exclaim. “I saw you throw Mitch across the room when he was six-hundred pounds of lion-flesh yesterday.”
“Bugger! I thought maybe you’d forgotten about that,” she admits guiltily. “I don’t want to break you.”
“I’ll be fine,” I tell her, though I know I’m lying. “I’ll hate you more if you go easy on me and I get killed in a fight with a Shifter. Then I’ll have to haunt you.”
“Are you sure about this? You’re only human, Anna, and I don’t want to irreparably damage you,” Tara asks me seriously, glancing at Brody and Mitch who are supposed to be having their own fight in the next ring but have become distracted by the sight of scuffling females.
“She’s got to learn some time,” Hilton’s voice cuts through the room like a knife and I wonder if they can all hear the way my heart skips at the sound. “It won’t do anyone any good going easy on her only to get her killed, and risk getting one of us killed if she can’t pull her weight.”
“Aww… I didn’t know you cared,” I sneer in response to his cold tone.
“I don’t. You’re not going to be around long enough,” Tobias retorts nastily, indicating that he thinks I’ll be killed off sooner rather than later.
“Give it to me, Tara. I can take it,” I snarl, feeling my temper flare. I’ve been trying to keep it under wraps, as fighting whilst furious makes for sloppy execution. But the werewolf rubs me the wrong way, even if the sight of him and the sound of his voice do things to me that I’d rather not discuss right now.
“I’m going to regret this, I just know it,” she mutters before she gets in position again. I watch her, staying loose and waiting for her to move. So far, I’ve been doing what I can simply to keep up with her, but that’s not going to cut it anymore. If I want to survive - if I want to prove Hilton wrong - I’m going to have to learn how to fight for my life against beings faster, meaner, and far deadlier than me.
When she suddenly moves, pouncing toward me quick as the cat she is, it’s on and I do what I can to meet her blow for blow. She takes a body shot at my abs that winds me, but I push through the pain, gritting my teeth and ignoring the way I stumble back several steps. Another punch, this one aiming for my jaw, brings everything into sharp focus and suddenly things feel different.
I recall in that moment the many times Dad tried to teach me to fight. He always went a little easy on me since he didn’t want to beat up his kid, but suddenly it’s like he’s there in my mind, telling me what to do, where to block, how to counter. The sluggishness of already having been pounded several times slips away and I step back out of range of Tara’s punch, letting the momentum of the expected blow carry her sideways and further throwing her off balance when I plant a high kick on her cheek. She snarls in pain and I push on, though my foot has begun to throb, and I suspect I might’ve just broken a meta-tarsal on her granite jaw.
Before she can recover, I throw a body shot at her ribs and counter the backhand she tries to hit me with as she rights herself before she can go down. She looks surprised, but I stay focused, holding on to the sound of Dad’s voice in my head, telling me she’s about to try tackling me to the ground with all that tigress power in those thighs of hers. I step to the side just as she throws herself at me and I hear Mitch gasp in surprise to see me lasting longer in this fight than I have thus far. Tara pulls out of the failed tackle with a tight roll and spins on her haunches to stare at me with her eyes narrowed.
I can tell that she’s not going easy on me anymore, and she does not like the idea of me surviving the fight this long. She comes at me again, rushing me and her right hook collides with my cheek hard enough to rattle my teeth. I just know it’s going to be the size of a watermelon and purple later but for now I try to shake it off. Not easy, but a training fight with Dad last year was worse. I grit my teeth before spitting the blood filling my mouth into her face, stumbling sideways even as I do. It hits her right between the eyes and she yowls in disgust, swiping at her face to get the blood and spit out of her eyes while I rush at her and tackle her to the floor. She goes down on her back, the wind rushing out of her lungs in a whoosh thanks to my shoulder driving into her diaphragm.
I straddle her before she can recover and begin pounding her, each fist bruised and bloody as I hit her repeatedly. She rolls me off her easily and I regret my actions when she returns the pummeling though she hits my ribs and body rather than just my face, for which I’m thankful, no matter how much each punch hurts.
“Tara, enough! You’re gonna really hurt her,” Brody cautions, a touch of worry in his tone. I ignore him though, focusing only on Dad’s voice in my head, demanding to know what I’m going to do now that she has me on my back, how I’m going to survive this one.
With more strength than I knew I had, I hurl the tigress off me, bucking my body even as I use a grip on her neck to throw her off me before I roll quickly and get back to my feet. The tiger roar that emits from her when I kick her in the face for the second time is a little terrifying, but I push on, dodging the swipe of her claws which are suddenly gleaming in the bright lights of the training room, long and wickedly sharp where they protrude from the ends of her fingers.
“Shit!” Mitch curses and I realize that maybe I’m not the only one concerned by this appearance of claws. I block a second swipe, hissing in agony when those four-inch claws slice across my forearm, tearing the skin open and spurting blood everywhere. I narrow my eyes against the pain and ignore the boys, who are shouting at us both to stop. I also choose to ignore the way Tara’s eyes have turned golden green and the pupil has narrowed to a slit.
I body-shot her again with my uninjured arm and then I leap backward out of the way when she tries to double-slash me again. Dad’s voice in my head is telling me she’s lost control of the animal inside her, that I’ve pushed her over the edge of anger and now she’s reacting on animal instinct alone. I run at her, not trusting what she might do with any kind of distance between us and I tackle her to the floor again. This time it doesn’t work out so well for me.
I cry out in pain when she digs those claws into my back, right through my training shirt and into the skin over my shoulder blades. She somehow twists around and gets her feet up under me and I can only thank my lucky stars she hasn’t sprouted claws on her feet too as she rakes them against my stomach before those powerful leg muscles bunch and she kicks me hard. The next thing I know, I’m flying over the edge of the ring and away from the safety mats.
I try to turn mid-air, but I realize what a mistake that is when I see what I’m flying toward.
“Crap!” I curse, as I collide heavily with Tobias, my arms wrapping around his shoulders and my body slamming into his chest painfully. The only mercy is that he’s seen me coming and rather than trying to shove me away, he catches me. The momentum of Tara’s kick sends us both crashing to the floor and I’m kind of grateful that he breaks my fall since the hard concrete of the training hall floor would be unforgiving.
Everyone is shouting now, and Greg comes rushing into the room just in time to see Tara shift fully from human to eight-hundred-pound tigress, while Mitch and Brody are forced to follow suit, all of them exploding out of their clothes and both boys leaping to try and catch her as she jumps the edge of the ring hea
ding straight for me. I gasp in surprise when Hilton rolls quickly, flipping us both over so that he is on top of me. Before I can fully process what is happening, he lifts off me slightly with his arms as though he means to do a push-up. His lower half is still pinning me to the floor and I see pain and fury flash across his face; I hear the breath leave his lungs in a grunt and I feel the impact through him when Tara lands as a tiger on his back, still trying to get to me.
I stare at Tobias wide-eyed when Tara is tackled away from both of us by Brody, now fifteen hundred pounds of American grizzly. Greg is shouting at Tara to get it together and trying to reach the human part of her. Brody is fighting with her while she yowls in fury, still trying to get past him to me and I realize this is all my fault. Mitch is hanging between where I’m sprawled on the floor under Tobias, and the raging bear and tigress across the room, a second line of defense to keep her from getting to me if Brody can’t keep hold of her.
“You alright?” Tobias grunts at me, those coppery eyes of his fixed on my face, though I’m struggling to make out his expression thanks to the rapid swelling of my battered face.
“You caught me?” I answer, aware that I sound a little out of it as soon as the words leave my mouth. He frowns at me. “I thought you’d bat me away.”
“Your face is turning purple,” he informs me rather than commenting as he continues to stare down at me, pinning me to the floor in a way that I’m entirely too comfortable with. In fact, I could get used to looking at him from this angle.
Bloody hell, how hard did Tara hit me?
“I think we’re both bleeding everywhere,” I say, though it takes me a few moments to convince my brain that those are the words I should say rather than blurting out that I like the way he smells of cedar soap, spearmint, and something musky and earthy that I can’t quite put my finger on.
“Probably,” he says, and something flashes in his eyes that makes me just the tiniest bit nervous when he glances at the blood dribbling from the slash mark on my arm. I wonder vaguely if it’s pooling beneath me from the wounds stinging on my shoulders.
