Hotbloods

by Bella Forrest

  “What do we do once we get there?”

  “We’ll want to find you something to eat, maybe somewhere to get warm. We can take things as they come and see how it’s going. But before we do any of that, we’ve got some preparations we need to see to first.”

  “Like what?”

  “We’ve got a whole cache of weapons here that you’ve probably never encountered before.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to let me use them?”

  “I’m not saying that—but if the situation comes up, I think it’d be good if you were at least a little familiar with them.”

  I followed him over to the back corner, where a large metal toolbox sat, the sort a construction worker might have permanently installed in the back of a pickup truck. Navan opened the lid and stood there, staring down at its contents. I stood next to him and peered inside.

  There wasn’t much that I hadn’t seen before, or at least some variation of it. There were boxes of bullets, two of the silver long-barreled pistols, something that looked like an assault rifle, a sword, and a stack of knives.

  “What are these?” I asked, pointing to the knives. They weren’t regular-looking knives, like the kind you’d see in a kitchen—they were more like daggers, long pointed triangles with a slender handle and a hollow ring at the end.

  “Those are throwing knives,” Navan said. “They’re very sharp, and you should stay away from them.”

  “But you said you were going to show me how to use some of the weapons.” I reached out and ran my fingertips along the handle of one of the knives. There was something about it that seemed to be calling to me. “I want to try this.” Navan opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, but then stopped. “I’ll just ignore that look on your face,” I said.

  His eyebrows shot up. “What look?”

  “That look that says you don’t think I have any clue what I’m doing, and that I’ll probably end up hurting someone if I try to use this.” I picked up the knife I’d just been touching. “Do you know how to use these?”

  “I do,” he said. “And that’s because it’s something that I’ve practiced. It’s not something that you’ll instinctively know how to use.” He held his hands up. “I’m not trying to discourage you. Well, maybe a little. I was thinking you might try something more like . . .” He looked at the weapons laid out in front of us. I waited, curious to hear what he thought I might be drawn to, but a second passed, then another, and it became clear that he didn’t know what to say.

  “I get it,” I said. “You think I can’t do this, or that because I’m a girl or something I shouldn’t be handling a weapon. Well, let me try this thing out.” The knife had a nice weight in my hand. It felt balanced, like this was just the thing I should’ve picked up. I might’ve been nervous to hold the gun, or that samurai-looking sword, but for whatever reason, the knife just felt right.

  “Easy there,” Navan said, reaching down into the box. He handed me the rest of the knives and pulled out the rifles and the sword. “Let’s go outside. These sorts of things aren’t meant for close quarters.”

  Outside, the sun was just starting to rise, a glowing orange illuminating the pale blue sky. We crunched across the hard snow, heading toward a copse of fir trees. I followed Navan beyond the trees, into a clearing.

  “While I doubt anyone’s going to randomly stumble upon us out here,” he said, “it’s better that we’re a little hidden from view. Now, you have those knives?”

  “I do.”

  “Why don’t you put them down over here. We’ll get to them in a minute. I want to first show you some self-defense moves. Hopefully, you won’t have to use them. But it will give me slightly better peace of mind if you know a couple basic things.”

  “Sure,” I said, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to end up grappling with a shifter—the thought of having to touch one of those things made my skin crawl.

  “On Vysanthe, we have a form of martial arts called Aksavdo. The closest thing you have here would probably be Krav Maga. Aksavdo is a military self-defense system, and everyone on Vysanthe is expected to master it by the time they’re eighteen.”

  “Really?” I said. “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Well,” Navan said, something of a chagrinned look on his face. “All the boys are, anyway.”

  “That sounds a little less cool.”

  “But plenty of girls on Vysanthe know Aksavdo. And I’m just going to show you some blocks and how to break certain holds. Again, I really hope that we’re not in the situation where you have to use it, but . . . just in case. Now, the problem with fighting a shapeshifter is they can change shape. When you’re fighting, you want to attack the most vulnerable areas, and if your opponent is constantly changing shape, that can certainly be a challenge. So that’s one of the main things when fighting a shifter—you must stay alert at all times. The eyes, throat, nose, groin . . . Those are the spots you want to go for. If the shifter is, say, in wolf form, and you manage to bash it on the nose, it’s probably going to be stunned and change back to its regular form, at which point it will be a lot more vulnerable. You saw that one in the alleyway—they’re ugly creatures, and they don’t have much in the way of natural defenses, except for their teeth. So I’m going to come up behind you—” Navan stepped behind me, his body pressed up against mine, his arm going around my neck. “Let’s just say you get caught like this. How would you escape?”

  I strained forward, feeling his arm tighten against my neck. Then I tried dropping my legs out from under me, but my head couldn’t slide out from his grasp.

  “No,” Navan said. “You’re not going anywhere, and that’s just giving me more time to lock the hold in. Grab my arm.”

  I reached up and put both my hands on his forearm. “Good,” he said. “Now pull on my arm as hard as you can—you want to get some space between my arm and your neck.” I squeezed with both hands and gave his arm a jerk. “The moment you feel the pressure let up a little, turn your head so your chin is down—yeah, just like that. Now I can’t get the hold back in place even if you let go of my arm. And now, move this leg back behind me, like that, and sit down.”

  “Sit down?” I asked, feeling as if we were playing some sort of bizarre version of Twister. I was trying to focus and do what he said, but the very fact that we were this close and his arms were around me was making it extremely difficult to concentrate.

  “Sit right on down,” he said. “Just drop your weight.”

  I did so, and he toppled below me, and I landed on him with a thud. “Good,” he said. “And at this point, you can use your elbows, your knees, your feet, and you want to look for whatever vulnerable spot you can reach.”

  I twisted around to look at him, raising my elbow as I did so, gently touching his cheek with it.

  “Like that?”

  “Very good.”

  I knew I was supposed to hop up so he could show me another move, but sitting there with him like that felt . . . truly wonderful. Like it was exactly the thing I was supposed to be doing, and in that moment, it was easy enough to forget that we were out in the middle of nowhere, doing self-defense training because we were in the middle of a potentially dangerous mission to locate shapeshifters. The cold air seemed to crackle between us and we were close enough to kiss. His gaze went to my lips, and my whole body tingled as I could have sworn I saw a flicker of longing in his eyes, but then he shook his head and was pushing me off of him, leaving me to wonder if I had just imagined it.

  “All right,” he said gruffly, clearing his throat. “That was pretty good, but let’s try it a little faster now. Real time.”

  “Right,” I murmured, jumping up and hoping I wasn’t blushing too badly.

  We probably spent close to an hour working on different self-defense skills, and I was winded and a little sore when Navan said we could move on to the weapons. But I felt good, as though I had really learned something new, something that if I had to, I’d be able to remember
and put to good use.

  “So you seemed drawn to the throwing knives,” Navan said. “Why don’t we start with those.” He cast a gaze around and then pointed at one of the trees that had a swatch of bark missing, exposing the pale, smooth wood underneath. It was about twenty feet away. “Think you can hit that spot on the tree?”

  “I’ll try.”

  I’d never thrown a knife before, but there was something about it that seemed familiar. I squared my stance and looked at the spot on the tree, then lifted my arm and threw the knife. It rotated once and then stuck into the tree, a few inches above the spot where there was no bark.

  Navan whistled. “Okay,” he said, “so clearly you’ve been keeping your identity as a professional knife thrower a secret from me.” He went over to the tree and retrieved the blade. “Your aim was only a little off, but for a first try, that was damn impressive. Try it again.”

  I took the knife from him and readjusted my stance, then aimed, a little bit lower this time, and threw the knife. It stuck right in the middle of the spot without the bark.

  “All right, then,” Navan said. “I don’t think we’ll have to spend too much time on this part.”

  “I swear I’ve never done this before, but it just feels . . . like it’s familiar or something.”

  “You have a natural affinity for it. Let’s try a couple of the other weapons.”

  He set up a few log targets and had me shoot one of the pistols, from both a standing position and lying down. My aim was not as accurate, though I did manage to hit the target several times. There was power in the gun, but I liked the throwing knives.

  “I feel less worried after seeing you with those,” he said.

  I smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “You should. You’ve got some real skill. It’s too bad we don’t have more time to practice.”

  We made our way back to the ship. “Now,” Navan said, “my hope is that you’re going to stay in the ship. In fact, I’m almost tempted to forbid you to get out of the ship.”

  “Almost being the operative word there,” I said. “Because you know that even if you were to do that, I probably wouldn’t listen; if it looks like you need help, I’m going to be there to help you. What was the point in doing all this training just now if I have to stay in the ship the whole time?”

  “The training was more for my peace of mind,” he said. “Like I told you, it’s going to be easier for me to focus on what I have to do if I’m not worrying about you. I mean, I’ll still be worried about you, but a little less so knowing that you’ve got those knives.”

  My face flushed and I tried to hide my smile. He seemed to have no qualms expressing how worried he was about me, which I found both endearing and a little irritating. I sure as hell didn’t want to be some damsel in distress, though my actions last night had certainly portrayed me as exactly that. It made my heart beat a little faster thinking that he cared about me, because after all that we had been through, I realized I cared about him, too. Really cared about him. The feelings had shifted in the time since we’d left Texas. It was more than just thinking he was handsome—it was something deeper than that, something I couldn’t easily describe. I hadn’t forgotten that almost gravitational pull I’d felt when I first looked into his eyes, nor that sensation of us being the only two people in the world.

  Part of me wanted to say screw subtlety and voice my thoughts to him, but I didn’t, because maybe he didn’t feel the same way. Maybe he was just concerned about me in the same way that he’d be concerned about a little sister or something—and in a way, after everything he’d told me about Naya, that would make sense. If anything, I wanted to show Navan that I could be useful, that I could take care of myself, that I could play an important role in what we were about to do.

  When we got back to the ship, he gave me the invisibility suit. “You need to put this on under your clothes,” he said. “I’ll just step outside while you do that.”

  After he left, I pulled my shirt off but then stopped. Was I supposed to take my bra and underwear off, too? Probably—they were clothes, after all. I stripped down and quickly slipped the suit on, then put my clothes on over it. The suit fit snugly, and once my clothes were back on, I barely even noticed it—except for the small button on the sleeve.

  I opened the door and stuck my head out. Navan glanced at me, raising a brow. “You decent?”

  “Yeah.” He hopped back into the ship and looked me up and down. “Okay. To activate the suit, you just press the button on your sleeve.”

  I did as he said. “I can still see myself,” I replied, looking down at my legs.

  “But I can’t see you.” Navan nodded. “And the shifters won’t be able to see you, even if they’re invisible themselves. The other good thing about a suit like this is that it significantly blunts the ability of something—like a lycan or a shifter—to detect you. Only a very evolved individual will be able to sense you. And I doubt we’ll be encountering many of those.”

  “And do I just press the button again to deactivate it?”

  “Yes. You’ve got to hold it down for a couple seconds.”

  I did as he said, and the air seemed to shimmer around me. Navan looked right at me and smiled. “We’ve got a few more things to do and then I think we’ll be ready to go.”

  “What’s that?”

  “For starters, I’ve got some darts that I need to coat with this drug called dakhye.”

  “What does that do?”

  “It’ll incapacitate any shifter we happen to come across. It will also prevent it from being able to change into a different form.”

  “That would probably be helpful,” I said.

  “We could put some on the blades of those throwing knives. That way, even if it wasn’t a fatal strike, it would still knock the thing out.” He grinned. “Not that I don’t think you could hit the bull’s eye every time after what I saw today. And then we’ve got to teach you how to navigate this ship.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Are you thinking if you show me how to fly this thing that I’ll be so enamored I won’t want to get off?”

  “Ah, you’ve seen right through me. Us coldboods and our ulterior motives,” Navan said wryly. “Flying this thing is fairly straightforward, though.”

  “Yeah? That’s a little surprising.”

  “Come on, I’ll show you now, then I’ll do the darts.”

  We went up to the front of the ship. Navan had me sit down in the driver’s seat while he sat next to me. There was a steering wheel, similar to that of a car but slightly bigger, maybe more like what you’d see on a boat. There was also a myriad of buttons and levers, as well as a gear shift. I moved my feet around on the floor and felt two pedals.

  “I feel the pedals,” I said.

  “Right’s for go, left’s your brake.”

  “Okay. And do I have to shift gears?”

  Navan shook his head. “You don’t need to shift gears on this. The gear shift actually controls your altitude. Rev up to go higher, rev back to go lower. The pedals are for speed. Just like a car or a bike, you jam it too quickly, the ride’s going to be jerky. First things first, though—you’ve got to turn it on. It’s that button right there.” He pointed to a circular button, opaque turquoise in color, to the right of the steering wheel. “Go ahead and press that.”

  I did so, and the ship hummed to life the second my fingertips put pressure on the button.

  “If you want to hover, you’re going to rev it forward just a little. Go ahead and try.”

  I moved the gear shift forward, surprised at how fluid it was. The ship responded instantaneously, lifting a few feet off the ground. A smile spread across my face. “This is so cool,” I said.

  “The steering wheel’s pretty self-explanatory, though you do have to be careful when you make turns at high speed,” Navan continued. “Obviously, you wouldn’t sustain the same sort of damage you would if you rolled an automobile, but there’s still a chance you
could hurt yourself or the ship if you try to turn too quickly while you’re in the air. The only other button you really need to concern yourself with now is here.” He tapped his fingers next to an opaque green button, which was maybe six inches from the turquoise button. “This activates hyper-speed and should only be used if you need to escape. Why don’t you cruise around a little and get the feel for it?”

  He didn’t need to ask twice. I gripped the gear shift and moved it forward so the ship lifted higher, and I pressed my foot down on the left pedal and the ship accelerated. I had an almost 180-degree view. I turned the steering wheel just a bit, and the ship glided to the left. When I pressed down a little harder on the accelerator, the ship responded beautifully.

  “You’re a natural,” Navan said. He leaned toward me, pointing. “Why don’t you try and fly between those two trees right there.”

  The trees were two tall evergreens, and they were spaced far enough apart that I knew I’d be able to get the ship through, but I still felt a wave of nervousness as we approached. I had to maneuver around a few smaller trees in order to slip through the gap, but I did it, and when Navan pointed to another group of trees and told me to try to navigate up and over them, I did it with ease, a smile on my face the whole time.

  When we brought the ship back, Navan had a smile on his face, too. “Well,” he said, “I don’t have to worry about you flying this ship, that’s for sure.”

  And as he smiled at me, I felt that surge in my heart rate again, and I suddenly had the urge to reach over and pull him to me and discover what his lips felt like against mine. But I fought to regain control over my thoughts. To say that now wasn’t the right time would be an understatement—even if I could find the courage to make a move like that.

  We had to finish getting ready so we could leave for the village.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The village was small and quaint, with a bakery, a market, a few shops, a post office, and a tavern, along with two churches, one at either end of town. Navan left me and the ship with a good vantage point of the town; we were on a small hillside that overlooked the area, though we were out of sight behind a copse of trees, just in case any of the villagers glanced our way.