by Jim Butcher
“Hey!” Nicole saw me standing next to my bike, ready for a fight, and tensed herself. She had my duffel in one hand, and she held it ready to swing. “Are you okay?”
Damn. I would have preferred a pissed-off Steve. Him, at least, I could maul without feeling bad about it.
“Fine,” I said, relaxing my stance. I couldn’t sense the demon anymore. “Don’t worry—that won’t happen again. I’m dropping my membership.”
“Are you kidding?” Nicole crossed her arms. “That was badass. Like, the attitude more than the throw. Your technique could use some work.”
“Some work, huh?” My world-class martial-artist sensei wouldn’t have liked that feedback at all, but skills get rusty with disuse. “Who’s gonna teach me? You?”
“Yes.” She handed over my duffel. “I’m a purple belt in BJJ.”
“What’s that?” I rummaged in my bag for my keys. “Sounds like a sex thing.”
That made her smile. “Brazilian jujitsu,” she said. “I’ve also got like a four-oh amateur record. I’m training to go pro. Nicole Vergaro. Look me up.”
“Nice.” I’d fought superstrong bruisers, apocalypse robots, and, like, a thousand ninja. But she was gorgeous. “Sure you wanna train me? I did just put another member in the hospital.”
“You mean Steve? He’s my ex, not a member.” Nicole shrugged. “Also? Fuck that guy.”
Gorgeous and awesome and straight. Oh, well.
“Thanks, but no, thanks.” I fit the key into the ignition and turned the engine over. “I’m not great at taking direction and I don’t play well with others. Laters—”
She stepped in front of my bike. “Hire me as your trainer,” Nicole said. “We’ll fix that throw and work on your punches.”
“Really?”
Nicole put her hand over mine on the throttle. “Really.”
She was a hard woman to turn down. And it’d be a chance to watch for that demon.
“Vivienne Cain,” I said, knowing I would regret this. “Call me V.”
A week later, as a fist connected with my face, I realized I loved the shit out of this.
“Keep your hands up,” Nicole reminded me for the twentieth time. She’d started giving me a reminder tap after the eighth slipup, so I’d grown accustomed to the routine by now. Not that it made the little pats sting less.
“Show me that combination. Launch from the face and pull right back to defend.”
I nodded, too low on breath to verbalize. My booze-heavy diet didn’t exactly make for much stamina. I hit her with a flurry that ended with left hook off the jab, a sucker punch that had taken down many an unsuspecting boxer. She blocked it easily and nodded.
“Good,” she said. “Again.”
On this, our third session, we’d skipped bag work and gone straight to sparring in the half-open ring. My fundamentals had deteriorated over the past ten years, but I’d always been a quick study. We squared off, and I focused on her white gloves with the red wraps beneath.
I’d felt the demon’s presence off and on during the week, but it hadn’t yet shown itself. Sure I was here to confront it, but increasingly I had to admit I really liked Nicole beating me up.
She hit me on the cheek again. “Come on, hands up.”
I held up my hands like claws, and she nodded in approval. That first day, she’d called my striking stance Muay Thai, which meant nothing to me but seemed to be a compliment.
“You need to start eating right,” she said. “Lots of veggies. Avoid meat and dairy.”
“What are you, vegan?” I went at her gloves.
“As a matter of fact”—she deflected my combination—“I am.”
“How do you get your protein?”
She rolled her eyes. Like she’d never heard that one before.
We fell into the rhythm of the fight. I’d launch a combination, slapping her training pads hard enough to bruise, staying on the balls of my feet and hitting with the hips rather than the arms. My sensei had always told me that if I could hit with my butt, no one stood a chance. I got in a few good ones, and the thick shin pads made reassuring crunches against Nicole’s legs.
As I hit her, I remembered sparring with Tony, under the watchful eye of his stepfather, Hugo, the second Raven. We were kids again, flirting as much as punching, and his burning eyes promised me this wouldn’t end on the mat. I hadn’t thought about that moment for ten years: not since New York, with Supergroup Tower shaking around us, when Tony put on his mentor’s armor to fight me and I tore his eye out for his trouble. And now he wanted to kill me.
Antonio DeSantes. Damn.
“Your striking is decent,” Nicole said. “Let’s see what you’ve got for grappling.”
I shivered and pushed the memory away. “No problem.”
Next thing I knew, I hit the mat with a sound like a gunshot.
“Your judo is insufficient.” Nicole clapped her gloves together. “On your feet.”
I climbed back up and glanced around woozily. Pretty much everyone in the gym had stopped what they were doing to watch the girl fight. Not that I blamed them: I was having a pretty good time watching Nicole pound the snot out of me, too.
“You’ve gotta relax,” Nicole said, a refrain that she’d repeated a dozen times since day one. “You know, loosen up your shoulders. You’re gonna hurt yourself.”
“Hard night.” Partly true, but not the reason I was tense. The flashback wasn’t doing me any favors, and the perky high coming off Nicole exacerbated the crushing hangover. I didn’t want a repeat rib-breaking incident, so I didn’t drink before our sessions, making the world raw and jumpy. Shoulda known better than to fight (mostly) sober. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.
“Stop dancing around and come at me,” Nicole said. “I won’t hurt you. Much.”
“That’s reassuring.”
We’d drawn a pretty big crowd at this point, blurry in my peripheral vision and thunderous to my empathic sense. Being sober, I got dizzy from the collective emotional swarm of that many people gathered in one place. I tasted excitement and more than a little unrequited lust. And I won’t say we didn’t deserve it—at least Nicole. She was in her element, a warrior woman as much as any I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of warrior women.
I went for her legs, and she snaked around with incredible grace to cling to my back. Her legs wrapped around my waist and her ankles locked in front of my stomach.
“Now you’re in a pretty tight situation here,” she said, calm while I grunted and cursed. “You’ve got to get around to a guard. Do your best.”
On my hands and knees, I gave her a piggyback ride around the ring, trying to twist out of the hold, but every time she corrected me with a tap on the ear. Finally, I shoved her back against the cage, which gave me leverage to twist around, putting us front to front. I lay back as she straddled me, arms crossed over her chest. She carried herself gracefully, as if we were dancing rather than wrestling. It was beautiful and more than a little bit sexy.
God, V, I thought. Grow the fuck up and stop crushing on your trainer.
“Seriously?” Calmly, Nicole swatted me on the side of the head, and I snapped out of it. Tony had never done anything like that. “Hands up.”
I put my hands up to ward off more blows and frowned sourly. “What now?”
“Now you turn things around,” she said. “Try one of the techniques I showed you. The goal is to get out—so you can go back to striking—or get me in a lock.” Her eyes sparkled with challenge. “Make me submit.”
Shit.
It had been too long since I’d done anything like this. I got her leg once and tried to pull it, but she slipped out and left me flat on my stomach, panting, while she held on to my back.
“You weren’t kidding about being bad at this,” she said. “Here. Let’s switch up, and I’ll show you some thing
s to try.” She lay down on her back. “Put your legs around me.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. We got into the same straddling position as before, only this time she was on guard, and I was holding on to her.
“If your guard is good, you’ve got the advantage.” She held up her arms to demonstrate proper form. She grabbed my wrists and locked my arms. “Okay, what would you do from here?”
“Head butt,” I said.
She smiled. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. You’d be surprised how effective a good head butt can be.”
“Launch some punches at me,” Nicole said. “Watch what I do.”
I did, and she fended them off with shoulders, arms, and gloves. Then she caught my arm, and before I knew what had happened, she had my wrist in one hand, wrenched my leg under her body, and held it at the edge of breaking.
I flashed back again. Tony was screaming, crushing me under him, drizzling blood onto my face from his gaping eye socket. I shook, unable to breathe.
“Okay!” I gasped. “I give up.”
I tapped my hand on the mat, and Nicole let go. “Are you okay?” she asked, concerned.
“Yeah.” That was a big, fat lie. “What the shit did you do?”
“Leg lock,” she said. “Did you see how I got there?”
“No,” I said, trying to get a hold of myself. “Show me again.”
We walked through the moves step by step, and I watched Nicole make the transitions with fluid grace. She showed me leg locks and arm bars and even a choke or two. I’d never had quite as good a time having my limbs almost broken. We switched back and forth, and she showed me a number of holds, and I didn’t do too badly. The swell of emotion from our audience made me feel dizzy and light-headed, drunk on their enthusiasm.
It was inappropriate, I know. She was my trainer, she was fifteen years younger than me at least, and she was straight. But damn.
This. This is why I started drinking.
Well, this and the nightmares. And the demons.
Nicole had just put me in a right-arm bar when I saw him: a tall, good-looking man standing toward the back of the group. Where the others moved around a bit, staying limber or angling for a better look at Nicole’s technique, this guy stood very straight and still. With his strong features and dark complexion, he looked— Holy shit, he looked like Tony. The fucking one-eyed Raven. Then I saw his liquid black eyes with no whites—both of them. I hadn’t felt him before, but now that I focused on him, I could tell he wasn’t secreting any human emotions. He felt dull, his resonance flat, like stagnant water that had collected a fine layer of dust on top.
“Hey,” I said, looking right at him. “Hey!”
The man stared right at me and opened his mouth slightly. His tongue was a licking orange flame. There was a fire inside him, and that meant he was no man at all. He turned to go.
Nicole hadn’t noticed my distress, so when I pulled away, she clung tighter by reflex. Trained fighters know to stop when someone submits to them or—if they’re the ones doing the locking—they hang on until someone stops the fight. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until my arm cracked that I remembered to tap out. Nicole let go immediately, looking at first surprised, then horrified. “What the fuck, V?” she asked.
I didn’t have time to explain. I staggered up, ignoring the liquid fire that kept pumping up my right arm. Wincing, I held it braced against my side as I scrambled to the edge of the ring and slipped through the open part. Purple fire accumulated in the palm of my injured arm without my conscious command. Using the powers in front of so many people was a big no-no in the “don’t get caught” playbook for ex-supervillains, but maybe they’d think it was a trick of the light combined with my purple wraps.
I stumbled out the door into the street, where I had to shield my eyes from the bright sun. Trust this to be the one week a year that Seattle has glorious weather. Cars zoomed past entirely too quickly for a residential neighborhood. I saw only one other person on the sidewalk: a hefty lady holding a cat and glaring at me. Weird and a little unsettling, but definitely human. I couldn’t feel the demon anymore. A curious pigeon cocked its head and looked up at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fucking brilliant.”
I fell to one knee and clenched my arm, which had started sending shocks of pain through my shoulder and clicked when I moved it. I flexed my fingers. It hurt, but that was better than numbness. A massive bruise was already starting to form around my elbow.
“Holy shit!” Nicole appeared. “That’s not— I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I know, it’s my fault.” I winced and cradled my arm. “I’m a spaz sometimes.”
“You were chasing someone,” Nicole said. “Who?”
“My ex. Sort of.” Shakily, I stood without her proffered aid and immediately regretted it. She helped me to a green-painted bench.
“Really?” Nicole wore a perplexed expression. “I thought you liked, you know, women.”
“That obvious, huh?” I sighed. “Both, unfortunately. So I’m fucked either way.”
Nicole stared at me, trying really hard to suppress a smile. It took me a second to realize what I’d said, and then I smiled. She laughed; I laughed. We laughed. Together.
Fuck.
Spraining my arm put me out of training for at least a week, and I thought that would be the last I saw of Nicole for a while.
Wrong.
The following Friday night, she came into my bar while I was in the back, mixing drinks one-handed. It was trivia night, so the place was packed with mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings exerting their impressive grasp of useless information. I’d waited on a few of my regulars, as well as a tableful of college kids celebrating a twenty-first, currently too drunk to protest the trivia kicking off. No one really interested me until Nicole strolled up in a classy black blouse, jeans that showed off her muscular lower half, and a pair of boots I would have robbed an armored truck to get on my feet. I’d never seen her in normal clothes, and, by the looks of things, that had been a damn shame.
“Madonna,” she said, answering one of the trivia questions. It was currently a music round, but she might as well have been talking about me.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Found you,” she said as she leaned against the bar. “So, this is your place, huh?”
“Yep.” I looked around the room. The number of wide-eyed gawkers convinced me Nicole was really here. “What can I get you? Vodka and Red Bull?”
“Ugh.” She made a face. “How about a White Russian?”
I hesitated. I hadn’t expected her to order that. Then I got out the vodka and a carton of coconut milk. “You want a menu? I guarantee you we serve nothing you can eat.”
“What makes you say that?”
I looked her over. “What are you, twelve percent body fat? Fourteen?”
She looked amused. “Thirteen.”
I nodded. “I stand by my statement.”
“I’ll have a Caesar salad anyway. We can skip the cheese, if it makes you feel better.” She slid onto one of the bar stools. “You thirsty?”
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Yes, I am.”
I poured her a coconut White Russian, plus a double Johnnie Walker neat for me. I’d been drinking steadily since three p.m., so I put in food orders for both of us.
“That looks gnarly.” She pointed at my arm and smiled. “How’d you do that?”
The doctor had put me in a sling but no cast, but the questions had come anyway. I played along. “Depends,” I said. “Truth, or one of the thirty stories I’ve made up so far today?”
She laughed. “I really am sorry, you know,” she said.
“Not your fault. I did it to myself.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to say it.” She sipped her drink. “Where are you from, anyway? You l
ook so—”
“Boston.”
She frowned, then flushed in the cheeks. “Sorry, I thought you were Middle Eastern,” she said. “Was that racist of me?”
“Seattle racist, maybe,” I said. “Anyway, you’re half-right. My mom was Irish Catholic, and my dad was from Iran. I got the looks, but not a lot else.” I nursed my drink—I was already about twelve ahead. “And where are you from? Colombia? Nicaragua?”
“San Rafael,” she said. “It’s beautiful this time of year.”
“Cheers to that.”
We drank. We chatted. We murmured answers over the loudspeaker to the trivia questions. I poured a few more drinks for other patrons. Our food came—her Caesar, no cheese, my big basket of Tater Tots drowned in melted cheese, jalapeños, olives, and green onions.
Nicole took one look at the mound and cleared her throat, impressed. “What is that?”
“Irish tatchos,” I said. “Like nachos, only tots—”
“Talk about Seattle racist,” she said. “And you gave me a bad time about my fat percentage.”
“I’m not training to go pro.”
I took a fork to the mound of carbalicious goodness, but not before Nicole had snuck a taste herself. Now, that—that took me off guard. Seeing her eat some of that delicious sinfulness. She looked at me with just the right mix of capricious innocence.
“So,” she said. “Are you gonna tell me?”
She may have been a presumptuous kid, but Nicole’s resonance said she really did want to help me. I didn’t deserve a friend like her—or a friend at all.
I opened my mouth, but something in her face made me choke up. My eyes welled.
“Whoa,” Nicole said. “It was just a Tater Tot.”
“It’s not—” I grabbed a napkin to dab at my eyes. “It’s fucking embarrassing.”
Nicole’s eyes widened a little. “Is this about what happened in the gym? And don’t try to deny it. Most people don’t almost tear their own arm apart willingly.”
“Like I’m gonna dump all my emotional shit on you.”
