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“You still have a lot of strength in you,” he said with arrogant certainty.
“I am saving it for my work shifts tonight. Saturday and Sunday are supposed to be my rest days.”
“You should quit.”
“No one is paying me to do this.” I gestured at him.
“Your dad will pay for your expenses while you’re going to college, and if he didn’t, I would. It’s nothing to either one of us, but to you, it’s burning the candle on both ends when you need to be working on your skills. You’re so far behind.”
I raised a brow and crossed my arms. “Wow. Far behind what? Who am I trying to catch up to? Having magic is fine as long as it gives me a pay increase, but I want a good steady job with a good steady paycheck and lots of benefits, particularly dental, so I can take care of my mom. I’m not relying on some guy to pay my bills who knocked up my mom, never considering that she might get pregnant. And you? You seriously expect me to take handouts from you?”
He stared at me similar to the way my dad had looked at me, trying to figure out a puzzle. “Fine. If you don’t want to quit your work, even though I have personally given you an option to do so, don’t complain about being tired from it, and don’t hold back from training that might save your life. Attack me.”
I did, because he was a jerk, and I wasn’t a novice when it came to street fighting. I did my best to stay a small target and to go for his most vulnerable points while staying out of range of his longer reach. I didn’t fly off the handle and beat at him like a banshee, however tempted I was, because that would give him the chance to use his superior height and weight to defeat me. I punched his mouth, giving him a bloody lip and felt a moment’s triumph before he swept my legs out and had me down, pinning me against the mat, his eyes bright and alive, his body warm and almost comfortable against mine.
“You punched me,” he said while my heart beat faster and faster, and the rest of my body got softer and softer, no doubt from being squished by his weight, only it wasn’t that, because he wasn’t putting his whole weight on me, just enough to keep me where I was.
“You left yourself open,” I said breathlessly, chest rising and falling against his. Why did he have so many muscles? It was wrong for someone to be so strong and so handsome.
“My mistake. I thought that you’d know better than to punch my face, but you knew enough to do it without breaking your hand. I’m impressed.”
Something fluttered in my stomach at the unexpected compliment. “You aren’t as useless as I expected,” I offered, because it was true, and it was as close as I was going to get to saying something nice to him today.
He smiled, a fierce smile that went through me like lightening, the way he’d smiled after singing together. “I guess that means that we have to do this again next week. Not tomorrow. You’re going to be recovering for the rest of the weekend. Next week I’m going to work you until you can perform a basic defense sphere.”
“Isn’t that kind of advanced?” I should shove him off me, but for some reason, I couldn’t seem to find the motivation.
He nodded, his hair falling around my face like a curtain, so it was just the two of us in that little hair cave. “It’s very advanced, but today you almost did it twice, so the potential is there. Defense is the first rule to fighting demons.”
“It’s a good rule.” Why did he feel so good? I wanted to touch his hair, disinfect his lip, and snuggle on a couch with him. Wait, what?
I elbowed him in the side and rolled out from under him, not stopping until I was on my feet, heading for the door.
“See you Monday, Red,” he called after me.
I didn’t look back, because if I did, he’d see that more than my hair was red. My cheeks burned with humiliation and something else that I was way too old to feel.
Chapter
Thirteen
“Sit up straight. Gargoyles don’t slouch,” my father said, eying me over the rim of his delicate teacup.
Was he being funny? Sometimes it seemed like there was no other possible explanation for him being who he was and getting my mother pregnant, besides a ridiculous sense of humor. We were in the tea parlor, which you shouldn’t confuse with the front parlor, which you shouldn’t mix with the breakfast parlor. He’d explained that so soberly two months ago when I came for my first lesson, when I’d been sure that it would take me a few days of breathing exercises or whatever before I could take to the skies like a proper gargoyle femme fatale, but no, it was gallons and gallons of that sludgy brew of evil.
“Did you know that humans have a natural slight curvature in their spine, even when it is perfectly straight?” I asked pleasantly, then sipped from my own cup, a tea of such noxious vapors that my eyes watered. It was all part of the transformation process, he assured me as he poured me another cup of endless tea. Today’s tasted like cheap conditioner smelled, plus a dollop of floor wax, and after two months of choking down the stuff, slowly able to drink larger and larger doses, I was no closer to flapping my wings and flying away into the sunset.
“I was aware of that,” he said with deep gravity.
I sighed and subtly checked the ceramic clock on the cream painted mantel. Three forty-five, which meant that I’d be stuck here for at least another fifteen minutes. Longer if he had something extra for me to work on. He wouldn’t tell me if I asked, no, but he would make sure it took longer.
“Are you in a hurry?” he asked in a dangerously pleasant voice.
“I’m just concerned that your clock may be out of order, since I haven’t heard it chime for at least twenty minutes. I know a clock repair place, and I could take it right this second to be fixed.”
He made a noncommittal noise. “Tell me about…” His lips thinned slightly as he made me wait with baited breath. He did this a lot. “Your home,” he finally finished.
“The healery was built in the seventeen hundreds, actually as a fort in the revolutionary war and against Indians. It is made out of some stone found on the site, but mostly from a quarry hundreds of miles upriver. They used to cut the stone slabs and send them down the river on flatboats, or barges, and when they got to their destination, they’d dismantle the boats and use the wood as well as the stone, so they wouldn’t have to pole back up the river.”
