I felt a familiar tingle. I was drawing on magic.
Then I heard a giggle.
Grace had leaped from her chair and hugged her parents, whose eyes were full of tears.
Gasps broke the silence in the congregation, then they cheered again.
“Thank you, Preacher!” Cecil said. “Praise God!”
I smiled, nodded at Shanda and Cecil, and walked back down the aisle toward the front of the church.
I bit my lip.
People were laughing in jubilation.
Grace grabbed the side of one of the pews. She’d jumped up pretty quickly, but she hadn’t used her legs much until now. Even if she was healed, she’d need to develop lower-body strength, and that would take time.
If I could use magic to build muscle, I wouldn’t have fish for legs at the moment.
Grace was still giggling as she made her way down the aisle towards me and hugged me. “Thank you, sir! Thank you so much!”
I smiled and briefly rested my hand on the top of her head. I was happy for her, don’t get me wrong, but this was just the start. If people had heard about Doris, an old white lady who didn’t even live in the neighborhood anymore, word of this was going to spread like wildfire. And with a previously paralyzed girl walking again, the evidence to prove the veracity of the story was there.
So much for coming back to the church quietly, trying not to make waves.
I’d probably be suspended again by the end of the week.
Chapter Two
I grabbed my duffel bag from the back seat of my Mitsubishi Eclipse and slung it over my shoulder. Didn’t have much in there: a couple of changes of clothes, a set to work out in, and another set for afterward, along with a relatively new pair of cross-trainers I was still breaking in. Other than that, a stick of deodorant, a padlock, and a massive bottle of ibuprofen. The essentials.
For the first time, I looked forward to the gym. Layla didn’t go to church with me. Our relationship wasn’t public, and her being an elf made it complicated.
She covered her ears with a hoodie most of the time, but the old-timers would insist she remove it. If only they were a little more old-school. Then she could get away with a bonnet, maybe.
Layla’s hair was long, straight, and blonde. If she wore it down, though, it only partially covered her ears. They tended to poke through, giving her elvish identity away.
At some point, if the world didn’t fall to her father’s elven legions, we’d have to figure it out. It wasn’t that I was afraid people would know she was an elf, but there was a cult that had arisen, the Order of the Elven Gate. People called it the Elf Gate Cult or the Cult of the Elven Gate, and it was privy to the otherworldly elf king’s plans, thanks to Layla’s ex, the late Hector, for creating it. They mostly hoped to get on the elves' good side so as to remain in the favor of the king after the elves conquered the world.
Most people thought they were just another run-of-the-mill crazy cult. And since many of the members wore fake ears or even had their ears surgically altered to resemble the elves’ ears, showing up as a recently reinstated minister with what people would think was a cultist as a girlfriend probably wouldn’t go well for me.
So, we’d planned to meet at the gym immediately after Sunday service.
I wobbled through the doors, my legs still weak from the day before. Layla was standing there in tight fitness pants and a tank top. Her body was flawless, and her workout clothes accentuated every curve perfectly. Most people would think she was my trainer, or maybe my daughter—certainly not my girlfriend. By human standards, she was in a whole other league. Thankfully, she wasn’t human. Apparently, hot elf chicks have a thing for the Pillsbury Doughboy look.
Layla didn’t require her hoodie in the gym to hide her pointy ears. Sure, the gym rats could be plenty judgmental, but they were more likely to damn you for excessive carbohydrate consumption than for membership in a fringe organization.
Perhaps that was one reason she loved the gym so much. She didn’t have to worry about being singled out.
“How was church?” Layla asked. “Everyone happy to see you back?”
I smiled. This was the obligatory friendly small talk she’d make before the workout began, a strategy meant to remind me that I did love her, no matter what she was about to do to me.
“Someone came looking for a miracle,” I said. “I wasn’t going to do it, but I couldn’t not help her. It was a young girl.”
Layla nodded and smiled. “You had compassion. Just be careful. You realize now that your services aren’t going to be the same ever again.”
I nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Those people don’t like change. They’re committed to their ways, their traditions, and for the most part, the denomination supports that. Once other people show up, people not like them, looking for healings…”
“Things will change,” Layla said. “Sometimes change can be a good thing.”
I nodded. “And a painful thing.”
Layla’s smile turned from kind to devious. “Which is exactly why we’re here. No pain, no gain, right?”
“Yeah, about that. Could we take it a little easier until my body adjusts? I can barely walk, and standing up and sitting down is a real challenge.”
Layla shook her head. “You just have to get through it. We don’t know how much time we have, so we can’t afford to start slow.”
I sighed. “All right, what is it today? Arms?”
Layla shook her head. “Yes and no. Chest and triceps.”
I made my way to the men’s locker room and changed clothes.
Layla put me through a warm-up set of push-ups. No, not standard push-ups. Most of them I did from my knees, but I got through them. The hardest part was standing again. Thankfully, Layla was willing to help me to my feet.
After that, it was the bench press.
You know, the barometer of gym-rat manliness? “How much you bench, bro?”
The question was meant to size you up to other dudes. Thankfully, no one had asked me yet. I wasn’t competition, and even if someone asked, I didn’t know how I’d answer. But I’d overheard other guys talking their bench press max in the locker room.
I tried not to think about it. Layla only had ten pounds on each side of the bar. I bench a twenty-spot, bro. Yeah, I wasn’t going to say that…ever.
Less weight, I wagered, added to the bar than the bar itself weighed. I could handle it. Seemed like for once, Layla had listened to me and was going easy on me.
So I thought.
First set, not too bad.
Then the second, and the third. Started to get a little more challenging.
The fourth set? It took everything I had just to raise the bar from my chest. Layla was spotting me. She’d prevent me from dropping the thing across my windpipe, which wasn’t entirely unlikely.
I finished my tenth rep and racked the bar. “Holy crap, that sucked!”
Layla smirked and took the weights off. “Go again.”
I raised one eyebrow as I laid on my back, staring up at her. “That was all the weight I could lift. Now you’re going to make me press the bar by itself?”
“It’s called a drop set. You have to shock your muscles. Keep going until failure.”
“You’re going to make me fail with just the bar?” I asked. “I’ll look like a wimp.”
Layla snorted. “If the shoe fits.”
“Hey!” I protested. “I might be a wimp, but that doesn’t mean I want to look like one.”
I glanced to my right. Some hulk of a man in a tank top, sporting a mohawk and a smorgasbord of tattoos, was bench-pressing the bar with three forty-fives on each side. I didn’t bother to do the math.
“You want me to sit here and struggle with the bar right next to that?”
Layla shook her head. “Who do you have to impress, anyway? I’m your girlfriend, and I’m not judging you.”
“Sure you aren’t,” I said, gripping the bar again. My arms were still tr
embling from the last set. Even the bar by itself felt heavy. I had no idea how much the bar weighed, but it wasn’t zero pounds. I’m sure Layla knew…and if she told me, I’d probably be embarrassed by how little I was barely managing to press. After four sets, my arms were ready to give out.
“Up,” Layla commanded.
I gripped the bar as it rested in the rack.
“Slow and with control,” Layla said. “You don’t want to give your muscles a break on the way down. It’s all about time under tension.”
I rolled my eyes. Time under tension. Drop sets. Supersets. Reps. All that gym speak. It was like I was in a foreign country.
The few times I had gone overseas, I didn’t know much more than how to ask where the bathroom was.
Wo ist die Toilette? That was Germany.
Ou sont les toilettes? That was what I asked when I had to go pee in France.
Onde e o banheiro? I once took a dump in Portugal.
But now I was in a gym in America’s heartland, and most of what the denizens said didn’t make a lick of sense.
“Where’s the shitter?” I asked.
“Nice try,” Layla said. “You know where it is. You were just in the locker room. Besides, you have to finish your set first.”
“But I’m going to poop my pants!” I protested.
“No, you aren’t,” Layla said. “You just know I can’t follow you into the men’s locker room.”
“Fick dich,” I replied under my breath. Not that I was fluent in German, but I knew how to f-bomb someone. “Where’s the toilet?” “Fuck you.” You know, the essentials. Enough to survive in most civilized nations, anyway.
Layla raised her left eyebrow. “What does that mean?”
“It’s German. It means ‘I love you.’” I smiled.
“For some reason, I don’t believe you.”
My eyes darted back and forth nervously. “What? Why would you think that? I mean, don’t you trust me?”
“I do trust you,” Layla said. “I also know you.”
I snorted. “How am I supposed to go to work if I can’t even walk tomorrow?”
“Legs were yesterday. Today we’re working your chest and tris,” Layla said. “By tomorrow, you’ll be able to walk just fine. Besides, you work as a bartender and as a preacher. You don’t need a lot of leg strength for that.”
I chuckled. I almost told her about my stuck-on-the-toilet incident at the church, but I was still too embarrassed to mention it. Besides, citing that event as told-you-so-moment would only turn up her workout intensity. Instead, I rambled on about the ridiculousness that was my existence. “A sober alcoholic preacher walks into a bar… Not a joke, it’s my life. Now that I think about it, I guess it is a bit of a joke.”
Layla shook her head. “Your life isn’t a joke. I don’t think that girl’s parents would call you a joke. Every day she walks, every step she takes, is a gift you’ve given them. And that’s just the start. The world depends on you, Caspar. Once my father sends his legionnaires here, you’ll need to be able to do more than heal people. You need to be ready to fight.”
I looked at Layla wide-eyed and parted my lips slightly. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
“You’re a cliché machine is what you are. Especially when you’re trying to put off your next set.”
I grinned. “You caught me. I’m ready to do that drop set now.”
Layla cocked her head. “No, a drop set means you reduce the weight and hit another set immediately without rest in between. Now that you’ve bullshitted for a couple of minutes, you need to do another full set, then the drop set.”
I grunted.
“Fick dich too, sweetheart,” Layla murmured, smiling sadistically. “And pardon my French.”
I almost choked on my tongue. It was German, not French, but I wasn’t about to correct her. Since she was asking for pardons, she must’ve figured out what it meant. Or she thought I was trying to tell her to flick a dick, which was how it sounded. Either way, she got the gist of it. “All right. But after this, we’re calling it a day.”
“After you do a set of dumbbell flies and stretch,” Layla said. “If you’re going to be a fighter, you need to be more than strong. You need to be flexible and agile.”
I shook my head. “Isn’t that why you have me doing yoga?”
“Ioga,” Layla said, correcting me. Technically, what she’d brought from New Albion was a tradition that was similar to yoga. When she said “ioga,” it sounded almost the same as “yoga,” and other than the terminology, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two practices. Not to mention, she usually had me doing yoga videos on demand. Apparently, the one time she’d tried to do it with me, I had been too much of a smart ass about it to maintain the state of mind that yoga, or ioga, requires.
Since Tony Horton wouldn’t talk back at me through the television, I suppose she figured leaving me in the hands of the ageless fitness wonder was better than trying to teach me yoga herself.
“You need to do that, too,” Layla said. “But immediately after a workout; that’s when your muscles are warm and the most pliable. It’s the best time to make flexibility gains through your stretching.”
I sighed. “All right. Load me up.”
Layla slid ten pounds onto either side of my bar. I glanced at He-Man, who was still pressing something in the range of three hundred pounds. And he made it look easy.
“Light weight, baby!” the man next to me shouted as he re-racked his weights.
“Why’d he say ‘light weight, baby?’” I asked. “He’s lifting more than my entire body weight.”
Layla shrugged. “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
I started to open my mouth and say something to the man.
“After you finish your sets,” Layla interjected before I could speak.
“Set,” I said. “Singular. You just said sets, plural.”
Layla added the safety clamps to the outside of each of the ten-pound weights. “Ten reps, then no talking. Straight to the drop set.”
Chapter Three
Why is it the older someone is, the wrinklier their ass is, the more likely it is that they stroll nakedly and carelessly across the locker room? They’re also the ones most likely to engage you in a conversation at the same time.
I turned my eyes the other way as I headed to my locker.
All I wanted was to quickly change and go home.
But on the bench right in front of my locker was the mohawk sporting bodybuilder from before.
I stood to the side and waited my turn.
He turned and looked at me.
“You need in here, man?”
I nodded. “Yeah, sure. But I can wait.”
The guy shook his head. “No, come on. I wasn’t trying to hog the space.”
I nodded. “All right. Thanks.”
“No problem,” the man said. “Name’s Jag, by the way.”
“Jag?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Short for Jagger. That’s my last name. It’s what I go by.”
I nodded. “Caspar. Nice to meet you.”
“So, your trainer is hot,” Jag said.
I nodded. “She certainly is.”
“Think I could get her number?”
I snorted. “She’s also my girlfriend.”
Jag raised an eyebrow and looked at me curiously. “Seriously? Congrats, man. How’d you pull that off?”
I shrugged and jiggled my gut. “It’s my magnificent physique.”
Jag looked at me blankly. “No, really.”
“What can I say? I have a fantastic personality.” I smiled.
Jag smirked. “Well, good for you, bro.”
“Yeah, good for me,” I said. I slithered around Jag and opened my locker, which was just below his. At the moment, even the location of our lockers seemed a display of the man’s dominance.
And we were invading each other’s personal space. And at the moment, Jag wasn’t getting anything out of h
is locker. He could have moved down, but I wasn’t about to ask him. I didn’t know this dude. I was hoping he’d get the hint.
Instead, he just sat there, his legs spread, smelling like man. I quickly retrieved my bag and found a spot on the bench about five feet away. Jag reached into his locker, pulled out a giant tub of who knows what, and a shaker cup. I glanced at him.
“Mind if I ask you a question, Jag?” I asked.
Jag shrugged. “Sure.”
“When you were lifting in there, why’d you say ‘light weight, baby?’”
Jag smiled wide. “Channeling the king, bro.”
“Elvis?” I asked, cocking my head.
“No. King Coleman,” Jag said, rubbing some kind of oil on his body. “Ronnie Coleman. Eight-time Mister Olympia.”
I tilted my head to the side. “The only Mister Olympia I’ve ever heard of was Arnold.”
“King Coleman was bigger than Arnold. Much bigger. And Arnold only won the Olympia title seven times. Anyway, Ronnie Coleman didn’t work out at a great gym. Not a fancy place like this one. Worked out at some shit hole-in-the-wall. But whenever he lifted heavy weights, he’d say, ‘Light weight, baby!’ Maybe he was being ironic. I think it was sort of a mind trick. Tell yourself you’re lifting light, it kind of feels lighter.”
“So, it’s a mind-over-matter thing?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Jag said with a definitive nod.
“And he’s who you’re trying to become?” I asked.
Jag shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. I admire what he did. But when I do competitions, I’m not competing against other men.”
I bit my lip. “So, you compete in the women’s bodybuilding competition?”
Jag snorted and chuckled. “No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, I don’t compare myself to other people. That’s the secret to success in the gym.”
“Hard to do,” I said. “I can’t help but feel like I’m the weakest guy here.”
Jag nodded. “Yeah, you probably are.”
I smiled. “Thanks for the confidence boost.”
Old Dogma New Tricks (The Elven Prophecy Book 2) Page 2
