My hands dropped down. “I’m getting the feel for it,” I said through gritted teeth. “And I don’t need you to tell me what to do. Isn’t that Mr. Connor’s job?”
Brian rolled his eyes. “Are you just going to get the feel for it when a demon attacks you?”
“Just shut up.”
He turned and stared at me. I could see the disgust in his eyes, though I was completely baffled by it. “Everyone thinks you’re just so damn special, and you’re not. You’re no different than anyone else.”
“I never claimed I was.” I’d never once said I was special. Hell, I’d never even thought it. If anything, I’d been the one to say I wasn’t special, that I was just me, Jade Hall, your normal, everyday girl. Well, as normal as a girl could be living at a facility that trained demon hunters.
“Maybe that’s the problem, then.”
“What? Huh? How does that make any sense?!”
He didn’t say anything else. At all. But he stared at me with that same disappointed slash disgusted look that had my temper soaring. When my fingers curled into tight, almost painful fists, and I realized he was the one I wanted to use them on, I spun around and gave the CM an uppercut that had my hand screaming in agony and the CM’s head flying in the air. It bounced off the wall and flew toward a couple of kids beside us. They had to duck out of the way to avoid it.
The neck of the CM sparked and smoke drifted out. I dropped my hands and couldn’t decide if I wanted to laugh, cry, or scream.
I caught a look from Brian but I had no idea what it meant and I really didn’t care. I’d just broken a brand new CM within an hour of class.
Mr. Connor ran over. He eyed the mannequin, then me and Brian, and then the manikin again. His mouth parted but no sound came out.
“She just kicked its ass!” someone shouted.
I just stared ahead, my eyes on the CM, trying to decide what I was going to say or do. Running away sounded like a very, very good idea. And so did crying and laughing and screaming, because I hadn’t decided on which to do yet.
Linc and Tasha came over. Linc glanced at me with a mixture of amusement and awe. “Should’ve known.”
I didn’t have the heart to glare.
Mr. Connor cleared his throat as the rest of the class surrounded us. “Well, obviously this one was defective,” he said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Practice with your partners for the remainder of class. I want to have the rest of the CMs checked out before anyone else uses them.” When no one moved, Mr. Connor gave them all stern looks. “Now would be good.”
“I’m sorry,” I blabbed as soon as the rest of the class was out of earshot. “I didn’t mean to hit it so hard.”
“It’s fine, Jade. As strong as I’m sure you are, I think it’s a safe bet you didn’t actually knock its head off. They’re made to take a beating. It was just defective—it happens.” He spared the CM another look, shook his head. “Looks like one of those P3s might be getting their wish.” He lowered his gaze to my hands again. “Go see Doc.”
“I’m fine—”
“I don’t need you bleeding all over the classroom. Mr. West, walk her down to Doc’s.”
I decided against arguing, since I wasn’t sure I could do it without whining. In fact, I was sure I couldn’t. Not only did I have to go see Doc (who I loved but hated at the same time), but I had to walk down with Brian, the indirect cause of my blood shed and someone I was beginning to dislike more and more.
“This is your fault,” I hissed, casting him a dirty glare as we walked out of the room. “If you hadn’t antagonized me, this wouldn’t have happened!”
“You broke a combat manikin, big deal.”
“That thing probably cost more than everything I own five times over. And I wouldn’t have broken it if you weren’t such a jerk!”
“It was defective. It would have broken just as easily if I’d hit it.”
I wanted to say something snarky, like, it wouldn’t have broken at all if I’d hit you instead, but I decided it probably wasn’t best to antagonize him, especially after I yelled at him for all but doing the same thing. At The Pond, I probably would have said something like that, and then I would’ve had to put actions to words because the girls would’ve seen it as a challenge. I didn’t think that’d be a problem with him, but who knew?
There was probably a reason why he hadn’t been in any of our classes last Phase. For all I knew, it was because of this crap right now. Maybe he was a troublemaker. Maybe he had anger issues.
A small voice in the back of my head whispered about me being the one with the issues, but I ignored it because I didn’t have anger issues. I had Brian issues.
“Whatever,” ended up being my great retort.
We rode the elevator down in silence, though the tension was insanely loud. My blood was boiling, my nerves were shot, and everything inside me was screaming to hit him. I closed my eyes and chanted Don’t hit Brian in my head over and over again so that, by the time we reached the second floor, I still wanted to hit him, just not as badly.
I stepped out before him, stormed over to Doc’s door, and knocked. Apparently, I didn’t fool my subconscious into thinking I didn’t want to hit him as hard, because when I knocked, I pictured the door as Brian’s face and knocked hard enough to leave my knuckles stinging. And I left bloody prints, I realized, quickly trying to wipe them away before Doc answered and—
The door opened and Doc raised her eyebrows. “What are you doing?” she asked when I almost fell on her.
“Nothing. Sorry.” I walked in before she could say anything else and hoped she followed without paying any attention to the door, which pretty much guaranteed she would.
And she did, but only because Brian The Jerk pointed it out to her. She’d had the damn thing almost shut before he’d lifted his head toward it.
Doc eyed the door, then Brian, and finally me. “What happened?”
“It was just an accident.” I held up my hands for inspection.
“She lost her temper.”
My gaze darted to Brian who was leaning against the wall near the door. “I didn’t lose my temper. I lost my patience. Because of you. You walked me down. Now you can go far, far away.”
He shrugged a shoulder, turned, and left.
“Freaking jerk,” I muttered under my breath.
Wasn’t it bad enough that I had Felecia’s old gang on my case, but now I had to add him to my list of enemies? And if he wasn’t an enemy, then that just made it even worse. Mostly everyone in Felecia’s old gang was a P3 (except the P1 girl), so it was easy to avoid them. I couldn’t avoid Brian, not unless I wanted to A) skip my class, or B) ask Mr. Connor to switch partners. As much as I liked the idea of option B, I didn’t want to do it because then he’d know that I’d asked. And there was no way I was skipping class.
Doc said something, but all I heard was “smoke” and my name.
“What?” I said, pulling my gaze away from the door and up to her face.
“I said you’re thinking so hard that your brain is starting to smoke.”
I scoffed.
“Your knuckles look broken, Jade. Tell me what happened.”
I looked down at them, shrugged. “They’re not broken,” I said, ignoring her other question because if I answered, then I probably would have smoke coming from some part of me.
“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow. “And how do you know that?”
“Because they’re my knuckles and I said so. That’s how.”
Doc stepped back and crossed her arms over her chest. “What has you so irritable? This isn’t like you.”
I struggled not to glare at Doc. My issues weren’t with her, but I was beyond annoyed at everything, and right now, she was only adding to it. “Just fix me up so I can get back to class.” I refused to meet her eyes, because I knew if I looked at her face, there’d be hurt on it, and I didn’t want to see it.
“Like I said, I think your knuckles are broken, and if they
are, you aren’t going back to class.” Her tone was hard.
“They’re not, and if they are, they’ll heal quickly.”
“I guess we’re about to find out. Let’s go.”
I figured she’d take me down to the first floor, to one of the med rooms for an x-ray or something, but instead she led me across the hall to the Terminator Tube room. “What are we going here for? Isn’t this thing for like, whole body scans? Seems wasteful to put me in for a stupid hand scan.”
“If your hand is broken, then this is the perfect time to use it. Your rapid healing is obviously due to the demon DNA, so this will, hopefully, give us the rate of your healing, and it could help the scientists.”
I didn’t reply and she didn’t say anything else, either. She handed me that stupid gown to change into and when I was done, had me step into the tube. At least she didn’t hook up any of the electrodes this time.
I stood quietly, fighting against the urge to fidget because I wanted to move. Not out of the scanner necessarily, just…move. Do something. Anything.
The beams of light moved and I had to fight even harder to hold still, otherwise I was sure she’d make me do this all over again.
“Your knuckles have hairline fractures,” Doc said, looking up from the console as the scanner beams moved past my hands and down the rest of the body. “Just like I—” She broke off and frowned as the beams went back up. “Hold on.” She typed something on the console and the beams moved again, this time hovering over my hands for a solid minute.
Doc turned off the scanner and when the glass panels slid away, motioned me to come over. “Watch,” she instructed once I was standing beside her. She pressed another button and a holographic image of my body appeared above the console.
“I don’t see anything broken.”
“This is from your original scan,” she explained, “and this is the one from today. It’s going to replay like a video, so you’ll see exactly what I saw as it scanned.”
I was sure there was some importance to her words, but I didn’t understand what it was. “Am I broken or not? I just want to get back to class.”
“You really are in a mood, aren’t you? Have some patience, Jade.”
A new image appeared and, as with the real scan, I could see where the beam of lights hit. When it reached my hands, she paused the holograph-video thing and pointed. “These are the fractures,” she said, pointing to dark lines over my knuckles.
“Fine. You were right.” I shrugged. “Like I said, they’ll heal.”
“Just keep watching.”
As the image played again, the little lines became smaller, and then they got smaller and smaller until they were nothing but barely-visible specs.
Doc turned off the holograph image. “I knew you healed quickly, but that’s incredible, Jade.”
“So I can go back to class now?”
“You can,” she said, speaking slowly.
As soon as the words left her mouth, I started for the exit.
“But you’ll have to watch from the sidelines if you do,” she added. I stopped and turned to face her. “Even if they’re not broken now, they were, just minutes ago. They need time to fully heal, Jade. I’ll run the scan again on Friday and see what it looks like. But until then, no physical training—and that includes Weapons class.”
“Well, that’s just great.” When she looked ready to say something else, I shook my head and stormed away before she could.
I made my way back to the fifth floor. Standing outside the door, I debated just going back to my room instead. The last thing I wanted to do was sit around and do nothing.
My knuckles were fine. They didn’t even hurt anymore, and a quick glance at them revealed they were completely healed. There wasn’t even a sign they’d been busted or cracked or anything.
Whatever. I’m not going to just sit around and do nothing, I thought to myself and went back inside.
Mr. Connor came over to me. “Nothing broken?”
“Nope.”
It wasn’t a lie, because nothing was broken now, but I knew it was still wrong and probably a bad, bad idea. Not because I was hurt (I wasn’t), but because if Doc knew I was going to keep participating, she’d throw a huge fit over it. But right then, I didn’t care. I had to do something. Sitting in my room, or even reading, just wasn’t going to cut it. I’d joined the CGE to train and I wasn’t taking a break from that, even for only a few days.
Not today. Not this month.
CHAPTER 06
My irritable mood lasted the rest of the week. Not just lasted, but got immensely worse. I spent most of my classes like a lit fuse, just waiting to explode. I was pretty sure it was just me overreacting and not everyone else trying to drive me insane (like the chick beside me in Demonology who kept kicking her desk leg), but even with that knowledge, I couldn’t keep calm.
I wasn’t sleeping, I was barely eating, and I’d spent pretty much every waking hour avoiding everyone, including Linc, which just made me feel ten times worse. I was on time for my classes, but I left as soon as they were over and didn’t give anyone a chance to talk to me. If I wasn’t in my room, I was in the gym using the punching bag, or on the track running laps. It was ironic that two of the things I hated most were the two things I had to do to keep from going insane.
The closer Friday got, the worse my temper got. Everyone noticed, I was sure. How could they not when I was snapping at people or ignoring them altogether? Linc knew something was wrong before anyone else, and he’d tried talking to me after Combat class Tuesday, but I’d damn near bitten his head off, so he’d just walked away and left me alone.
In a way, I’d been glad, because it made one less person to worry about, one less piece of stress I had to deal with. In another, it made me really mad, because I wanted him to keep trying. And still, in another completely irrational and mental way, it made me really, really sad. I wanted to talk (or scream or yell), but I didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything.
And nothing you think makes any kind of sense, I thought with a sigh, slowing down for my last lap on the track.
I’d seen Linc staring at me sometimes, but we hadn’t really talked in days. He’d been outside at the track a few of the times I’d been running, either alone or with Tasha. I had a sneaky feeling he was trying to keep an eye on me without being too conspicuous about it, but he failed. Miserably.
Then again, knowing him, he probably hadn’t tried being inconspicuous at all.
I walked half the length of the track, then made my way to the bleachers for some water.
“Ready?”
My eyes widened as I looked up and found Linc walking toward me. “What are you doing here?”
He made a face at my tone (which had probably sounded meaner than I actually meant) and then just shrugged. “It’s Friday. We have our appointment with Doc.”
“Oh. Right.” I’d almost forgotten about it. “She’ll probably just take us separately,” I said, picking up my gym bag and tossing the strap over my shoulder.
I glanced at Linc as we walked back to the North Tower. He had this expression on his face, like he wanted to say or ask something but couldn’t figure out how, so I braced myself for it, and for the fight that would probably come because of it.
But he never said anything. Instead, we silently made our way to the second floor and the Terminator Tube room, where Linc knocked on the door. Doc answered a second later and motioned us inside. “Come on,” she said, walking away from us briskly.
I followed in behind.
Wasting no time, Doc handed him the plasticy-silk gown and he marched off to the changing room.
Doc gave me a sheepish smile, like she expected me to say something. Normally, I probably would have, but today I just didn’t care. “You okay, Jade? You’re awfully quiet.”
“I’m fine,” I said for what felt like the umpteenth million time in a week.
Doc gave me a tight nod as Linc came out of the changing room. She led
him to the Terminator Tube and hooked him up to all the electrodes. With all the wires hanging everywhere and the flash of the lights, he looked as alien-like as I’d felt the first time. Well, he didn’t look like an alien so much, maybe, but he looked like he was hooked up to a big alien machine.
Looking up as Doc connected the IV thing, I studied Linc. His blue eyes met mine and there was a ghost of a smile on his face. I tried to return it but knew I’d failed when he frowned and looked away.
It shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. And I had no one to blame but myself. I was the one who’d basically ignored him for the last week, so I couldn’t be mad that he wasn’t exactly thrilled with me now, could I?
No, but I still am, a small voice whispered. I shoved my hands into my pockets and sighed as I started to pace a short line between the door and the computer console, careful to keep my gaze away from Linc and Doc.
It seemed like only a minute had gone by before I heard Doc call my name. My head snapped up in time to see her toss me the gown I had to wear. Without a word, I turned away and went to change.
As soon as I was hooked up to the TT, Linc and Doc walked back to the console. She turned on the holographic imaging thing and let Linc watch as it scanned my body. I decided it was more than slightly weird that he was seeing my innards. Actually, it was more than weird. “Shouldn’t you at least ask me before showing my insides to people?” I snapped.
“I don’t need your permission to show him his scan,” Doc said, her tone admonishing.
From here, I couldn’t really tell whose body it’d been, because it was the muscle-y image (at least that’s what I thought it was since everything was pink and white).
Linc looked up at me with a hurt, I-can’t-believe-you-said-that look, and then he shook his head.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
Linc walked away from the console and paced, like I’d done moments before. He didn’t glance at me or say anything. He just wore this odd expression I hadn’t really seen before that left my stomach in knots.
After the first round of the scan, Doc looked up. “Your knuckles are showing newly healed fractures,” she said, sounding surprised. “They were nearly completely healed before you left Tuesday. Considering the rate of your healing, they should have been fine by now.”
Breed of Envy (The Breed Chronicles, #02) Page 8
