Shadowspell

Chapter Twelve

My parents wanted me to spend the night at Dad’s house. I guess they thought I was in need of their nurturing comfort or something. If I stayed, they’d probably expect me to talk to them and let them coddle me, and I was afraid I’d lose control of my fragile temper and make the evening even uglier than it already was. Besides, though my dad obviously had money, his house wasn’t exactly huge, and my mom was in the only spare bedroom. Mom offered to sleep on the couch so I could have her room, but I refused.

Dad could have made me stay, of course. But I think he’s the kind of guy who’d rather be left alone when he’s miserable, so he understood where I was coming from.

Whatever the reason, he agreed to take me back to my safe house. Finn met us there, and when Dad left, I retreated to my suite to be alone with my thoughts.

I knew I should call Kimber to check and see how she was doing. But I knew how she was doing, and it was lousy. Calling her would be the right thing to do, but that night, I just didn’t have it in me to do the right thing. I didn’t want to face the guilt her grief would stir up. And I didn’t want to cry anymore, which I knew I’d do the moment I heard her voice. Even looking at my freshly manicured nails practically set me off, and if I’d had any nail polish remover, I’d probably have put it to use. I thought about trying to call the magic again as a way to distract myself, but I wasn’t sure I could sing even “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” right now. So instead, I went to bed way early, then lay there wide awake wondering if there was anything I could have done to save Ethan.

I must have fallen asleep eventually, because I woke up to the sound of someone pounding on my bedroom door. I groaned and tried to settle back down into the covers. Sleep was the greatest invention in the history of mankind. When I was sleeping, I wasn’t feeling guilty, or miserable, or sad.

The pounding on the door continued until I realized that sleep was not among my options. I have one of those alarm clocks that gradually brightens in the morning so I didn’t have to wake up to the pitch-black of the cave. When I finally forced my eyes open, I saw that the clock’s light was at its brightest, so even though it took me a moment to focus my bleary eyes, I knew immediately that it was morning.

The pounding on my door was relentless. And annoying.

“All right!” I yelled. “I’m up.” Why couldn’t Finn just let me sleep? It wasn’t like I had somewhere I had to be.

“Sorry to wake you,” Finn called through the door. He didn’t sound very sorry. “Keane’s been waiting over an hour, and I figured that was enough.”

It took like five minutes for me to process what Finn said. Then I remembered this was Tuesday morning, which is one of my regularly scheduled lesson days with Keane. A glance at the clock told me it was well after ten, and my lessons usually started at the ungodly hour of nine.

I pushed my sleep-matted hair out of my eyes and stifled a curse. I hadn’t expected Keane to show up today. I know life goes on and everything, but still …

I’d have tried to crap out on the lesson, but I knew Keane too well. He’d come into my room and drag me out of bed if he had to, then carry me over his shoulder to the practice mats.

“Tell him I’ll be out in a few minutes,” I said with resignation.

Usually, I shower before our sparring sessions, even though I know I’ll land right back in the shower as soon as the lesson’s over. Today, I just didn’t feel like it. I was pretty sure I didn’t stink, although one glance in the bathroom mirror was almost enough to make me flee in terror. Yeah, I looked that bad.

I brushed my teeth, washed my face, then combed out the tangles in my hair and arranged it in a messy knot at the back of my head. Then, still yawning, I dressed in yoga pants and a form-fitting tank top. When I’d first started training, I’d worn loose, comfortable T-shirts. I’d quickly discovered that loose, comfortable T-shirts don’t do such a great job of keeping you covered when you spend half of your time upside down or being dragged across mats. It still made me blush to think of the up-close-and-personal look Keane had gotten of my bra. (Thank God I’d been wearing one! I’m flat-chested enough that I could go without.)

Keane was waiting for me in the sitting room. The furniture had already been moved aside, and he’d laid out the mats. It was the usual routine, and yet when I got a look at his face, I saw that at least part of the usual routine was missing.

Keane is all about arrogance and attitude, and his catalog of facial expressions usually runs to smirks, smugness, and glowers. Today, he looked different. Whatever he was feeling, I wouldn’t call it a happy emotion. Was it because he knew what had happened with Ethan yesterday? Or was he still sulking about how his dad had kicked his butt in front of me?

Whatever it was, I didn’t want to deal with it. Hell, I didn’t want to deal with anything.

I gave myself a mental slap upside the head. Ethan hadn’t wanted to be captured by the Wild Hunt, either. What we want out of life and what we get are two entirely different stories.

I wondered what was happening to Ethan right now. Was his wound all healed? What had the Erlking done to him? Ethan was apparently destined to become a member of the Wild Hunt, but what did that entail? I remembered the Erlking saying that his Huntsmen don’t talk, and I shuddered as my mind tried to send me pictures of just what he might have done to them to keep them mute.

Damn it, tears were burning my eyes again. I blinked fiercely, determined to keep them back. Crying wasn’t going to save Ethan, and it wasn’t going to make me feel any better.

Keane proved to me once again that he was all heart. While I stood there in the doorway trying to get control of myself, he crossed the distance between us in a couple of long strides. Was he coming over to give me a hug, or commiserate with me, or tell me everything was going to be all right?

Not exactly.

Before I had a chance to react, he’d grabbed me and yanked me forward, pulling me off balance and then sweeping my legs out from under me. I was completely unprepared for the attack, and I found myself heading face-first toward the stone floor, since we hadn’t even gotten to the mats yet. Instinctively, I put my hands out to stop my fall, but Keane grabbed me under the arms and hauled me to my feet before I hit the floor. He then shoved me, hard, onto the mats.

Graceful as a wounded rhinoceros, I tripped over the edge of the mats and went sprawling. I’d had enough lessons with Keane by now to know that I didn’t dare lie there and catch my breath, so I rolled quickly to the right, avoiding Keane’s pounce. I hadn’t secured my hair well enough, and a strand came loose to dangle in my face.

I pushed to my feet, my body going on autopilot now that the lesson had started—whether I was ready for it or not. Keane was frowning at me and shaking his head.

“How many times have I warned you not to put your hands out like that?” he barked, doing his best drill-sergeant impersonation. “You could have broken your damn wrists!”

I tried not to flinch. I’d thought I’d gotten used to the way he yelled at me when we sparred, but I guess I was in a particularly fragile state of mind. It was true, though, that Keane had spent a lot of time teaching me how to fall, and taking the full impact on my outstretched hands wasn’t in the lesson plan.

Usually, I’d have had some kind of snappy comeback. Well, at least a lame comeback that I could pretend was snappy. Today, I kept quiet and wished I’d stayed in bed. Keane wouldn’t have been able to come drag me out if I’d hit the panic button and lowered the security doors in the hallway.

Keane must have been in as foul a mood as I was. Instead of waiting for me to say something or to brace myself, he swung his fist at my head. Once again, my body went on autopilot, and without thinking about it, I stepped into the punch, taking away his momentum, while sweeping my arm up to block it. I was too slow to block it completely, and ended up taking the blow on my shoulder.

I know Keane holds back during our sparring sessions, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when he hits me. When we’d first started, the pain had often shocked me into immobility, at least for a moment. Today, it just made me mad. I countered with a kick to his knee that would almost certainly have broken something if it weren’t for his shield spell.

We were fighting in earnest now, my entire being concentrating on blocking his blows and evading his holds, while still looking—unsuccessfully—for a way to get through his defenses. There was no actual teaching going on, not right now anyway. If my brain weren’t so busy trying to keep me in one piece, I might have wondered what had gotten into Keane this morning.

I was doing a pretty good job of defending myself, but each blocked punch or kick hurt, and the pain made me madder and madder, until finally I threw a punch of my own.

My lessons with Keane were all about self-defense, not offense. Yeah, I’d learned to kick and punch and grab, but always with the goal of learning to momentarily disable my attacker so I could get away. I was only supposed to attack the most vulnerable parts of his body with the least vulnerable parts of my own. Which was why I took us both by surprise when my fist made contact with his jaw.

If he’d been a real bad guy, it would have been a terrible decision. I’m not strong enough to do a lot of damage with a punch, unless it’s to something really sensitive. Plus there’s the little-advertised fact that, duh, when you smash your fist against something hard, it hurts, and jaw bones tend to be pretty damn hard. So do the shield spells Fae fighters use to protect themselves.

I felt the impact all the way up my arm to my shoulder, and for a moment my fingers went completely numb. I had half a second to register the surprise on Keane’s face—and to feel a malicious thrill of triumph—before the numbness went away and my hand screamed with pain.

I half-expected Keane to take advantage of my distraction—he wasn’t exactly taking it easy on me today—but I couldn’t help cradling my hand against my body, gritting my teeth against the pain. It left me completely undefended, but at that moment I didn’t care.

Keane heaved a dramatic sigh and reached for me. “Let me see it,” he said in a long-suffering tone.

I jerked out of his reach, anger still simmering in my veins. “Don’t touch me!” My knuckles throbbed to the beat of my heart. I saw no evidence that my punch had actually hurt him. Surprising him seemed to be the best I could do. Somehow, that wasn’t quite as satisfying.

Keane rolled his eyes. “Don’t be a drama queen. Let me see the hand. If it’s just bruised, I can heal it. If you broke something, we need to get you to the emergency room.”

“I didn’t break anything.” At least, I hoped I hadn’t.

“Then let me heal it.”

Even the least powerful of the Fae have enough power to heal minor injuries like bruises. Keane, with his Knight heritage, could heal more serious ones than the average Fae, but fixing broken bones was beyond his capabilities. It was a sign of Ethan’s magical genius that he could heal broken bones even though he was neither a healer nor a fighter.

Thinking of Ethan took the last of the fight out of me, and I meekly held out my hand for Keane to examine. The knuckles still throbbed, and my middle finger was starting to swell. I tensed in anticipation as Keane ran his fingers lightly over the back of my hand, examining the damage.

Considering what a hardass he was as a teacher, he was surprisingly gentle with me now as he prodded and poked and forced my fingers to move. Gentle or not, it still hurt, and it took all my willpower not to yank my hand out of his grasp.

“Not broken,” he finally declared with a nod.

I let out a sigh of relief. I needed a trip to the emergency room like I needed another enemy out to kill me. I expected to feel the tingle of Keane’s magic gathering, but instead he let go of my hand and went to pull the coffee table away from the couch.

“You’ll want to sit down for this,” he said in reply to my questioning look. “Unless you want to go to the hospital after all. A real healer can make your hand go numb before fixing the damage, but I can’t.”

I shrugged and walked to the couch. “You’ve healed bruises for me before, and I haven’t swooned.” I put my wrist to my forehead in the classic damsel-in-distress swooning pose.

Keane’s lip twitched like he almost smiled—imagine that! But he didn’t change his mind. He sat on the couch and patted the seat beside him.

“This is different. There’s more damage, and fingers are super sensitive. It won’t last long, but it’ll hurt like a bitch.”

Fantastic. Just the thing to cheer me out of my doldrums. But if I let Keane take care of it, it would all be over in a couple of minutes. If I insisted on seeing a real healer, I might not be able to get an appointment—and assemble an entourage my dad would approve of—for hours.

I plopped down heavily on the sofa, grabbing a throw pillow and clutching it to my chest with my left arm as I once again let Keane take my right. Gripping my wrist firmly with one hand, he laid my hand on his lap. The touch might have been embarrassingly intimate if I hadn’t been hurting so much.

The pain didn’t improve when Keane used his other hand to coax my swelling finger as straight as it would go. I probably should have closed my eyes, or at least looked the other way, because seeing the redness and swelling made me a bit queasy. Still, I couldn’t help watching in sickening fascination as his fingers lightly stroked mine.

“Dana.”

I almost jumped at the sound of his voice. I tore my gaze away from my wounded hand and met Keane’s stunning emerald eyes.

“Sorry,” he whispered, his eyes narrowing in a wince even as he held my gaze. I belatedly realized he’d distracted me on purpose, but the pain hit before I had a chance to tense up in anticipation.

I’d thought the pain when I’d first hit him was bad. The healing was far, far worse. The electric tingle of Keane’s magic prickled, and then it felt like a car had just run over my hand, breaking every bone into tiny fragments. I couldn’t fight my instinctive urge to pull away, but Keane held my hand trapped against his thigh as his magic sank into my flesh.

If it had lasted even a millisecond longer, I wouldn’t have been able to hold back a scream. As it was, I managed to limit myself to a pained whimper.

The pain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, although Keane didn’t release my hand. I let out a shuddering sigh as he ran his fingertips across my skin. The touch was almost like a caress, and now that the pain had stopped, I couldn’t help noticing that my hand was almost within touching distance of something I had no desire to touch. Funny how I failed to pull away, even when I noticed that.

I glanced at Keane’s face but was unable to tell what he was thinking. Was he stroking my hand like that because he was searching for signs of more injuries? His touch felt too much like a caress for that. But I was like a bratty kid sister to him, so why would it be a caress?

No way he was coming on to me, I told myself firmly as he let go of my hand and I fought the urge to leave it right where it was. Keane didn’t even like me, much less like me. And what kind of a slut did it make me that I was even thinking about this when Ethan had just been kidnapped? Maybe Ethan’s jealousy hadn’t been as misplaced as I’d thought …

I held my hand up in front of my face and examined my now-healed fingers, wiggling them experimentally. They all moved on command, and there was no residual pain.

“Good as new,” I said, a little breathlessly. But I was just breathless because the healing had hurt so much, not because I was reacting to Keane’s touch. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

“Good,” Keane said, then folded his arms over his chest and gave me one of his disapproving-teacher looks. “Now, want to tell me what that was all about?”

My eyes widened. “You’re asking me? I’m not the one who went on the attack without even saying hello.”

He gave me one of his smug looks, the kind I hated. “You think the bad guys are going to warn you before they attack?” He unfolded his arms and did a manly-man pose, making his voice comically deep. “Excuse me, miss, but I thought I should warn you I’m about to try to kill you. Please prepare to defend yourself.”

“Hardee-har-har,” I growled. “You’re so funny I’m about to die laughing.” I remembered the strange look on his face when I’d first entered the room, and I had a hard time believing he was telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Something had prompted him to be especially aggressive today, and it wasn’t just part of his lesson plan.

“So,” he continued, “what was with the Muhammad Ali impersonation?” He rubbed his jaw approximately where I’d hit him, but I doubted it was because I’d hurt him.

Much as he’d annoyed me, I had to admit, it was my fault I’d gotten hurt. I knew better than to punch him in the face. We’d fought for maybe five minutes—probably less—and I’d made two major mistakes, both of which could easily have been fatal in a real fight. I’m not what you’d call a pro at this self-defense stuff, but that was bad even for me.

“I can’t do this today,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t act normal. And anything you try to teach me is going to go in one ear and out the other.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence, and I glanced over at him again. His eyes were closed, and a muscle ticked in the side of his jaw. Why he would get so bent out of shape about me not wanting my lesson was a mystery. When he spoke, it sounded like he was forcing the words out through clenched teeth.

“The bad guys aren’t going to wait until you’re in the mood for a fight.”

I made a sound between a huff of exasperation and a growl. “I’m sick to death of that argument. I don’t care what you think. I need a day off after seeing my…” My voice trailed off, because I’d been about to call Ethan my boyfriend, and I’d made it clear to both him and me that he was no such thing. I swallowed hard. “… my friend captured by the Wild Hunt because he was trying to defend me.”

If I’d hoped talking about my trauma would make Keane take pity on me, I was sadly mistaken.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But if you think Ethan Leigh is your friend, you’re deluded.”

I gaped at him. Where was all this coming from?

“Tell me you weren’t falling for his song and dance,” Keane continued, giving me an intense stare that made me squirm.

“Oh for God’s sake! Don’t tell me you’re jealous.” It wasn’t like Keane had any cause to be jealous. He and I weren’t even friends, much less dating. And I couldn’t imagine Keane being jealous of Ethan’s success with girls. I suspected girls fell at Keane’s feet on a regular basis.

“All right: I’m not jealous,” Keane said, and he sounded like he meant it, despite the way his eyes flashed dangerously.

“You don’t even know him!” I said, ignoring his claim. I knew jealousy when I saw it, and I was looking right in its face.

Keane gave me an incredulous look. “Says who?”

I stammered, because, of course, I had no idea if the two of them knew each other. I’d just assumed they didn’t.

“There are exactly two secondary schools in Avalon,” he said, his voice tight with repressed anger. “I had the bad luck of going to the same one as your ‘friend’ Ethan. There may have been a couple of girls in our class he failed to hit on, but only because they were ugly. As soon as he got what he wanted from one, he’d move on to the next. Even if his next target already had a boyfriend. That just made it more of a challenge for him. His ego was far more important to him than anyone’s feelings. You’re fooling yourself if you think you’re the one who’s going to make an honest man out of him. That’s what he wants all of his conquests to believe.”

I didn’t know what to say. I knew Ethan had a reputation as a player. And I’d seen for myself how easily he turned on the charm—and how determined he was to get his way once he’d set his sights on someone. But there was more to him than that, I was sure of that. Much more.

“He saved my life,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “He jumped into the moat when Grace threw me over. He knew all about the Water Witches, and he jumped in anyway.”

Keane made a sound of frustration and leapt to his feet, quickly turning his back on me. I remembered how he’d failed to visit me while I was in the hospital recuperating from the Water Witch’s attack. I’d been puzzled by it at the time, but now I wondered if maybe he’d been pissed off because I’d run off with Ethan. Not that there’d been anything romantic about it, though I supposed Keane couldn’t know that.

“Would you rather he’d let the Water Witch get me?” I asked Keane’s back.

He turned to look at me again. “Of course not. I’m glad he was there, and I’m glad he saved you. I despise him, but I won’t claim he has no redeeming features. I just…” He shook his head, then bent to start rolling up the mats.

“You just what?” I asked.

He continued rolling. “Let it go, Dana.”

“No. You’re the one who came into my home and started saying hateful things about a guy who got captured by the Wild Hunt because he was trying to defend me. If you’re going to start something, you’re sure as hell going to finish it.”

He shoved the rolled-up mat out of the way so hard it bounced off the wall. He was still kneeling on the floor as he turned to glare at me. It was a weird expression, because as pissed off as he looked, there was also a world of pain in his eyes, pain I didn’t understand.

Something clicked in my brain, and I winced in sudden sympathy. “One of those girls Ethan went after in school was your girlfriend, right?” That would certainly explain the level of rivalry I’d seen between the two of them.

Keane neither confirmed nor denied my guess, but I knew I was right. Eventually, the intensity of his eyes was too much, and I let my gaze slide away. When I looked up again, it was to see Keane’s back as he left without another word.