“Move to your left,” Lincoln shouted.
This continued on and on, each opponent with a different advantage depending on which supernatural race they were from. Vampires were so fast, and super strong. Shifters had unparalleled senses, our speed and strength not far behind vamps. The magic users had extra energy and the ability to use spells if they were quick enough – although Lincoln didn’t encourage spell-casting in hand to hand, it was supposed to be more about physical abilities. The fey were magical without needing any spells. They could blur themselves and almost act chameleon-like to blend into surroundings. They were so in tune with nature that the very air itself whispered, helping them gain advantage. In Stratford, we were low on female fey, who we called Sirens. They had the ability to enthrall the mind with their calling song. It seemed to mainly affect males … go figure. Probably a reason we had so few. Men did plenty of stupid things without additional help from a clouded mind.
Lastly, the demi-fey were all different. The pixies could fly, zap with energy, and be-spell with pixie dust. The trolls were like brick walls. You could hit them and they wouldn’t even move. Sometimes I wondered if they even noticed me hitting them. There were about twenty different demi-fey, but Stratford only had six species. Though others had come and gone through the years, so I’d met most of them. The mermaids were the strangest. They preferred places with large bodies of water, not forests, so despite our large tanked area, we never had long term mermaid residents.
We continued to rotate. I was starting to feel the bruises. There’d been a few lucky hits in my distracted state. Maximus had somehow maneuvered himself next to Mischa and was helping her out. Which, luckily for her, resulted in her opponents going easy as on her, thinking her vampire bodyguard might pound them into the ground. He’d done that for me before, and I kind of felt a little put out that I no longer had him watching my back.
Damn sisters, always stealing your favorite toys.
I groaned when I saw my last opponent for the day – Melly, a six foot six, muscle-bound dickface. And I say that with no love at all because he was an ass who had tormented me for many years. For some reason, the bear shifter had a hate-on for me that would not disappear no matter what I did.
“Well, if it isn’t the wolf princess.” Melly’s shoulder-length red hair was always scraggly. His skin was spattered with red freckles and his eyes were moss green. He spent most of his time in the forest. His family had all left Stratford last year, and unfortunately he’d decided not to go with them. I’d felt sorry for him … for roughly eight seconds before he’d buried me under a massive mound of autumn leaves. “Are you worried, princess? Hate for you to break a nail…” The mocking grin dropped from his features. “Or your neck,” he added quietly.
I didn’t fear much, but he made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t really the comments, alphas get threats a lot, and I had a big mouth – yeah I pretty much deserved everything I got. No, it was the look in his eyes. When he locked me in his gaze the green darkened and I could sense his need for me to be removed from this earth. And the worst part, I had no freaking idea what I had done to him.
I watched him closely but didn’t speak. Anything I could say would only make it worse. I’d tried over the years to fix the problem, to no avail.
“And now there’s a younger, more pathetic wolf princess.” He moved on to Mischa, who was finally starting to pay attention to the bear shifter. Maybe he hadn’t noticed her new bodyguard. He was going to get Maximus all riled up. Should be fun. “Maybe one day I’ll get the privilege of destroying the entire Lebron line. Bears are not led by wolves.”
Curious.
That was the most information he’d revealed in a long time. Maybe this hatred wasn’t personal toward me, just that he was ruled by wolf shifters who happened to be my bloodline. I could see Maximus starting to move closer to me. He’d been fighting a male fey. His shirt was smoking a little from a few fireball accidents.
I shouldn’t have shifted my focus. As I turned back, Melly had moved and a fist was coming straight at my face. I threw my head back, twisting to the side, hoping to avoid his massive knuckles. No such luck. The meaty fist clipped me on the side of my chin and cheek bone. I heard the crunch; my screams echoed around the cavernous training room. As I hit the padded mat, I clamped my mouth shut, cutting off the sound of my agony, since opening my mouth seemed to be increasing the intense stabbing heat. Chaos descended as everyone ran to see what had happened. I was pretty dazed, I wasn’t sure exactly how much I missed in the next few moments. The throbbing hum of agony that was pulsing in the side of my face was distracting me from everything else in the room.
“Jessa!” Soft hands gently touched the uninjured side of my face. “Are you okay? Open your eyes.” Mischa sounded a tad frantic, and I did not want to know what my face looked like.
I opened my mouth, but the agony that stabbed into me again had me clamping my lips shut. Shit. I was going to kill Melly the second my face healed. I was going to cut his arms and legs off and then slice them into little pieces, and after that his eyes – yep, one by one I’d pluck them out and feed them to the closest shifted animal …
Maximus interrupted my thoughts. “Jessa, open your eyes, babe.” Just when I was getting to the good part. Typical.
I slowly opened the eye on my uninjured side; the other was already sealed shut and wouldn’t open. The light was so bright it took me a moment to fight through the blindness and try to see. I knew my cheek was broken, and I was pretty sure I had a concussion. Everything was blurry and out of focus. Not to mention I had the mother-of-all-headaches and was about ten seconds from barfing everywhere. I was forced to shut that eye again.