I grunted. I still wasn’t in a good place to talk about it. “What’s on the agenda for this afternoon?”
“I’m going to show you how to use a gun. A rifle.” He paused and looked over at me. “You’re not going to tell me you already know how to do that, are you?”
The laugh was louder than I wanted, but I couldn’t stop it. “No, no. I’ve never held a gun. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Excellent!” Aiko tipped his head. “Well, not really excellent, but I’m glad I get to at least teach you something.”
“I liked our lessons this morning.” I openly laughed.
Aiko held his laugh back, trying to scold me, but it wasn’t working very well.
He pulled out his gun and started naming the pieces as he took it apart to clean it. “It is important that you clean it because the carbon from the ammunition can really mess it up and foul the aim.”
Two long hours of taking apart and reassembling one of the other guns, then the rifle, he finally felt that it was time to let me try firing one of them.
We walked to the range, and Aiko handed me the long gun, the rifle.
“Now, you have to remember when you pull the trigger, you’re going to experience something called kickback, and you have to know how to handle it. With a rifle like this, you have to tuck it into your shoulder—no, no, lower, into the crease of your arm.”
I moved it down and tucked it into the spot he pointed to, and it was actually more comfortable.
“Why are you doing this?”
“What?” He was confused.
“Why are you giving us guns and teaching me and…”
“And letting your other raiding party steal the weapons from the north?”
I tucked that information in the back of my head. Rilen’s raiding party had been successful.
I nodded.
“Because we need your help to rally the vampires. We are beaten, oppressed, and just damn tired of fighting. With you behind us, we can stir the rebels back to fever pitch and, with luck and skill, kill Savion.” He pointed the gun down the range while I held it. “We need your fresh energy to finally—finally be free of him.”
I remembered everything Aiko had told me about the gun—about aiming, how the gun worked, and just to be patient with myself.
I found the target and pulled the trigger.
The gun slammed into my shoulder, and it did hurt, but only for a moment. I held on and held it steady. Glancing downrange, I could see that the bullet had already done the damage it needed to.
“Excellent,” the lord knight said quietly. “Do it again.”
I nodded.
The raw power in the gun was stunning, and I knew it could be a very dangerous thing in the wrong hands.
Savion’s hands.
I aimed again.
And again.
I imagined the target was first Savion, then Elex, then the ass who took Carolee’s head. Every single one of those images was something I wanted to destroy.
For the next four hours, all I did was put bullet after bullet in the targets that came up. Some still, some moving.
All now with lead embedded in them.
