• • •
Ronnie lunged at me with his knife.
I slapped the outside of his hand hard enough to send the wooden practice weapon clattering across the basement floor. My other hand formed a claw that clamped on to the front of his throat. “You shifted your weight onto your back leg before you struck. You might as well have shouted, ‘It’s stabbing time!’”
I let go of his neck. He pulled back and rubbed his hand.
Annette would have disapproved. I could imagine her grumbling.“Stop teaching the wannabe killer how to be better at it.”
But I couldn’t shake how much Ronnie reminded me of myself at that age. Weaker and less skilled but with the same dreams of saving the world, the same burning need to prove himself.
I didn’t want him to make the same irreparable mistakes I’d made. And if he was like me, a good workout would help him open up. It might even give me a chance at getting through to him.
“Try again,” I said.
This time, he tried to surprise me by throwing the knife as soon as he picked it up. I gave him points for mixing things up, but he still telegraphed his attack, making it easy enough to deal with.
“Okay, so you can catch knives,” he said. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Your form was good. The knife would have stuck me point first in the throat.”
He took a bamboo shinai—a kendo practice sword—from the weapons rack and gave it a twirl. “My parents used to train me. Swords, bows, guns. Throwing knives. Anything that can kill monsters.”
I adjusted my grip on the knife and motioned for him to come at me. “Sounds a lot like my childhood.”
He circled to my left. “Were your parents Hunters of Artemis, too?”
“I was adopted. My father was an actuary. My mother was a dental hygienist. They didn’t know about my after-school job.” I almost missed Ronnie’s next attack. I twisted out of the way, but my back twinged in protest. I tapped his chest with the tip of my knife. “My mentor was named Felipe Aguilar, and if he were training you, these wouldn’t be wooden weapons.”
“How many kills did you have?”
“You want to know my high score?” I straightened. “Did your parents teach you this was a game?”
His face darkened, and he turned away. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Tell me about the harvester.” I kept an eye on his stance in case he tried to catch me off guard again. “Was that the first monster you tried to kill?”
“I helped with a pixie hive outside of an elementary school outside of Birmingham, but I don’t think that counts. Ma did most of the work. I just sprayed the hive with Raid when she was finished.”
“How did you feel when you stabbed the harvester?” I thought back to my first real fight. “Were you afraid? Exhilarated? Did you feel powerful and righteous?”
He cocked his head. “Not afraid—I wasn’t scared or anything. More like I was in a dream, like time slowed down and sped up all at once.”
I understood that feeling all too well. “What was it like the first time the knife pierced her skin?”
He lowered his sword. “Her?”
“The harvester was female.”
He glanced away, and I could have killed him eleven times in the pause that followed. “There was hardly any resistance. I didn’t expect it to be so...”
“Easy?” I returned the knife to its place in the rack. “Felipe taught me that killing was easy because it was my calling. The hunting and tracking and all the planning and preparation werework, but the actual killing? Landing the blow that takes a life? That was nothing. A split second for the knife to slash a throat or the arrow to pierce a heart.”
He leaned his sword against the weight bench and picked up one of the dumbbells. “This is starting to sound like a lecture.”
“How old are you, Ronnie?”
“Seventeen. And before you ask, I got my GED more than a year ago.” His face turned red as he struggled to curl the dumbbell. I didn’t tell him it was one of my warm-up weights.
