Shadowspell (4 page)

Finn was very much the strong, silent type, so we didn’t do a whole lot of chatting, but even so, after being around me for a few weeks, I think he was beginning to understand how I think. Without a word to me or my mom, he plopped himself in his favorite chair, turning on the TV. He flipped through the channels until he found a soccer game, then settled in, making it clear that he could keep himself entertained.

Flashing him a smile of gratitude, I gathered up the remains of our tea and led my mom through the short, fortified hallway and into my suite. The layers of protection between me and the outside world were almost ridiculous, if you asked me. If someone wanted to get to me, they’d have to find their way here through the darkness of the tunnel system, then defeat the protections on the front entrance, then fight their way through Finn. And if they managed to do all that, I could still run into my suite and hit a panic button that would lower three separate steel doors to block the hallway. I was safer than the gold at Fort Knox.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” I announced to my mom as I carried the tea tray over to my mini kitchen. “Want some?”

“No, but if you’ll put the kettle on to reheat, I’ll have another cup of tea.”

I sloshed the electric kettle around a bit to make sure there was enough water in there, then turned it on before putting on some French roast coffee to brew. Mom waited in my living room while I got the tea and coffee ready and then served it. The coffee smelled heavenly and tasted even better. Thank goodness for Starbucks! Tea was so common it practically fell from the sky around here, but good coffee was hard to come by.

I joined my mom in the living room. As usual, since Dad had forced her to quit drinking, she was fidgety. Her teeth worried at her lower lip so much it was chapped raw, and she plucked at the tiny pills that had formed on her wool sweater. I don’t even know if she realized she was doing it.

“So,” I said, looking at her over the top of my mug, “how are you doing? Without the booze, I mean. Are you … okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, not terribly convincingly. “I don’t know why you and your father are making such a big deal out of it.” She took a sip of her tea, not looking at me. “Maybe I was drinking a little too much, but it’s not like I’m an alcoholic. It’s just that I was under a lot of stress.”

My hand spasmed on my mug, and I gritted my teeth against the sharp retort that instantly sprang to my tongue. I’d thought she was past pretending she didn’t have a problem. Already knowing it was a lost cause, I tried to reason with her anyway.

“Mom, you went through the d.t.’s when you stopped drinking. If that doesn’t make you an alcoholic, then what does?”

She waved that away. “I told you I know I was drinking too much, especially after you ran away. But now that I’m here with you, everything is fine. I miss having a drink every now and again, and I don’t appreciate being treated like a child.”

My throat ached, and I had to swallow hard to try to dislodge the sudden lump that formed there. Dad had told me we couldn’t cure my mom’s alcoholism by force. He could keep her under lock and key and not let her have alcohol, and that would keep her sober. But it wouldn’t cure her.

I really wanted to believe he was wrong. But if she
still
wasn’t ready to admit she had a problem, then I had a strong suspicion Dad was right. If she considered drinking constantly from the moment she woke up until the moment she went to bed—or passed out—to be “having a drink every now and then,” then she was still in massive denial.

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said with a tight smile. “Are you looking forward to starting school in the fall?”

I was more than happy to change the subject, though I suspected we were still in denial-land. “I think Dad’s made it pretty clear I won’t be going to school.” My heart sank at the thought. I’d never been that crazy about school, since our constant moving meant I always got to be the new kid, and everyone knows how much fun that is. But after everything I’d already gone through this summer, hanging out with a bunch of other kids and pretending I had nothing more dire to worry about than a pop quiz sounded like paradise on earth.

“If you want to go to school, you’ll go to school,” she said, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that she did actually care what I wanted. “I can’t blame your father for wanting to protect you, but he’s going about it the wrong way, and eventually he’ll figure that out.”

I wished I had her confidence. I still couldn’t say I knew my father all that well, but I did know he was very stubborn. And sure of himself. If he’d already decided that school wasn’t safe, I honestly didn’t see how either my mother or I could talk him into it.

Of course, the fall semester didn’t start for another eight weeks or so. There was always a chance we were both being overly optimistic in thinking I’d be alive when it rolled around.

*   *   *

My back hit the mat with a sound between a squish and a thud. The impact forced the air out of my lungs, so all I could do was lie on my back like a dead bug and try to breathe. Keane came to tower over me, shaking his head and curling his lip in disdain.

“That was pathetic,” he told me. So nice to have him heap on the positive reinforcement.

I was struggling too hard to breathe to tell him what I thought of him, but I’m sure he could see it in my eyes. He’d told me once that if I didn’t want to bash his face in during our sparring sessions, then he wasn’t doing his job. He was doing his job just fine.

“If I were the bad guy, you’d be dead by now,” he continued.

Yeah, rub it in,
I thought as I finally succeeded in drawing a little air into my lungs. I hated the nasty wheezing sound I was making, but I couldn’t seem to make it stop.

Why, oh why had I asked for self-defense lessons? Even my best moves would be useless against the kind of enemy the Faerie Queens would send to kill me. But after Finn had been brutally beaten by a bunch of Knights while I could do nothing to help him, I’d decided I wanted at least the illusion of usefulness. That’s why I’d started my lessons with Finn’s son, Keane, which I regretted on a regular basis.

Even when my breath finally started to come easier, I stayed lying on the floor, not looking forward to going another round. We were sparring in the living room of my safe house, the furniture pushed up against the walls to make room for the mats. We’d have had more space if we’d done our sparring out in the guardroom, but we’d also have had an audience—Finn. Keane would have been fine with that, but not me.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t want Finn to see me making a fool of myself, either. I had a big, whopping favor to ask of Keane, one I didn’t dare let anyone else hear. Now, if I could just find the nerve to actually ask …

“Are you going to take a nap, or are you going to get off your ass and get back to work?” Keane asked.

I glared up at him. My body ached from being repeatedly slammed into the mats, and my muscles were quivering with exhaustion. Keane was theoretically taking it easy on me, but you couldn’t tell it by the way I felt.

“Don’t you ever get tired?” I grumbled, pushing myself painfully up into a sitting position.

He snorted. “Not in fifteen minutes I don’t.”

Was that how long it had been since we’d started? It felt like at least an hour.

“Guess we need to work on your stamina on top of everything else.”

I knew he was only doing what he’d been hired to do, but I was sick and tired of his attitude. He treated me like I was some kind of idiot because I couldn’t fight like a trained warrior. Well, excuse me, but before I’d come to Avalon, brawling hadn’t been a big part of my life.

A hint of malice kindled in my chest. Once, just once, I wanted to get the upper hand on my obnoxious jerk of a teacher. And if I had to play dirty, well that was just tough.

I made as if to get up, groaning dramatically. I didn’t expect Keane to fall for it—usually, it’s like he knows what I’m going to do even before I do—but maybe after a few weeks of these lessons, he was starting to get complacent. I could see in his eyes that his attention had wandered, and I took advantage. Instead of getting up, I propelled myself forward, hitting Keane’s legs and knocking them out from under him.

He gave a startled yelp, and I had about half a second to feel a thrill of victory. In retrospect, I should have come at him from the side, so my momentum would have carried me out from under him as he fell. As it was, he landed flat on top of me, smashing my face into the mat as once again my breath whooshed out of my lungs. He was coordinated enough that he could have stopped his fall with his hands, but no, he let his whole weight come down on me, practically crushing me.

“Nice move,” he said, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. “You’ve really improved your situation.” To emphasize his point, he used his powerful legs to pin my arms to my sides, then held my ankles down.

I wriggled and squirmed—once I could breathe well enough to do even that—but there wasn’t much I could do when I was facedown on the mats with my arms and legs pinned. I could move my head, which Keane had taught me to use as a weapon, but I couldn’t reach him with it, so I couldn’t do any damage. I’d definitely lost this round.

“You can let go now,” I grumped. “I got the point.”

“Maybe I don’t feel like letting go just yet.” He sounded really amused. Glad he was having such a great time at my expense.

I let out a little growl of frustration. How could I possibly ask this asshole for help? With
anything
? And yet, there was no one else I could think of who might be able to help me get to Kimber’s party without my dad’s permission.

It occurred to me that in the position he was in, Keane would be staring directly at my butt. I craned my head around to see if I was right, and sure enough …

My face heated with a blush I couldn’t help. Granted, I didn’t have that much for him to look at—my Fae heritage gave me a figure only slightly more feminine than that of a teenage boy—but it was still embarrassing. Worse, he met my eyes when I looked around, and he was grinning. I didn’t like the grin any more than I liked his usual scowls and smirks.

I wanted to say something witty and worldly, something to cut him down to size and make him regret that stupid grin. But everything I could imagine saying would only make things worse. I bit my tongue and closed my eyes, determined to wait him out. I’d take this time to rest up, and when he finally decided he was tired of ogling me, or whatever he was doing, I’d have a little more energy to fight back with.

I guess his mind-reading skills were back online, because the moment I relaxed under him, he let go and rolled off of me. Damn. So much for taking a rest. With a sigh of resignation, I forced myself to my feet once more.

We spent another half hour or so sparring. If you could call me repeatedly getting my butt kicked “sparring.” By the end of the session, I was ready to give up for good and leave the fighting to bodyguards. Who was I kidding, anyway? Buffy the Vampire Slayer might have been able to kick butt at the age of sixteen, but not me.

“Don’t look so glum,” Keane said as he began rolling up the mats. I probably should have helped him, but I was too tired and, well, glum. “You’re doing great.”

Obviously, he and I had a different definition of “great.” I plopped down heavily on the sofa, not minding that I had to climb over the coffee table to get to it. I’d move the furniture back into place later.

“I mean it, Dana,” Keane said, shoving the rolled-up mat aside and standing up. He pulled the coffee table out of the way, then sat beside me on the sofa.

It was a little too close for comfort, so I slid over to make more room for him. Being Fae, he was drop-dead gorgeous by birth. I couldn’t decide if his pseudo-Goth bad-boy look made him more or less so. I say pseudo-Goth because he didn’t quite have the look down. His hair was dyed jet black, his left ear was pierced about a gazillion times, his entire wardrobe appeared to be black, and he sometimes painted his fingernails black. Even so, there was something strangely … wholesome about his appearance. If the Jonas Brothers ever decided to go Goth, that’s what they’d look like.

I couldn’t help liking the packaging, but the personality beneath it grated on my nerves even at the best of times.

“You really get a kick out of humiliating me, don’t you?” I asked, then wished I’d kept my mouth shut. I should at least be
pretending
he didn’t get under my skin so badly.

I didn’t look at him, but I could hear him shrug. “You need to be motivated to fight hard, even when it’s only sparring. If you were a guy, I’d motivate you by hitting a lot harder. Would you like that better?”

I turned to glare at him. “Have I ever told you you’re a total asshole?”

He laughed. “I think you might have mentioned it a time or two.” His smile faded, his emerald green eyes losing their teasing twinkle. “I meant what I said. You’re doing great. I’ve been learning to fight almost from the time I could walk. You can’t expect to beat me. And if you
could
beat me, then you’d need a better teacher.”

Every time I convinced myself to despise Keane for good, there’d be one of these unexpected flashes of humanity that made me think maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. And I had to admit, I liked the fact that he didn’t treat me like either a weirdo or a fragile flower because I was the first and only Faeriewalker born in the last hundred years or so. Nor did he want to use me to further some political agenda. That made him comparatively uncomplicated, and that was why I was willing—in theory at least—to ask for his help.

I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, then turned to face him on the couch. “I have a favor to ask you,” I blurted before I could chicken out.

He looked startled for a moment, then raised his eyebrows. “You’ve managed to take me by surprise for once.”

I smacked his shoulder with the back of my hand. Luckily, he didn’t treat that like an attack and pounce on me. “Quit it. If you keep being a jerk, I’m not going to ask you.”

“And I take it this would be a bad thing?”