“With spells and magic and all that raven-fucking nonsense?” Abby asked.
Drake looked annoyed at the interruption. “No, not just with caffeine-related abilities or supernatural powers – magic, as you so succinctly put it. You’ll learn how to fight with hands and feet too. We can’t just train you in how to fight supernaturally. It wouldn’t prepare you for what you could potentially face – and preparation in the face of adversity can be the difference between life and death.”
“So no pressure then?” Abby said drily.
Drake’s mouth was clamped tightly shut.
“Drake,” Abby said, “what is it I’m supposed to be fighting?”
Drake frowned, considering the question. After a while, he said, “Why and who and what we fight is up to Miss Delphine Hightide to decide. She is, after all, our leader and our banner-bearer. She guides us and sets our feet on the least crooked path.”
“Great, so you can’t tell me what the hell I’m doing here,” Abby said. “But can you at least tell me why it has to be us – and by us, I mean, me and you and all these other strange creatures?”
“Simply put,” Drake said, “I guess we have to fight because we can.”
***
Abby sat in the back of the classroom of novice supernaturals and tried her hardest not to stare too much at her classmates. It was tough. The class wasn’t big. There were ten other students, making a class of eleven, and none of them looked to be human. All of them, bar one albino looking young man, were female.
Abby wasn’t sure why she was trying so hard to be polite and not stare, because the rest of the class had no qualms about eyeballing her.
A few of the girls at the front had their heads together and were whispering among themselves, casting appraising looks at her over their shoulders. They had skin tones ranging from light green to violet purple, claws or a thick thatch of hair which seemed to extend from eyebrows to ankles – mostly a little younger than she was, maybe eighteen or nineteen. One of the girls was a fae – the glistening wings protruding from slits cut into her dress were a giveaway – but Abby had no idea of the origins nor species of the others. She suspected that one girl, who seemed to be the leader of the little clique at the front of the class, might be a witch, but that was only because of the slight, luminous green quality of her skin, her hair, which was as black as a raven’s wing, and the fact that she was casually levitating a pen just above her open palm.
The witchy-looking girl raised her voice so that it carried easily to the back of the room where Abby sat.
“She looks pretty human to me,” she said in a lofty, sophisticated voice that sounded as if she were projecting it through her nose. “Miss Hightide must see something in her, otherwise she wouldn’t be here.” She sniffed contemptuously. “But what that something might be I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess at.”
Her little group of cronies tittered sycophantically.
Abby let the words slide off of her like water from a duck’s back, leaving only the faintest trace of irritation behind. Absentmindedly, she thought how funny it was that this sort of hazing and subtle bullying got to some people. To her, as a young, modern woman of twenty-two years of age, she found it so infantile that it was almost enjoyable. She was staggered slightly that, in a world of such diversity, there were still some who thought that pointing out somebody’s differences was a good way to get to them, as if uniqueness was something terrible, to be ashamed of instead of treasured.
Abby knew that the best way to get back at people with these sorts of narrow minds was to ignore them completely. Moronic individuals like that used any reaction as a sort of power, as if they were vindicated when their target got upset. A lack of reaction dispelled the illusion of power. However, there was something about the little gang – and the greenish girl particularly – that invited retaliation of some kind. It is easier, after all, to ignore a sardonic bitch in theory than in practice.
To emphasize how little she cared for the lame gossiping, Abby shot a question at the girls. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the albino guy watching the scene unfold with a slight smile on his face, as if he found the whole thing as contemptible as she did.
“Hey, girls?” Abby said, making sure she kept her tone light and neutral.
The other chicks’ whispering stopped for a second. Then one of the cronies murmured something to the witchy girl, who replied in a half-whisper, “I know she’s talking to us. Can you believe it?” The girl turned to face Abby. “Yes, human?” She pronounced the word ‘human’ in the same way that one might speak the word ‘dog-turd.’
The air-headed girls next to the ringleader tittered.
“What’s your name?” Abby asked, pleasantly.
“Radella,” said the bitchy witch.
“I’m Abby.”
“How nice for you.”
“I guess,” Abby said.
Thinking that she didn’t understand that Radella was trying to wind her up, the three cronies chuckled even more mindlessly.
Maintaining her sunny and amiable tone, but fighting a rising ire, Abby asked the three giggling girls, “Do you three pets have names?”
The girls instantly stopped laughing.
Abby continued to smile blandly at the little group. Radella’s eyes had narrowed and she gave Abby what she probably considered to be a gimlet stare.
“Have you got something in your eye?” Abby asked. She had the strangest sensation that her own eyes were heating up, turning into two little globs of molten anger as, despite her logic, she got more worked up.
The girl stopped her squinting. After a moment, her countenance cleared and she adopted a voice of such fake sugary sweetness that it was all Abby could do to not burst out laughing.
“So,” she said, casting a glance at her three nameless toadies, “what powers do you have, human? I’m intrigued. It’s quite rare for such an ordinary creature to gain entrance to the S.B.A. I heard you were from”—here she stifled a phony snigger—“Rotwood Harbor.”
“Yep, that’s me,” Abby said affably.
A look of such put-on shock and surprise was suddenly plastered over Radella’s face that Abby almost cracked up again. “Oh,” the young witch said, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea that they let people like that in here.”
“’ Fraid so,” said Abby. “Where are you from?”
Radella smirked and sat up a little straighter in her chair. “I’m from Ravencharm Heights,” she said.
“Wow,” Abby said, nodding appreciatively. “Very nice. Very fancy.”
“Yes,” said Radella smugly, her nose turned up so much that it might’ve been trying to crawl off her face.
Abby smiled. “And now look at us, huh? All in the same class. As equals.”
The look of smug satisfaction slid off Radella’s face.
“Yeah,” Abby said. “What a world!”
“Do you have any powers?” Radella asked.
Abby looked at that question like a true scientist. There was no point in lying to the silly bitch. Lying would only make her look more stupid when she inevitably had to do something. She elected to tell the truth – though as little of it as she could. She recalled the ball of light she had inadvertently conjured that night in the coffee shop.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I have powers.”
“Really?” Radella said skeptically. “What can you do?”
“We-ll, I sort of made this ball of bright light appear and fired it at this big thing and blew it through a brick wall. I’m not sure what it was or how I did it, but the thing didn’t come back for seconds.”
Radella was looking at her with genuine astonishment. Then she burst out laughing. As if on cue, her cronies did the same.
A muscle in Abby’s temple twitched.
“Fired a ball of light at a big thing and blasted it through a wall!” she screeched incredulously. “Oh yes, I bet! And what was this thing?”
Abby, keeping her face neutral and to the
facts, said, “Miss Hightide said that it was a red-eye demon.”
Radella and her minions howled with laughter. “Oh gods, it gets better! A red-eye demon?”
“Yep.”
“Oh sure, and I just defeated three bodachs this morning before class. Done anything else cool before we’ve even started our lessons?”
Despite her brain telling her to remain calm, Abby couldn’t help but think what a satisfying thing it’d be to take the chair she was sitting on and clobber Radella over the head with it. “I did floor Drake – do you know Drake? – with a knee to the nuts yesterday.”
Radella held a hand to her cheek in disbelief and then looked at her friends, shaking her head. “Of course. Of course, you did. Of course, you took down one of the most powerful Guardians in –”
Abby’s jaw was clenched hard. She could feel the muscle in it working as she fought back a retort.
“She did,” a soft voice butted in. Both Abby and Radella looked over to where the interruption had come from and saw that it was the slight, albino looking young man. “She did,” he said again. “Takedown Drake, I mean. Square in the nuggets.” He gave her a shy smile. “It was a hell of a shot.”
Radella opened her mouth to utter some scathing witticism, but before she was allowed to riposte, a dry cough sounded from the front of the classroom.
“Ladies and gentlemen – or should I say, gentleman – thank you for coming. I now ask you to be quiet.”
The class turned its collective attention to the front of the room.
A slim, unassuming man wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a tweed three-piece suit was standing serenely behind a desk. The only thing that set him apart from the average librarian was the fact that his hair flickered across his pate like a lazy white fire. Over his shoulder stood Drake.
“Thank you, class,” the mild-mannered man said. “Settle down and thank you. Now, I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation just now concerning abilities. Radella – it was Radella, wasn’t it? – I’m curious, what powers do you have currently?”
Radella straightened herself in her chair and said primly, “Not too much, master. I’ve been able to levitate things a little bit since I was about fourteen, and I can also do this.” She concentrated on a lamp hanging from the ceiling and clicked her fingers. The lamp fizzled out and, for a second, Radella held a little ball of flame in her hand, then the flame fizzled out and returned once more to the lamp.
The man in the tweed gave her a small smile then turned to the class as a whole. “Very good. Now, my name is Master Tamper, and I shall be your Master of Combats.”
Radella snorted – one of those derisive ones that the rich and privileged learn from birth. “Master of Combats,” she hissed. “He doesn’t look like he could hurt a fly, he’s so weedy –”
She was cut off suddenly. Having your face pressed flat into a wooden desktop will hamper even the most sarcastic, determined or caustic chatterbox. Master Tamper had seemingly shimmered, going from where he had been standing in front of his desk to Radella’s desk, which was fifteen feet away, in the space of time it took to gulp.
He had the young woman’s head pressed firmly into the desktop. He hadn’t used any sort of explosive force or acceleration – one minute he had not been there and the next he was; it was as simple as that.
“And that, Miss Radella,” he said, still pinning her head to her desk with an outwardly immovable grip, “is your first lesson: never, ever make assumptions.”
Abby was filled with a glowing admiration at the mild-mannered teacher and his professor’s clothing. How sweet it was when the universe sorted itself out for a few seconds and delivered retribution to stuck-up fuckwits like Radella. A glow of vindictive delight lit up Abby’s features and she smirked in a quite unladylike fashion.
The Master of Combats released Radella and her head shot up. Her pale green skin was flushed and she looked livid. She put a hand up to her face, no doubt to feel for bruises or a bloody nose, but Master Tamper had been as gentle as his voice in handling her.
“Assumptions,” he said gravely, looking around at them, “are like enemies; make enough of them and eventually you’ll wind up dead.”
The words hung in the air as if he had traced them with a sparkler. Behind him, Abby saw Drake lower his face to hide his smile.
“Now,” Master Tamper said, removing his tweed jacket and hanging it carefully on the back of his chair so that he stood in his waistcoat and starting to roll up his shirt sleeves, “let us begin your training.”
***
Abby landed hard on her back for the umpteenth time and felt the wind-driven from her lungs once again. She didn’t panic as she had the first time. She merely lay there, her eyes streaming, and gasped like a landed fish until her lungs inflated again.
It had quickly become apparent that, although she might have accidentally blasted a red-eye demon through a solid brick wall, a life of study and casual manual labor had left her ill-equipped to handle herself in the combat arena.
The class had been divided up into pairs by Master Tamper and Drake, and then told to fight. When, as one, the entire class had looked at each other and then at the Master of Combats, he had sighed.
“I need, before trying to teach you anything, to get a sense of what you know and, more importantly, the type of instincts you possess. In the future, you may be forced to fight for your lives, with no caffeine to draw upon, no powers at your disposal. That means that you will be reliant solely on your wits and your bodies. Now I want to see you battle each other and try and get each other to the mat. As soon as your opponent is down, then that particular battle is over and the victor will allow the loser to stand. Then you will go again. You will keep going until I tell you to stop.”
The part of Abby that was still simmering and bubbling over Radella, like a stew over a volcanic fire, was a little bit disappointed that they hadn’t been paired. Even though Abby wasn’t a naturally violent person, the idea of spending the next hour trying to turn Radella’s face inside out had definite appeal.
Abby had been paired with one of Radella’s butt-kissing pals. She was a slight girl who, as soon as she had been removed from Radella’s abrasive company, actually turned out to have a personality all her own.
Sadly, it was the personality of a scorpion.
This girl’s name was Vallentina and, apart from being a bit of an ass, she was as fast as a thought and as merciless as a storm. She was thin and lithe and sharp-featured, with pointed ears and long, strong fingers. It seemed that while Abby had been at college, her nose in books and her eyes on a desktop of one sort or another, Vallentina had been running six-minute miles and learning how to kick somebody’s liver out of their body.
It took Vallentina all of four seconds to get Abby on her back the first time around, and things only went downhill from there. When it became apparent that Abby wasn’t going to strike her with a ball of fizzling light, Vallentina attacked with skill and cold fury that Abby would’ve found incredible – if it hadn’t been being focused on her.
For the first half an hour of the lesson, it felt as if she was picking herself up off the mat so Vallentina could have the pleasure of slamming her back down.
As she raised herself groaning from the mat and readied herself to take another ass whooping, Drake appeared at her shoulder.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
Abby gave him a look that, had he been a weaker man, might have turned him into a smear on the nearest wall.
“Right,” he said. “Um, Vallentina, if you could go and form a threesome with those two over there.”
Vallentina gave Abby a parting smirk and walked off.
“Okay,” Drake said, turning back to Abby, “let me teach you a few techniques that might stop you from getting your ass handed to you quite so easily.”
He walked her through a few simple throws, demonstrating the various steps involved in getting someone on the ground. Then he asked her whether he could d
emonstrate it on her at full speed so that she could get an idea of what her opponent might be experiencing. This was essential, he told her, because that knowledge would enable her to know where to next strike her enemy.
Abby nodded.
Next thing she knew she was flipping through the air, her legs whipping over her head as she revolved and smacked hard into the practice mat. Her breath exploded in a great rush and her eyes bulged. She gritted her teeth and clutched at Drake in a sudden breathless panic. After a second or two, she realized that the two of them were lying face to face – he on top of her – his body pressed against hers.
Gods, it’s been a long time since I’ve been this close to a man, she thought. I really need to get laid.
Abby tried to suck in some air but, at the same time, she had to admit that she was quite enjoying the sensation of Drake’s hard body pressed against hers, his weight a warm comfort against her. She was staring into those gray eyes of his, using them as an anchor point while she got her breath back and wondered, as she looked into them, what Drake’s supernatural capabilities might be. As if in answer to this thought, she became aware that she could feel what felt like tiny scales under her fingers, where they clutched Drake by the back of the neck.
“That… was great,” she managed to choke. “Certainly… took my…breath…away.”
***
Later, after a tasty dinner – the likes of which she couldn’t remember eating in her life – Abby lay on her bed. She was shattered, both physically and mentally. She ached everywhere, including places that she hadn’t been aware a person could ache. She ached in the gaps between her toes.
But she couldn’t seem to drift off to sleep.
She kept dwelling on Drake and that moment in class. The feeling of him on top of her, his chiseled body pressing down on her, his face near enough for her to kiss. She pondered whether, had they been alone, she would have tried to.
Caffeinated Magic: Supernatural Barista Academy Page 6
