by Paul Duffau
“Since armed men tried to abduct you,” interrupted her mother. “I think our precautions are perfectly reasonable, even if your manners are not.”
“You could always have Father lock me in a cell someplace.”
Red appeared high on Sasha’s cheekbones. “The sarcasm is unwarranted. And you could try calling him ‘Dad’ like most other girls do with their fathers.”
Inwardly, Kenzie was delighted that the small insurrection bugged her mother.
“We’re not like most others, are we, Mother?”
Her mother ignored the provocation and redirected the conversation. “I am planning a dinner party, and I will need you in attendance.”
“Why? It’s not like you need me for one of your business thingies. Anyway, they’re boring.”
Sasha Graham sighed. “My business ‘thingies,’ as you call them, provide opportunities for the Family. However, that is immaterial. This is not a business dinner. Your father and I have decided that it is time for you to be presented to the eligible young suitors of the Family. I have invited a young engineer from the company to meet you at this dinner, and I expect that you will show him every courtesy as a young lady. Do you understand?”
“But—”
“There will be no buts. There are quite a few bachelors that meet the criteria set forth by the Family. Ideally, you will find one that you can find happiness with. Regardless, you will marry one. The magic must survive.”
With a sick feeling, Kenzie saw that her fate was being determined not by a mother but a high priestess.
“I will instruct Jackson to take you shopping for a suitable dress.” Her mother handed her a credit card. “Use this,” she instructed. “Dinner will be at six thirty tomorrow evening. See that you’re ready on time.”
Chapter 24
Mitch jacked up Hunter twelve minutes before the first bell, pinning him to a masonry wall in a side hallway that was momentarily deserted.
“What the hell!” yelled Hunter.
Got to be quick, Mitch thought, casting glances down both ends of the short hallway.
“Need to talk to you,” said Mitch from a distance of six inches away from Hunter’s face.
Hunter struggled against the armbar, but Mitch leaned in and saw surprise register on Hunter’s face, swiftly replaced with an icy fury.
“Get your dirty hands off me.”
“Sure,” agreed Mitch, forcing his face into hard planes to belie the easygoing tenor of the words. “You start moving your hands, though, and I’m going to knock your teeth into your throat. Deal?”
Color fled Hunter’s face as shock and the first signs of fear overrode the other emotions.
“Deal?”
“Yeah.”
Mitch eased back as a tall brunette turned down the hallway. Both boys pivoted their heads to watch her. Mitch kept tabs on Hunter from the corner of his eye.
Her steps faltered as she approached, and a self-conscious blush lit on her cheekbones. She looked away and scurried into the independent studies room at her end of the hall.
Hunter lifted a hand.
Mitch instinctively clenched a fist, shoulder pulling back.
“I heard you,” said Hunter, his hand seeking his chest, moving carefully as he maintained contact with Mitch’s hard expression. “Chill.” He used the heel of his hand to massage the spot where Mitch’s elbow had dug in.
Mitch could see the thoughts racing through his friend’s mind. He started talking before Hunter could bury him under a load of horse crap.
“What I want to know, dude, is what you know about—” Mitch paused to force Hunter to pay attention. “—magic. Not like pulling rabbits out of hats. The kind that you do with that fancy hand-waving stuff that makes all the girls fall over for you. The kind that shuts up a cop in my garage.”
“You’re nuts,” said Hunter. He straightened himself, and his face slid to neutral, only the glint in his eyes betraying him.
“Yep, totally. Except I keep running into people more nuts than me.”
Hunter wagged his head side to side. His hands stayed stationary.
“I didn’t put it all together until yesterday, but it all makes sense, everything since the goons tried snatching—”
Recognition popped as Hunter added things up. “You said it was a dream.”
“I wish,” said Mitch, kicking himself for the admission and lying in the same breath. He was very, very glad that Kenzie was not a dream.
“Look,” Mitch said, “I know stuff, not enough, though, and what I don’t know is about to bite me in the ass.”
The contrary part of him that lurked in the back of his mind to cause him trouble murmured, True, that. Mitch blinked three times to clear the voice.
Hunter stared at him. “What kind of stuff?” He spoke like he was addressing a dolt.
Mitch glared at Hunter and then lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Weird crap, like making me talk when I don’t want to. Like you did with Paulson yesterday. You short-circuited him with a wave of your hand and freakin’ walked out of class.”
Hunter blanched. “You got any evidence or data? I mean, you sound seriously crazy, or would if anybody would listen to you.” Hunter shook his head, a sneer twisting his features. His voice raised to a mincing falsetto as he mocked Mitch. “Hey everybody, I believe in magic, and unicorns, and faeries.”
Blood thundered in Mitch’s ears, and his fist closed again. He drew a long breath and forced the muscles in his arm to relax, ignoring the impulse to clobber Hunter.
Mitch’s voice was thick. “Knock it off.”
“Why? You’re the one assaulting me, right? Shouldn’t I be saying that?”
“Because Ken— the girl needs my help and I need yours.”
The urgency that made him feel desperate served to strengthen his resolve. He paused, gazing steadily into Hunter’s eyes. Below the surface, below the anger was a fear, but not directed at Mitch, because a bare trace of sympathy showed too.
Hunter responded to the open plea in Mitch’s voice. “You want my help, then run away from all this as fast as you can.”
“Not going to happen.”
Hunter gave Mitch a hard stare. “Then you’re screwed. Too many people know about you.”
A tingle ran the length of Mitch’s spine, and he resisted the urge to shudder. He could count three people other than Hunter who knew for certain. Two he trusted, and Kenzie’s dad had only interrogated and warned him. That left Hunter.
“Who did you tell?
Hunter’s words came out low. “I had to. He could tell.”
“Who? About what?”
Hunter shrugged and didn’t answer, looking away down the hallway.
Mitch considered the data. “The flash. It’s the only thing you knew about.”
“I told Father,” said Hunter. His scowl deepened. “I had to. There’s no way to disguise that much power. He’s gone nuts, raging about some other Family. I had to go over the whole thing, explaining you’re about as magical as a toothbrush. He couldn’t believe that a piece of Meat—”
“Meat?” Mitch glared at his best friend.
“Ordinary people, okay, we call them Meat. None of you have any ability worth talking about. No one has ever heard of Meat acting like you did, like some kind of capacitor. That’s the way I explained it and the only reason . . .” Hunter’s voice faltered. “. . . the only reason they don’t kill you immediately.”
Mitch’s mouth dropped open, and it took him a second to find words.
“You can’t be fricking serious.”
“I told you, run away, go back to Idaho or wherever, just get away from here.”
“I can’t.”
Above them, the fluorescent lights began to dim and flicker. Mitch formed an image of Hunter at the bottom of a whirlpool with an ocean of energy sucking down toward him. Mitch latched onto the idea that the odd flash, the way Hunter used the term “capacitor,” the magic, were all related. He pieced together the implica
tions and spoke, the words tumbling out to keep pace with his thoughts.
“Energy. That flash of energy, then the lab goes into the toilet. All the other magic stuff, it’s all some wild application of energy.”
Hunter’s head was turning back and forth, dismissing the words as fast as Mitch uttered them. “You can’t know this.”
Like sparks leaping from a bonfire, ideas and connections leapt in Mitch’s mind.
“If it’s energy, then it's subject to the laws of physics—energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but transformed into a different form.”
In his excitement, he saw the change in Hunter’s face without comprehending the reasons.
“And for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. It’s not magic, it’s crazy weird physics.” Mitch stopped the torrent of words long enough to understand what he had said.
“That spark, from Kenzie,” he said, forgetting that Hunter didn’t know her, “through me to you, it’s all part of the chain of reactions. And you’re like, what, an overloaded battery?”
Hunter’s façade crumbled, and he let the fear write itself onto his face, dark and shadowy. “It’s like a fire hose,” he said, “on full blast, and I’m the only one on the end of the nozzle.”
“Well, figure out how to chill, dude, before you blow up the lights.”
Hunter glanced up, saw the flickering. The effort to control himself wrote itself in his strained look and the flat compression of his lips. The illumination steadied.
“So what happens now?” asked Hunter. “You can’t tell anyone. Most people will think you’re crazy, and my Family will destroy you as soon as they understand how you did whatever it was you did to store energy like that.”
The bell sounded, and Mitch jumped.
“I guess we come up with a plan that saves everybody’s ass,” he said.
“How do we do that?”
“I got no idea, dude, not even a clue.”
Chapter 25
Kenzie stormed into the martial arts studio. Behind her, she heard the door open and close. Little Bo Peep only had sheep following her. She had Jackson. In the car, she had a “suitable dress” for her mother’s “party.”
She changed into her uniform in a couple of fast shrugs and a tug, tied the red belt around her waist and knotted it, and stepped back into the open. Jules met her eyes through the glass window of the office and twitched her head to one side.
Come here.
Kenzie, chin out, blew a breath of air up, a mixture of a sigh and a snort. She stomped past Jackson, or tried to, but the carpeted floor and her slight build defeated the effort. To make up for it, she dumped her bag at his feet.
“Yes, ma’am?” she said, from the office door. The skin on her face was tight from chin to hairline, and she kept her gaze down to the floor.
“I think,” said Jules, in measured tones, “that you need some practice on the heavy bags. Set up two speed bags across from the hanging heavy bags. Begin with a straight progression, ten kicks each leg, front, side, round, and use the speed bag for hook kicks. Then hit the basic hand and elbow attacks. Once you’re warmed up, begin to set up combinations, and keep moving from bag to bag.”
Jules glanced at the clock. “You have thirty minutes, then class starts.”
After the barest of pauses, Kenzie nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
Kenzie retraced her steps, stopped at the entrance to the training floor, and bowed deeply. She crossed the floor to where the portable heavy bags lined the wall, red pads on sand-filled black bases standing sentry next to the black-on-black speed bags. With a grunt because even the smaller training targets weighed more than she did, she dragged a pair of free-standing reflex bags into position.
Kenzie faced the hanging heavy bag. Teeth clenched, she settled into a back stance, weight on her right leg, hands coming up into defensive position. Her left foot lashed out, lifting and snapping toward the bag. With her toes pulled back, Kenzie struck the bag at waist height, the rough canvas making a rasping sound as the force of the impact sent the bag away.
In her mind, she pictured the kick striking the solar plexus of ferret-faced Ashley Rowbury.
Hana, she thought, counting in Korean as Jules had taught her.
The bag creaked back toward her, a heavy pendulum tied to a support beam by stout white rope. Kenzie launched another front kick.
Dul . . .
The bag started to pivot.
. . . set . . .
The kicks and words worked together to build a rhythm that settled her mind.
She finished the left leg with a loud mental yell. Yoel!
She switched legs and repeated the sequence. As her body warmed to the work, her mind drifted to the hallway of All Friends, and Alicia Rowbury, with a pair of minions, because nothing says I’m popular like mindless followers.
She shifted again, sending a powerful side kick into the meat of the bag with a thunk that lifted it on the rope and popped the canvas-covered weight backward.
Alicia, looking down her nose, mocking her as she spoke. “I thought you’d be interested, McKenzie”—always a heavy accent on her name, like there was something wrong with it—“that my father was asking about you.”
While Kenzie searched for a reason for Miss Bitch’s dad to even know who she was, Alicia opened her lips in a fake smile and handed Kenzie the information.
“I suppose mostly he wanted to know what you said about your family’s little company,” the tall ash-blonde said. Her voice changed from mocking to sugary-sweet venom. “My father takes over crappy little companies and rebuilds them into successes. Of course, he has to fire all the old people and bring in his own management team to fix them.”
The other girls had laughed. Kenzie’s face burned, but there was no way to respond, short of hurling insults, and she’d seen too much of Alicia destroying other girls with wickedly fast and mean statements to dare it.
Kenzie, done with the heavy bag, stepped to the speed bag. The pad was set at head height. Alicia’s head height.
The hook kick, a deceptively fast and effective attack, set the target oscillating.
Hana.
I got answers, thought Kenzie, with a glare.
Dul.
Except I can’t use them.
Set.
Kenzie nearly missed the next kick, her heel scraping along the side of the canvas as she misjudged the movement.
A firm voice called from the office doorway. “Kenzie, you’re thinking. Stop.”
Kenzie broke out of her stance to acknowledge Jules with a nod. The black belt walked onto the floor and toward the heavy bags and Kenzie.
Kenzie refocused her efforts, aware that her instructor analyzed each movement. She finished the warm-up sets with a sheen of fine sweat on her skin, nervous because the tall woman beside her was quiet.
“Better.” With the single word of encouragement, Jules retreated back to the office.
Kenzie ripped through the hands-and-elbows sequence. In the middle of a hard step-in strike, she recalled the elbow Mitch had delivered to Jackson the day he returned her permit. The question slipped away with the sounds of her fists hitting the bag.
Then it was time for the combinations. Kenzie mixed hands and legs into attacks on the bags. Without a real threat, she delivered them like she was guessing at right answers. Finally, she decided to pretend that each target was an enemy and to visualize a scene in her mind. The heavy bag became the men that tried to abduct her, and the speed bags represented Alicia and the minions. Her movements smoothed out. She flowed into one attack on the heavy bag, broke away to deal with a “threat” from the first speed bag, and kept moving. As she did, a new image formed.
The image lasted one sequence and changed. The walls grew indistinct, absorbed into a damp fog of gray. The heavy bag represented an ogre, the smaller bags knaves; a trio, intent on her. The lights above dimmed, and now she breathed faster, moved faster, as her imagination supplied sounds to match her
movements. She spun to her right, engaged a knave, but in her mind’s eye, drab brown cloth, coarse and thick over a muscled forearm, blocked her spinning backfist.
She kept moving.
She sunk a side kick into the distended stomach of the ogre. Hard contact that generated a foul expulsion of fetid breath, but he didn’t fall.
Turn, an elbow to one knave, and a lightning-fast spinning hook kick snapping like a whip to the head of the second.
The second knave dropped, but the ogre came into striking range.
Instinctively, she stepped under the arms—Can’t let him grab me!–and launched a fast combination of punches into the kidney area, then ducked under again, before the ogre could turn.
Her momentum sent her toward the last knave. He bobbed his head as the distance closed.
Kenzie gathered herself and leapt. Her right foot slashed up and out, slipped between his arms, and caught the knave under the chin.
He’s finished.
She landed, balanced on the balls of her feet. She stared at the ogre, feinted right, and crossed over to deliver a spinning sidekick. The ogre lurched, folded, and charged with a roar as she landed and recovered her footing.
The space between them closed in a blink. In that instant, Kenzie pivoted and, uttering an explosive “Kai!” that shocked her ears, unloaded a mule kick straight behind her with all the force she could gather.
With a bang, the rope holding the heavy bag parted. The sound was enough to break Kenzie out of her fantasy.
She looked at the bag crumpled to the floor in dismay. The first speed bag was on the ground. The second was “headless,” the pad lying twenty feet away.
A group of young students gaped at her, Jules towering over them, a peculiar cast to her face.
A yellow-belted girl named Sophie, no more than ten, with corn-colored pigtails and an oval-shaped face, looked wide-eyed at Kenzie and then to the bag.
“Daaaammnnn,” she said, voice filled with awe, and embarrassingly, hero worship.
Jules ran the class through forms, the choreographed movements that simulated an attack and response. Starting with the first form, the class stepped forward, punched, and blocked in unison.