I’d nearly forgotten that I’d left my costume in the hands of Lia. Brayden wasn’t the only one interested in seeing what I’d be wearing.
“Looking forward to it,” I said.
After a few moments, I wondered why he wasn’t leaving. He still wore that shyness and uncertainty, as though he were trying to work up the nerve to say something. Only, as it turned out, speaking wasn’t what he wanted to do. With a great show of courage, he stepped forward and kissed me. It was nice, though once again a little underwhelming.
From the look on Brayden’s face, however, he might have been sent to new heights. Why didn’t I have the same reaction? Maybe I’d done something wrong after all. Or maybe I was deficient?
“See you Saturday,” he said.
I made a mental note to add kissing to my list of research topics.
I got back to Amberwood and texted Adrian as I was walking into my dorm. There’s a defense class that starts tomorrow night. $75. Despite his interest last night, I was a little skeptical of whether he’d snapped out of his depression enough to be up for something like this. I wasn’t even sure if he was going to his art classes anymore. A minute later, I got his answer: I’ll be there. This was followed by another text: Can u spot me the cash?
Jill was walking into the dorm, just as I was, both of us barely getting in before curfew. She didn’t even notice me and instead looked troubled and pensive. “Hey,” I called. “Jill?”
She stopped halfway through the lobby and blinked in surprise upon seeing me. “Oh, hey. Were you out with your boyfriend?”
I winced. “Not sure I’d call him that yet.”
“How many times have you gone out?”
“Four.”
“He’s taking you to the dance?”
“I’m meeting him there.”
She shrugged. “Sounds like a boyfriend to me.”
“Sounds like you’re quoting something from Kristin and Julia’s dating guidebook.”
That brought a fleeting smile, but it didn’t last. “I think it’s just common sense.”
I studied her, still trying to get a feel for her mood. “Are you okay? You looked like something was bothering you. Is it… is it Adrian? Is he still upset?” For a moment, I was actually more worried about Adrian than her.
“No,” she said. “I mean, well, yes. But he’s a little better. He’s excited about learning self-defense with you.” The bond would never cease to amaze me. I’d only communicated with Adrian a minute ago.
“‘Excited?’” I asked. That seemed like an astonishingly strong reaction.
“It’s a distraction. And a distraction’s the best thing for him in these moods,” she explained. “He is still upset, though. He’s still depressed over his dad.”
“I shouldn’t have taken him to San Diego,” I murmured, more to myself than her. “If I’d refused, he wouldn’t have been able to get there.”
Jill looked skeptical. “I don’t know. I think he would’ve found a way, with or without you. What happened between them was going to happen eventually.” She sounded remarkably wise.
“I just feel terrible seeing Adrian like this,” I said.
“These moods come and go for him. Always have.” Jill got a faraway look in her eyes. “He’s laid off the drinking a little bit—for my sake. But then that just opens him up for… well, it’s hard to explain. You know how spirit drives people insane? When he’s down like this and sober, it makes him more vulnerable.”
“Are you saying Adrian’s going crazy?” That was not a complication I was ready for.
“No, not exactly.” She pursed her lips as she thought. “He just gets a little scattered… weird. You’ll know it when you see it. He kind of makes sense but kind of not. Gets dreamy and rambles. But not in the way I do. It’s got like a—I don’t know—mystical feel. But it’s not actually magical. It’s just him kind of… losing it temporarily. It never lasts and, like I said, you’ll know it when you see it.”
“I think I might have…” An unexpected memory flashed back to me, of just before Sonya and Dimitri had arrived. I’d been at Adrian’s, and he’d looked at me strangely, like he was just noticing me for the first time. Thinking about it still sent chills through me.
My God, Sage. Your eyes. How have I never noticed them? The color… like molten gold. I could paint those…
“Girls?” Mrs. Weathers was at her desk, shutting things down for the night. “You need to get to your rooms.”
We nodded obediently and moved toward the stairs. When we reached Jill’s floor, I stopped her before she could leave. “Hey—if Adrian’s not the problem, then what was bothering you when you came in? Is everything okay?”
“Huh? Oh, that.” She flushed in a cute kind of way. “Yeah. I guess. I don’t know. Micah… um, well, he kissed me tonight. For the first time. And I guess I was just kind of surprised at how I felt about it.”
I was surprised they hadn’t kissed before and supposed I should be grateful. Her words resonated with me. “What do you mean? Did it feel a lot less exciting than you expected? Like you were just touching someone’s lips? Like you were kissing a relative?”
She gave me a puzzled look. “No. That’s crazy. Why would you think that?”
“Um, just guessing.” I suddenly felt silly. Why had it felt that way for me?
“It was great, actually.” A faraway look came over her. “Well, almost. I couldn’t quite get into it as much as I wanted because I was worried about my fangs. It’s easy to hide them talking and smiling. But not while kissing. And all I kept thinking was, ‘What am I going to say if he notices?’ And then I started thinking about what you and everyone else said. About how this thing with Micah isn’t a good idea and how I can’t keep things hands-off forever. I like him. I like him a lot. But not enough to risk exposing the Moroi… or endanger Lissa.”
“That’s a noble attitude.”
“I guess. I don’t want to end things yet, though. Micah’s so nice… and I love all the friends I’ve made by being with him. I guess I’ll just see what happens… but it’s hard. It’s a wake-up call.” She looked so sad as she went into her room.
Continuing on to mine, I felt bad for Jill… but at the same time, I was relieved. I’d stressed over her casual dating of Micah, worried we’d be facing some dramatic, romantic situation where she refused to give him up because their love was too great and transcended their races. Instead, I should have had more faith in her. She wasn’t as immature as I sometimes thought. Jill was going to realize the truth and resolve this on her own.
Her words about Adrian also stuck with me, particularly when I picked him up the next evening for our first self-defense class. He got into my car with a cheery attitude, seeming neither depressed nor crazy. He was, I noticed, dressed very nicely, in clothes that would have been an excellent choice for the visit to his father. He noticed my attire as well.
“Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in anything so… casual.” I had on olive green yoga pants and an Amberwood T-shirt.
“The class description said to dress in comfortable workout clothes—like I texted you earlier.” I gave his raw silk shirt a meaningful look.
“This is very comfortable,” he assured me. “Besides, I don’t own any workout clothes.”
As I shifted the car into drive, I caught sight of Adrian’s left hand. At first, I thought he was bleeding. Then, I realized it was red paint.
“You’re painting again,” I said in delight. “I thought you’d stopped.”
“Yeah, well. You can’t take painting classes and not paint, Sage.”
“I thought you’d stopped those too.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “Nearly did. But then I remembered I’d convinced some girl that if she gave me a chance and got me into those classes, I’d follow through on them. That’ll teach me.”
I smiled and pulled into traffic.
I’d left a little early so that Adrian and I had time to take care of our registrati
on. When I’d called the Wolfe School of Defense earlier today, an agitated man had told me to just show up with the money since we were down to the last minute. The address was outside of downtown, in a residence set on sprawling grounds that had made no attempts to go green and thwart the climate. The desert still held claim here, giving the house a dismal, forlorn look. If not for WOLFE printed on the mailbox, I would’ve thought we had the wrong place. We pulled up into the gravel drive—no other cars were there—and stared.
“This is the kind of place you see in movies,” said Adrian. “Where careless people run into serial killers.”
“At least it’s still light out,” I said. Ever since the alley, darkness had taken on a whole new menace for me. “Can’t be that bad.”
Adrian opened the car door. “Let’s find out.”
We rang the doorbell and were immediately met with the sounds of barking and scampering feet. I stepped back uneasily. “I hate poorly trained dogs,” I muttered to Adrian. “They need to behave and be kept in line.”
“Just like the people in your life, huh?” asked Adrian.
The door opened, and we were met by a fifty-something man with a grizzled blond beard. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. Also, he had an eye patch.
“This is incredible,” I heard Adrian murmur. “Beyond my wildest dreams.”
I was taken aback. The eye patch made me think of Keith’s glass eye, which in turn made me think of my role in him acquiring it. It wasn’t a memory I liked being reminded of, and I wondered at the odds of running into another one-eyed man. This guy nudged the herd of dogs aside—which appeared to be some sort of Chihuahua mix—and barely managed to step outside without them following before he shut the door.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“We’re, uh, here for the class. The self-defense class.” I felt the need to clarify, in case he also taught about dog breeding or riding the high seas. “I’m Sydney, this is Adrian. I called this morning?”
“Ah, right, right.” He scratched his beard. “You got the money? Cash only.”
I produced one hundred and fifty dollars and handed it over. Out of habit, I nearly asked for a receipt, but then thought better of it. He stuffed the cash into the pocket of his shorts.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re in. Go ahead and wait in the garage until the others show up. The side door’s unlocked.” He gestured to a large, industrial looking building—twice the size of the house—over on the far side of the lot. Without waiting around to see if we’d comply, he slipped back inside to the barking dogs.
The garage’s interior, I was relieved to see, was the first thing here that looked like it had some semblance of legitimacy. There were clean mats on the floor and mirrors on some of the walls. A TV and VHS player sat on a cart, along with some defense-related tapes covered in dust. Slightly more disconcerting was some of the decor, like a pair of nunchucks hanging on the wall.
“Don’t touch those!” I warned, seeing Adrian head toward them. “That’s not the kind of guy whose stuff you want to mess with.”
Adrian stayed hands-off. “Do you think we’ll get to learn to use these?”
“Weapons weren’t in the class description. It’s about basic self-defense and hand-to-hand.”
“Why bother then?” Adrian strolled over to a glass case displaying several types of brass knuckles. “That’s the kind of stuff Castile does all day. He could have showed us.”
“I wanted someone a little more approachable,” I explained.
“What, like Captain McTropicalShorts back there? Where on earth did you find him anyway?”
“Just did an Internet search.” Feeling a need to defend my research, I added, “He comes highly recommended.”
“By who? Long John Silver?” Despite myself, I laughed.
Over the next half hour, the rest of our class trickled in. One was a woman who looked to be about seventy. Another was a mother who’d just had her fourth child and decided she needed to “learn to protect them.” The last two women in the class were in their mid-twenties and wore T-shirts with angry girl-power catchphrases. Adrian and I were the youngest in the group. He was the only man, not counting our instructor, who asked that we simply refer to him as Wolfe.
I was beginning to get a bad feeling about all of this, particularly as class started. The six of us sat on the floor while Wolfe leaned against one of the mirrors and looked down upon us. “If you’re here,” he began. “You probably want to learn to use those right away.” He pointed at the nunchucks.
I caught sight of Adrian’s face in the mirror. His expression said, Yes, that is exactly what I want to learn.
“Well, too bad,” said Wolfe. “You aren’t ever going to use them. Not in this class, anyway. Oh, they’ve got their uses, believe me. Saved my ass more than once when I was out bow-hunting in Alaska a few years ago. But if you pay attention to what I’m going to tell you, you won’t ever need to pick those up, seeing as we don’t have a rabid moose problem here in Palm Springs.”
The new mom raised her hand. “You used nunchucks on a moose?”
Wolfe got a haunted look in his eyes. “I used all sorts of things on that bastard. But that’s neither here nor now. Because here’s the thing. With a little common sense, you won’t need weapons. Or fists. You.”
To my shock, Wolfe pointed at me and fixed me with a steely, one-eyed stare.
“What did I tell you to do when you arrived?”
I gulped. “Give you cash, sir.”
“And after that?”
“You told us to come wait out here.”
He nodded in satisfaction, so apparently my answering of the obvious had gone well. “We’re two miles from any other houses and about a mile from the highway. You don’t know me, and let’s face it, this place looks like something from a serial killer film.” Out of the corner of my eye, Adrian flashed me a triumphant look. “I sent you out into a remote building with hardly any windows. You went inside. Did you look around as you were walking over here? Did you scan the surroundings in here before coming all the way inside? Did you check the exits?”
“I—”
“No, of course you didn’t,” he interrupted. “No one ever does. And that is the first rule of self-defense. Don’t assume anything. You don’t have to live your life in fear, but know what’s around you. Be smart. Don’t go blindly into dark alleys or parking lots.”
And like that, I was hooked.
Wolfe was astonishingly well prepared. He had lots of stories and examples of attacks, ones that kept reminding me: humans are some of the most vicious creatures out there, not vampires. He showed us pictures and diagrams of various unsafe places, pointing out vulnerabilities and providing pretty practical advice that should’ve been obvious to most people—but wasn’t. The more he spoke, the more foolish I felt about what had happened with Sonya. If those guys had wanted to attack Sonya badly enough, they would’ve found a way somehow. But there were a million things I could have done to be more cautious and possibly avoid the confrontation that went down that night. That idea turned out to be a huge part of Wolfe’s philosophy: avoidance of danger in the first place.
Even when he finally moved on to discuss some very basic moves, his emphasis was on using them to get away—not to stick around and beat your attacker into the ground. He let us practice some of these moves in the last half hour of the class, having us pair up to work with classmates and a dummy since we didn’t really want to hurt each other.
“Thank God,” said Adrian, when we broke out to practice. He and I were partners. “I thought I’d come to a fight class to learn how not to fight.”
“But he’s right,” I said. “If you can avoid the fight, so much the better.”
“But what if you can’t?” asked Adrian. “Like with your sword-wielding friends? What do you do once you’re in trouble?”
I tapped our blank-faced stuffed practice dummy. “That’s what this is for.”
Wolfe’s main
move today was on how to break out of someone’s hold if we were grabbed from behind. He had a couple of techniques which weren’t much more complex than head-butting or stomping on feet. Adrian and I took turns being the attacker while the victim practiced the maneuvers—in slow motion and with almost no contact on our partners. That was what the dummies were for. I was about five inches shorter than Adrian and seemed pretty implausible as an attacker, which made us both laugh each time I made a move. Wolfe chastised us for not being serious enough but gave us high marks for learning the techniques.
This made me feel a little arrogant, enough so that when Adrian turned his back to get a water bottle, I sneaked up from behind and flung my arms around him, pinning his arms in turn. Wolfe had shown us how to break that type of hold, and I honestly thought Adrian had seen me coming enough to slip away before I even touched him. Apparently not. He froze, and for one moment, we stood locked in time. I could feel the silk of his shirt against my skin and the warmth of his body. The lingering scent of the overpriced cologne he wore floated around me. No smoke for a change. I’d always told him the cologne couldn’t be worth what he spent, but suddenly, I reconsidered. It was amazing.
I was so awash in sensory overload that I was caught completely unaware when he did push me away.
“What are you doing?” he exclaimed. I’d thought he’d be impressed at my sneak attack, but there was neither approval nor humor on his face. My own smile faded.
“Testing if you could handle a surprise attack.” My tone was hesitant. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. He looked uncomfortable. Almost upset. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he said gruffly. For a moment his eyes locked onto me with an intensity that left me breathless. Then, he glanced away, as though he couldn’t handle looking at me. I felt more confused than ever. “Never thought I’d see the day when you’d throw your arms around a vam—someone like me.”
I barely even noticed his public slipup. His words drew me up short. He was right. I’d touched him without even thinking about it—and not just a formal Moroi handshake, like usual. Sure, it was in the context of our class, but I knew that I never could have done this a few months ago. Touching him now had seemed perfectly natural. Was that why he was upset? Was he worried about the Alchemists and me?
The Golden Lily: A Bloodlines Novel Page 18