“Start trying to hit very specific things,” he said. “Or try to stop right before hitting them. Basically, anything that gives you more practice in controlling the staff.”
“Okay.” She sounded doubtful but she took the staff off her back and went to find a pile in another part of the yard.
He didn’t talk for a while as he warmed up with the series of passes Zaara had shown him for that purpose. If he did them correctly, the sword hummed through the air. He had no target, not yet. It was simply a series of techniques at all different angles. They forced him to use all the muscles in his arms and core, shift his grasp more than once, and begin using footwork. By the end, he could feel his body awake and ready to go, and he’d had a blessed few minutes with a clear mind—nothing in his head except for the techniques and his muscles.
Ben started into the second set of exercises without looking at the twins. This set was more basic, but Zaara had been adamant that in swordsmanship, as in most areas of life, the basics were what one should spend the most time on.
Now, he let his thoughts run ahead. He was fairly sure that Prima meant for the twins to accompany him, but he wasn’t certain that it would be a good idea. After all, Jamie was injured. If he went into danger—as he suspected he would—the two young people would be vulnerable.
Taigan, of course, had shown that she could handle herself ably. But he had no illusions about whether her brother would be comfortable to remain back at an inn while the two of them went off to fight, as they inevitably would.
On the other hand, he thought as he stepped through for a turn and reverse attack, he couldn’t simply leave the two of them there alone. They had no money and not the first idea of where to go to keep themselves safe, and he certainly didn’t want them to end up in Heffog.
He sighed as he continued.
Taigan looked curiously at him. “Is everything okay?”
Ben nodded wordlessly. She had made short work of two entire piles of garbage and with enough violence that he could absolutely believe she had beaten a cat to death the night before.
She returned to her workout and he moved to where Jamie was seated. He settled himself on a barrel next to the boy and waited for him to speak.
“You stay away from her,” Jamie said finally.
He was struck by the very sudden impression that he had become old while he wasn’t paying attention. So much was evident in his voice that the boy wasn’t aware of. It wasn’t only dislike or the threat but the faint self-consciousness and the quaver in the tone that screamed, “I’m not ready for this.” And, of course, the uncertainty over whether this was the right thing to do at all. Ben remembered those moments and to his surprise, he felt sympathetic.
“As I recall,” he said, as lightly as he could, “she said she would stab me if I tried anything, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess she told the truth.” He nodded to where Taigan currently destroyed a broken barrel.
Jamie remained silent.
“I expect you’ll only believe me as you get to know me,” he said. “If you do, I guess. But I have no intention of hitting on her. When the two of you came into the inn last night, you were injured and there were people at the fire looking like they were ready to mug you and I felt…protective. I didn’t expect it. I’m only thirty-four. While I know that seems super-old to you, I didn’t think I was old enough to feel like I should be taking care of kids.”
The boy considered this and finally looked at him. “She’s always been falling into these states,” he told him. “The comas. I pushed our family to put her in this game. I thought at the start that it had killed her, and I couldn’t…that was the worst thing I’ve ever felt. I wanted to die. It was too much guilt for me to live with. I don’t want her to get hurt in here.”
Ben looked at him. “Is that what happened with…” He gestured at the wound.
“No.” Jamie flushed with embarrassment. “We didn’t see the animal until it was too late. It knocked me over and Taigan tried to get it off, and it went to jump and its claws came out.” He shuddered at the memory. “God, that moment—I thought it would get my heart. I was so afraid and it hurt so much. And then I couldn’t help her while she fought it.”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry I threatened you,” the youngster said finally. “That was uncalled for.”
“Eh, I think it’s better for Taigan to know her brother has her back,” he told him. “So…are we cool?”
“We’re cool. Just…you know, if you do try something, I won’t stop her from stabbing you.”
“That’s fair.” He sighed and looked at the sun. “God, I’m old. You don’t think about it until you see someone young.”
“What’s it like to be…thirty-four?”
“Thank you for not also saying ‘old,’” Ben said wryly. “And I hate to tell you, but it’s as confusing and weird as being a teenager—only for some reason, you also have to pay bills and take care of yourself. I guess that’s the big thing. You still don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Huh.” Jamie looked skeptical. He rotated his arm in its socket. “You know, it feels like this is healing.” He pulled his shirt aside to look under the bandage. “Oh, shit. Look.”
He leaned closer to the boy. What had been a deep and angry red puncture wound was now completely gone.
“What was in that salve?” Jamie asked.
“I think it was the tea,” he said. “You should probably have more. You know, to make sure.”
“New plan,” the youngster said, “if you ever hit on my sister, I will make you drink some of that tea.”
Ben guffawed.
“What are you two talking about?” Taigan asked suspiciously.
“Jamie’s wound is gone,” he responded.
“What?” She dropped the staff and ran to them to look. “Holy crap—how?”
“I have no idea,” her brother told her, “but I’m glad. And I think I will take that sparring match now,” he added and looked meaningfully at Ben.
He laughed. “I suppose I earned that. Go easy on the old man, though, will you?”
“Never,” Jamie replied cheerfully.
“This isn’t a stupid guy thing, is it?” Taigan asked suspiciously. “Because if you two start beating each other, I’ll simply leave.”
“We’re only sparring,” the boy promised her.
“And then I’ll teach you the warmups I was doing,” Ben told him.
“Cool.”
The two took their places in the field of scattered debris. Jamie was grinning as he surged forward in an attack.
Ben, however, knew a thing or two about doing foolhardy charges. He stepped into the charge and saw his opponent’s moment of indecision—whether to accelerate his strike or pull up? That indecision cost him as he tapped the boy’s ribs lightly with his sword. Jamie winced and swore under his breath but resettled into a fighting stance.
Good. He wouldn’t run when he was outmatched. In his experience, that was a critical part of surviving in the world of PIVOT.
This time, Jamie circled and waited. He tried to be careful and feel him out, which was something Ben approved of. The newly discovered old man in him tried to decide whether to give the boy the next point in order to show him that the tactic was good. Most of him, however, felt like he should pull no punches.
He didn’t have to decide, as it turned out. As he readied himself to close the gap between them, a bloodcurdling scream came from the front of the inn. The three exchanged panicked looks and all of them sprinted out of the yard and to the road.
Chapter Six
“Whoa, fuck!” Ben skidded abruptly to a stop when he saw what was there. He couldn’t stop himself from yelling, but he clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle the noise.
The beast that paced at the front of the inn was mangy and undernourished but no less terrifying for it. He couldn’t have said whether it was a wolf or a cat—or, possibly, a bear of some kind. The way it walked was ambiguous. I
ts paws were gigantic and there were huge claws on each.
Old blood—not new blood, thankfully—was visible on its teeth. Whoever it had scared was presumably in one of the houses by now as there was no sign of blood and no body.
Only an angry wolf-bear-cat paced the empty road. Ben hadn’t stifled the sound enough, though, because it looked at the three of them for a long moment as if it tried to decide whether to attack them or not. Its eyes were a sickly yellow-green.
“Oh, crap,” Taigan said. “Another one of these fucking things.”
“That’s what you fought the yesterday?” He stared at her, then at Jamie before he looked hastily at the animal.
It, of course, no longer paid attention to them. There was something insulting about that—it didn’t even think they were worth worrying about.
“Well, it was dark,” the girl said.
“Yeah, we couldn’t see it well,” Jamie agreed.
“This is scarier,” she finished.
Ben, vividly remembering the dark elf twins he had worked with at Lord Kerill’s house, decided to put an end to the ping-pong type of conversation. He waved his hand to quiet them and said firmly, “We need a strategy.”
“Operation Rock and a Pointy Place,” the twins said immediately in unison.
He stared pointedly at them.
Jamie explained. “Taigan gets its attention and hits it as much as she can with the stick while she drives it back to me so I can kill it. We’ve practiced it often.”
Questions stirred but he filed them to discuss later. “Which side should I be on?”
“You and Taigan be the rock,” the boy decided.
“Right.” He took a deep breath and looked at her. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She didn’t look enthusiastic about this. Still, she readied her grasp on her staff and focused on the beast.
Without warning, she attacked with a battle cry that made Ben want to hide. It took one startled moment before he remembered to follow her.
The monster—he had decided to call it a bear-cat—looked around with a snarl when she raced forward. It crouched, its head whipped from side to side, and it darted sideways around her and launched itself at Ben.
“Fuuuuuuck!” He went over backward and his head struck the cobblestones so hard he saw stars. When he opened his eyes muzzily, he saw a chunk of hit points floating away.
He still seemed to be alive, though, and scrambled to his feet to see Jamie warding the animal off with jabs of his sword. The boy also yelled at random—it seemed to be a family trait—and while their adversary snarled and snapped, it didn’t seem willing to get in too close.
Zaara would probably have despaired of the twins, but he had to admit that their balls-to-the-wall-crazy style had definite advantages.
Ben waited until Jamie lunged forward and he timed his strike for when the bear-cat scrambled back, away from the sword. His heavy slash connected successfully with the monster’s leg, a little above the knee, and the creature howled. The sound was terrifyingly human.
Then he remembered that, according to Taigan, these things might well be human. His stomach turned.
The monster didn’t give him time to mull over the morality of the situation. As he had been the first to draw blood, it seemed to have decided he would be the first to die. It bunched into a crouch and launched toward him.
That action was very cat-like. Maybe he would see a full characterization by the time this was over. He decided to think about that while he waited for the right moment—the monster’s legs lengthened, the paws left the ground, and its jaws opened—and he ducked and threw himself forward under the animal’s trailing feet.
He landed too hard on the cobblestones. This was yet another way in which he was getting old. Things that would have been amusing before were now terrifyingly painful.
“Rock and a pointy place!” Taigan yelled. “Ben, get up!”
“Yeah, yeah.” He pushed to his feet beside her. “I think I liked it better when I couldn’t move,” he said grumpily. “At least then I didn’t end up getting myself into these situations.”
“This way, however, is more fun for me.”
The girl snickered.
“Yes, thank you, Prima.” Ben rolled his eyes and looked at her. “Charge?”
“Chaaaarge!” was Taigan’s answer.
“They are not subtle, those two,” he said to Prima as he followed.
“You’re one to talk.”
“It takes one to know one, I guess.”
To his surprise, the two of them settled into a rhythm fairly quickly. One would dart in with a yell and a few good strikes while the other one prepared and darted in silently to stab at the bear-cat from the opposite side.
All he wanted was for this to be over, but it was difficult to get close enough for a solid blow without the risk of claws or teeth. The creature might have been human to start with, but it had good reach, sharp claws, and dangerous fangs, and it certainly knew how to move.
The thing that kept him going was that it was limping from his first strike. It could be injured. He had done it before and he could do it again.
“Ben, be ready!” Taigan called.
“On it,” he responded.
She launched herself closer and spun to put the entire force of her core behind the staff strike. It wasn’t fast enough to catch the bear-cat, but he knew that was her purpose. The monster, having to choose between moving carefully or getting out of the way of a bone-crushing blow, reacted on instinct and leapt toward him.
He saw Jamie waving his arms to indicate that he was open. Rather than striking directly at the creature’s back, he circled and drove it away from Taigan laterally. Between her strike and his shift of angle, it thought more about evading them than it did about what else might be behind it.
The boy put his whole body into his attack. The bear-cat arched and shrieked. The yellowish-green of its eyes flared and it thrashed and tore the sword from his hand. It stumbled away, clearly in its death throes but still too dangerous to reach. They watched as it sank to the cobbles and its ribs stopped moving.
The shift from monster to human wasn’t immediate. The form seemed to melt before their eyes. Patchy fur transformed into tattered clothes, the claws and fangs melted away, and the snout flattened into a human face.
Jamie’s sword, however, was still lodged in the man’s side.
Ben had recalled Taigan’s words about their attacker the night before but half of him had not believed in the transformation. The other half had not appreciated exactly how desperate and emaciated the human was. The cheekbones were gaunt and he could see the line of the ribs even under the shirt.
“Look,” Jamie said quietly and pointed at the man’s hand.
A gold ring glittered on his finger.
The oddness of it wasn’t that it was simply a gold ring on a man who would easily have been desperate enough to sell it. It was the way it glittered, the only thing about him that wasn’t dirty. Ben edged closer with the twins beside him.
None of them wanted to touch it.
When he pulled a dagger out and pressed the man’s hand down, he saw something else that frightened him.
“Is that…” The boy sounded horrified. “Is it going into his hand?”
He had to swallow bile before he could answer. “I think so.” The skin around the ring was reddened in a slight but unmistakable pattern. If he had to guess, he would say the ring had spikes on the inside that dug into his flesh.
The wearer couldn’t have taken it off without severing his finger. How it had been put on was a mystery.
Suddenly, he remembered why he was there.
“Ben?” Jamie frowned and his expression seemed confused and impatient.
“Orien’s friend,” Ben said slowly. “She was a goldsmith.”
Both twins looked at him, dumbstruck, and down at the man and his ring.
“Did she do this to him?” Taigan asked. “If she’s the one—well
, we don’t want to…” She swallowed and blew a breath out. “If this is her work, we should think about whether we want to find her.”
“Not necessarily.” He looked at the gaunt man. In Heffog, he had been attacked by people who killed for money or out of desperation. He fought them, but he hated it and wanted to target the people who pulled the strings, not those who put human shields between them and their enemies. His gaze settled on the twins. “What we should think about is what to do when we find her.”
They looked wordlessly at him, afraid and uncomfortable.
And when he saw that, he came to a decision. They could not accompany him. He merely had to find a way to tell them—and get Prima to give them a new mission.
It was something to think about.
When he stood, he was surprised to see an unexpected figure waiting on the edge of the town square. “Orien,” Ben said in surprise. “I didn’t expect you to come yourself.”
The elf came closer, his elegant features still and expressionless. He looked at the twins, who gazed at him, wide-eyed and confused, and stepped forward to crouch beside the body. Carefully, he studied the ring, the man’s features, and the clothing.
Finally, he said a single word, too low for Ben to hear, and the ring vanished. In its wake, the man’s hand blackened and curled as if it had been burned.
Orien stood, his face determinedly blank. “We should speak alone,” he told Ben.
“Of course.” He knew better than to think the twins would accept that, though. “First, let me introduce you to two travelers, Taigan and Jamie. They are on a mission of their own and helped me with this fight.” A glare over Orien’s head told the twins to stay quiet.
“I’m very pleased to meet you,” the elf said to them politely.
“Take a meal with us,” he suggested. “If you’ve come this far on your own, you have the time for it.”
Orien nodded. Whatever he was about to say in response, however, it was lost in a storm of anguished chatter from the innkeeper’s wife. She ran out the door, waving her hands at the scene in the town square.
His worry was that she knew the man they had killed. This turned out to not be the issue, however, and instead, she was incensed that Jamie had disregarded her order to rest for a week. She checked his bandage, wagged a finger at him, read him what was clearly the riot act in whatever language she spoke, and marched him into the inn by force.
Grasping The Future Page 4
