The next week, Lucette leaned over the balcony railing above the school gymnasium to see the action below. Her hands itched to hold one of those big sticks the boys were thrusting and swinging as they leaped around the gym. Even though this was an advanced class, some of them were complete klutzes.
Others weren’t.
A tall blond boy, about sixteen from the looks of him, was completing an obstacle course and Lucette couldn’t keep her eyes off him. He climbed nearly twenty-five feet up a rope, the muscles in his bare back and shoulders flexing and straining as he moved impossibly fast. Reaching the top, he swung the rope to gain momentum and height, and then released it as he propelled himself toward an even higher platform. As he landed, Lucette sucked in a quick breath, watching how the strong muscles in his legs flexed. He sprang again, this time executing a flip in the air, and landed on another platform. A straw-filled dummy shot skyward. He picked up a stake and leaped to stab it midair.
The stake went straight through the dummy’s chest and the boy landed on the gymnasium floor.
Lucette lifted her hands to clap, but noticed that no one else did. The other girls had all turned their heads or covered their eyes, as if real blood had been spilled instead of just a little straw. Wimps.
Miss Eleanor stepped up beside her. “You see now, don’t you?” Lucette studied a group of boys about to start a sparring exercise and lifted her arm to mimic their stance. “See what?”
“That slaying is no job for girls,” Miss Eleanor said, a smug look on her face.
Lucette dropped her arms. “No, I don’t see that at all. Look at him.” She pointed at a skinny boy struggling to push a huge block of stone across the room. “I’ll bet I’m stronger than he is.”
“They all have their specialties, Lucy. That boy is the fastest in this group at rope climbing. He can scale a three-story building in thirty-two seconds.”
“So could I, I’ll bet. If someone would just give me the chance.”
Miss Eleanor pushed back from the railing. “Bringing you girls up here was a mistake.” She shook her head. “I hoped that by showing you the brutality of the boys in action, you’d come to your senses.”
She had come to her senses. Nearly every night vampires roamed Xandra looking for necks to bite, and Lucette now felt sure that the vampire boy she met in the woods had been the exception, not the rule. Vampires were vicious, and in only three years she might find herself facing them alone. She wished her father would declare war like her mother wanted, but while he’d reinstated the slayer army for defensive purposes, he still refused to declare war on Sanguinia. He was determined to find a diplomatic solution.
She shuddered. The possibility that her father might find a solution someday didn’t make it any less horrible for the nightly vampire victims. And if the curse came true, she’d be left to defend the entire kingdom on her own.
Her hand rose to cover her neck. She was doomed unless she learned how to slay. Arguing with Miss Eleanor would be nothing compared to fighting a vampire. She would make the teachers at the school see. She’d make them believe she could do it. If only she could tell everyone she was the princess, then they’d have to do what she wanted.
She stepped back from the balcony and turned to the stairs. “I’m going down to join the boys.”
“Lucy! Stop right now!” Miss Eleanor called after her as she ran to the flight of stairs leading to the gym.
Dizziness seized Lucette at the top of the stairs. She hadn’t walked down a flight of stairs alone in her entire life, but after drawing a deep breath to steady herself, she took hold of the banister and raced down.
“Lucy!” Slowed by her high heels, Miss Eleanor reached the top of the stairs just as Lucette reached the bottom. “Girls aren’t allowed on the gymnasium floor! There are weapons! You’ll get hurt!”
Hearing the thuds and smashes of the weapons and bodies slamming into each other, fear and excitement coursed through her. Training with these boys, she might get an injury way worse than a finger prick.
Nonetheless, she stepped onto the floor. Two tall boys were sparring right in front of her, so close she could smell their sweat. She stepped to the side and saw a rack of stakes about twenty feet down the wall she was standing against. What she wouldn’t give to hold one in her hand, to feel its weight, to leap and strike one of the dummies. She headed toward the stakes.
“Watch out!” Someone yelled, and she was tackled from the side.
An arrow swooshed over her head and thunked into the wall. Lucette looked up. Just above her head was a bull’s-eye, the arrow still vibrating at its center.
“What were you thinking, walking in front of a target?” An angry voice startled her, and she realized it was the tall blond boy she’d been watching earlier. He had her pinned down, and she could see his eyes were bright blue, flashing with life, and very, very angry.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Miss Eleanor’s voice rang out, “Mr. Harris, one of my young ladies is on the floor and one of your young men has attacked her! Stop your boys right now!”
A horn sounded, and the mock battles stopped.
“Tristan, help her up!” someone yelled from the other side of the room.
The boy named Tristan shook his head in disbelief and his eyes narrowed as he rose to his feet. Lucette still sat, feeling hot and scared and excited. Her heart was beating so quickly she wondered if it might pound its way out of her chest.
Miss Eleanor’s heels clacked across the gymnasium floor. “Lucy, you are on warning! Behave or I’ll have you expelled. You’re a young lady—even if you don’t much look like one—and I’ll have you act accordingly.”
Lucette’s cheeks burned. Having her appearance derided in front of half the boys in the school—not to mention her blond lifesaver—both enraged and embarrassed her.
She would not be treated like this. She would not be held back by people like Miss Eleanor. Somehow, she would learn how to fight.
That night, Lucette stared into her bathroom mirror at a face that looked back at her with angry red cheeks, and lifted another clump of her long, wavy black hair to the side. Her father loved her hair, and she considered it her best feature, too—her only feminine feature, even though she usually kept it bound up in a braid. But what good was a lot of nice hair on top of a toothpick body, or around a bony face?
Grabbing the knife she’d smuggled out of the gymnasium, she sawed her hair, and a three-foot-long section fell onto the marble floor. She’d show her father she wasn’t some dainty doll for him to put on display for boys. She’d show Miss Eleanor what she thought of her grooming lessons. With short hair, she’d look even more like a boy than she already did. Maybe then the school would see her slayer potential. Maybe she’d reenroll in the Slayer Academy under a new secret identity—Luke.
Somehow, she’d make everyone see that she needed to train, even though no one could know why it was so important.
She cut off another chunk of her hair, close to her scalp, and furrowed her brows. Her eyebrows might be thick and ugly, but no way was she letting Miss Eleanor’s tweezers within ten feet of her face. The other girls all looked permanently startled with their overplucked arches.
“Lucette, what in the world are you doing?”
She spun away from the mirror to see her mother standing in the doorway, her face stricken with concern. But Lucette refused to cave in to her mother’s obvious hurt. She turned back to the mirror and sawed off another chunk of hair. Her father hated her for not cooperating on his matchmaking project. Miss Eleanor hated her for not playing nice at school. That tall, handsome boy Tristan hated her for being careless in the gym. Now her mother could hate her, too. She didn’t care.
“Go away, Mom! Leave me alone.” She shut the door to the bathroom and continued to hack away at her hair.
Two weeks later, things still hadn’t turned out as she planned. In spite of her new haircut, the teachers had not let her train with the boys, and Miss Eleanor forced her to wear an itchy wig at school. Worse, her haircut had broken her father’s heart. He could barely look at her now, yet still insisted she meet boys every Friday night.
But Lucette wasn’t one to let rules interfere with what she wanted. She peered through the posts of the balcony railing and studied Tristan. He trained here every day at three o’clock, once classes were over, and she never missed it. From up in the balcony where he couldn’t see her, she copied his actions, learning as much of his training routine as possible.
After watching his last sequence, she leaped, spun, and kicked into the air. Without a real stake or the straw dummy to strike, it was difficult to tell if she had used enough force or if her form was correct, but it felt good. She felt strong, having developed so many new muscles since beginning this shadow-training regimen.
Tristan threw a spear down the length of the gym to impale a straw dummy. With nothing to throw, Lucette wound up and launched an imaginary spear, visualizing it sailing through the night air to pierce a vampire’s heart.
“Why don’t you come down and try with a real spear?” Tristan called, and Lucette froze. He had seen her.
“Come on,” he said. “I can hear you up there and I see your shadow. Your form on your roundhouse kick is getting better. Pretty good, considering all you’re attacking is air.”
She stepped up to the railing and, after drawing a deep breath, leaned over to see if he was serious. If he were mocking her, she’d try out one of those real spears—on him.
He smiled and ran a hand through his short blond hair. “Come on down. I don’t bite.” He flashed a wide smile.
“No,” she said, “but you do tackle.”
He chuckled. “Hey, I saved your life. The least you could be is grateful.”
“Yeah, well, if they’d let me train as a slayer, then maybe one day I could pay you back and save your life.”
He laughed again and crossed his arms over his chest. “Not if you stay up there.”
Excited, she headed for the stairs. If he was serious about helping her train, no way was she going to turn that down.
“Hey,” he called up before she reached the first step. “Do you want to be a slayer, or not?”
She walked back to the railing and looked down at him. “Why else would I be up here every afternoon, copying you?”
“Great.” He grinned. “Then why are you headed for the stairs?”
“Um, you said I could come down to train. Do you want me to come down or not?” she asked. Tristan was strange and infuriating, even if he did make her feel kind of fluttery inside.
He folded his bare arms over his broad chest.“A real slayer wouldn’t use the stairs.”
She looked down to the gymnasium floor and shook her head. “It’s at least a twenty-five-foot drop! I can’t jump that!”
“Take a look around you,” he said, his voice calm and deep. “What can you use to help?”
There was a rope hanging a few feet away from the balcony. It should be a relatively easy jump, but she’d never tried anything like that before. She had only recently been allowed to walk down a flight of stairs unaccompanied, and had never tried anything where failing had real consequences. She wondered what would happen if she died before she turned sixteen. Would the kingdom be saved—or cursed forever?
“Just concentrate,” he said, breaking her out of her morbid thoughts.
“Focus on the rope, see yourself grabbing it, and don’t think about the floor. It’ll take care of itself.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
“Slayers don’t worry. They train, they develop skills, they practice, and then they act.”
Trembling, she nodded. He was right. If she wanted this, it was time to prove it. But to leap for the rope, she’d have to stand on the railing. She briefly considered whether she could sit on it, but she wouldn’t get enough momentum for launching from that position.
She looked down. Tristan looked up at her with calm encouragement on his face. He wasn’t prodding or daring, he wasn’t teasing or goading—he simply nodded encouragement. Confidence flowed into her. She had good balance. She was a good climber. She could jump. She could climb ropes. She’d tried all these things over the past two weeks of sneaking into the empty gym. Other than falling, there wasn’t one part of this challenge she hadn’t done before. The problem was, she’d never done all those things together.
Pulling courage from deep inside her, she pushed to rest her hips on the railing, then lifted one foot up. After testing the railing with her bare foot and centering herself, she leaned to the side and brought the other foot up.
She wouldn’t win any prizes for grace—balanced in such an awkward side lunge on the railing with her hands holding onto the wood between her legs—but grace wasn’t what this was about. This was about proving to herself she could do it. And if she didn’t believe she could do it, how could she possibly convince the school’s administration?
She drew her second foot closer, shifting her weight until she was securely in a crouch. Then she raised her hands in front of her, and balancing, she slowly straightened her legs until she was standing on the railing.
“Lucy,” a voice came from behind her, “what are you doing?” Miss Eleanor’s high heels clacked on the wooden balcony floor, approaching quickly.
“It’s fine!” Tristan yelled up. “She’s coming down to train.”
“Lucy, if you go down there . . .” Miss Eleanor’s voice trailed off, as if she’d run out of threats. “If you go down there, I wipe my hands clean of you. I won’t send anyone down to rescue you.” She really had run out of threats. That last one sounded like more of a promise.
It was now or never. Lucette blocked out everything except the rope, and then leaped. Her hands gripped the rough rope, but she slipped, wishing for once she was wearing her gloves. She wrapped her legs and feet around the swinging rope to stop her rapid, hand-burning slide, and then, with her heart racing and her feet squeezing together to control her speed, she lowered herself, hand over hand, until she was close enough to the floor to jump down.
She landed and turned to Tristan.
He nodded, looking impressed. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
Her entire body felt flush and her mind raced.
Maybe finding true love wasn’t so impossible, after all. Maybe if she kept training with Tristan, they’d fall in love. Maybe Miss Eleanor’s flirting and seduction classes wouldn’t go to waste. Maybe some afternoon soon, if Tristan didn’t kiss her, she’d kiss him.
Cheeks still pink, she smiled as seductively as she knew how.
He reached out and rubbed his hand over her chopped-off hair. “Nice haircut, by the way. Now you fit in with the boys.”
She flinched and backed up a few feet, crossing her arms over her flat chest. “Are we going to train or not?” No way would she show him how much his comment had hurt.