Della lands flat
on her back with an indelicate thump. Rage reaches up from her throat, but she
squeezes her eyes shut and chokes it back down.
She shakes her head to clear it, opens her eyes, and sees Jamie reaching
down to offer her a hand up. She takes
it, and is pulled swiftly back to her feet.
“OK,” Jamie says,
“What happened there?”
“You knocked me
down.”
“But how?”
“You – ” Della
pauses. She had thrown a punch, but then
her foot – of course. “When I stepped
forward to punch, you pushed my foot even farther with yours. That put me off-balance, so you only had to
do a little to knock me down.”
“Right. Now come at me again.”
Della smoothes out
her gi, takes a deep breath, and drops into her stance. She and Jamie begin to circle each other in
the ring. Della pays closer attention to
her footing – in order to close and strike, she needs to first commit with her foot, unless she can draw Jamie
out. So she hadn’t thrown a punch and then her foot was moved, she had
stepped to punch but was interrupted before she could even swing. OK, so
do better next time.
Della steps in
with her right foot, a straight punch on its way – Jamie once again goes to
kick it out with her own leading right foot, but Della has feinted. Instead of putting her foot down, she lifts
her knee and turns her hips for a roundhouse kick. Before she can snap, though, Jamie pops a
single knuckle into her quadriceps, right above the knee. Della’s leg goes wobbly, and Jamie slides in,
her left biceps under Della’s leg and her right elbow coming to a halt within
two inches of Della’s face. Dell’s eyes
go wide, then Jamie lifts her leg a tad more and dumps her on her back again.
“And there,” Jamie
asks after helping Della up once more.
“What was that?”
“You hit my leg,”
Della says, replaying the exchange in her mind.
“And it stunned me, so you moved in.”
“Good. So, try again.”
Della smoothes out
her gi, takes a deep breath, and drops into her stance again. She and Jamie begin to circle each other once
more. So it’s not just my footing, she’s got a second line of defense. Della waits until just before Jamie is
mid-stride – an easy task, as she is stepping slowly and steadily – then darts
in with a quick right jab, feinting again.
Jamie goes to block it, but blocks across her body with her own right
hand, so Della follows up with a left hook.
Jamie blocks high, easily, her right arm already in position – exposing
her torso to a left roundhouse kick.
Just as Della had planned. But as
Della turns her hips, Jamie steps in with her left foot and shoves an open left
palm right into the joint where Della’s left femur meets her pelvis, sending
her off balance again. Della recovers,
though, and reaches for Jamie’s gi. The
two grapple briefly, and Della kicks out one of Jamie’s legs, then sends her
tumbling to the mat – and then Della is pulled right along with, watching in
slow motion as Jamie tumbles smoothly out of the throw and sends Della to the
mat face-first. The holds are released,
and Jamie helps Della up yet again.
“OK,” Della
says. “I got it. Learning how to take a fall, learning how to
step, learning how to place your hands – yeah, I got it. They’re all important. Fine.”
“Good,” Jamie says
with a nod. “Shall we continue the lesson, then?”
“Yes. Please.”
The callous
disregard for the unfortunate, then, seemed a necessary pill to swallow. It was the lesser of a few dozen evils.
“What if we all
just decided to go extinct,” Della had asked at one point.
“A noble option,”
Jamie said with a nod and a slow blink.
“But think it through. While you,
or I, or even Elder Morgan might be willing to go along with it, it would only
work if everyone went along with
it. And there are quite a few bloodkin
around, these nights.”
“Couldn’t we weed
out the bad apples?”
“Ah, and then do
ourselves in once we’d struck down the naysayers. Still wouldn’t work – again, there’s a lot of
us, and the ‘bad apples’ would surely catch wind and run. They wouldn’t all make it, but all it takes
is one – if just one managed to hide out until the rest of us had died off, it
would start the whole damn cycle all over again. Except now there’d be a lot of knowledge
lost, and a lot less self-policing, so things would be much worse.”
As Della came to
appreciate the bigger picture – that bloodkin society was here to stay, and
that it absolutely had to remain hidden from the public eye – the rather
drastic measures took on a more innocuous cast.
Not “innocent,” not by a long shot.
More like the sort of evil that knows it can’t change, and so tries to
restrain itself as much as possible. It
seemed absurd to Della, to have so much power and yet to hold back. But she was the new kid on the block here,
and had to follow suit with the rest of them, otherwise she might wind up like
Edward. That fear, if nothing else, kept
her in line.
Jamie said Della
could choose lesson three for herself – the first two were really the most
important, after that it was kind of a self-structured curriculum. Della had asked about the Hunters. Jamie let out a deep sigh.
“Well, you gotta
learn some time, I guess.” Jamie ordered
another round before continuing. “OK, so
there are these folks. Something happens
to ‘em. Either a vampire goes after
someone in their family, or they get handpicked for being super-great at what
they do, or they’re just some poor sap who was in the wrong place at the wrong
time and now they know too much.” She
rolled her eyes back and forth for a couple seconds. “Yeah, I think that about covers it. However it happens, they’ve caught a glimpse
of the underside of things, and now they can’t go back. ‘Oh, shit, there’s bloodsucking monsters prowling
the streets. Better kill ‘em all!’ You know how that sort of thing goes.”
“But aren’t we
stronger,” Della asked. “I mean, don’t
we have special powers and stuff?”
“Well, that’s just
it.” Jamie swirled the last few sips of
blood around in her goblet. “A Hunter knows that, so we can’t exactly take ‘em
by surprise. The experienced ones,
anyway. And they try to pick us off when
we’re young – nip ‘em in the blood. I
mean, bud.” She shook her head. “And, of course, the very best of them are as stealthy as we are. We don’t even know who they are, there’ll
just be some really weird murder on the news and suddenly Jim’s not around
anymore. Sometimes not even that much.”
“So,” Della said,
“How many of these guys are there, then?”
“Nobody
knows. Not even the Hunters. It’s not like they’re all part of some club
or something. Soon as we find out about
one, we follow up. That goes without
saying. But the ones who pick us off in
the middle of the night? Could be
one. Could be ten. Could be ten in a group. We just don’t
know.”
“Jeez.” Della ran her hands back through her long
brown hair. “So there are people
literally stalking the streets looking for fuckin’ vampires.”
“Well,” Jamie
said, leaning back in her chair, “There are literal vampires stalking the
streets at night. Can you blame ‘em?”
The phlebotomist
arrived with their second goblets.
“So,” Della said,
taking a swig, “You said there were other kin, too. What’s their deal?”
“Yeah. There’s moonkin, they’re like werewolves,
except they don’t have the allergy to silver.
They’re really more like hardcore hippies: they mostly leave us alone, unless we intrude
on their territory. But they tend to
stay out of big cities, so that’s fine by us.
They’re only really a problem for bloodkin flying solo out in the
boonies. They run in packs, they howl at
the moon, they do their thing.
“And then there’s
the bramblekin, they’re just – weird.
You ever meet one, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Seems like each and every one of ‘em is their
own special kind of crazy. It’s hard to
explain.”
“All right,” Della
said. “Any others?”
“Yeah, but,” Jamie
stammered, “They’re even harder to explain.
Haven’t met ‘em, myself. Ask Thomas
some night, he might give you a speech if he’s in a good mood. And if you haven’t done anything stupid
lately. Which shouldn’t be too hard, you
being under house arrest and all.” Jamie
gave a wry grin on the last point.
For her fourth
lesson, Della decided to learn how to defend herself from Hunters. And so she had been enrolled in “the dojo,”
the all-encompassing martial arts academy of bloodkin society. After some days of learning how to fall, how
to roll, how to stand, how to step, how to hold her hands, how to move her
hands, she had gotten sick of the minutiae. She wanted to learn some nifty moves so she
could start trashing bozos, not some fancy-pants dancing. So she called Jamie out on it – and Jamie had
taken her up on the challenge.
And now here they
stood. Fortunately, Della had the wherewithal
to comprehend that Jamie had defeated her with the very fundamentals she had so
recently derided, and so she was appropriately humbled, rather than outright humiliated.
“Good,” Jamie had
said. “Shall we continue the lesson,
then?
“Yes, please,”
Della responded.
Jamie directs
Della to sit, and then sits, herself.
“So,” the teacher
says to her student, “Now you get that ‘spacing’ and ‘timing’ are kind of a big
deal. That’s good. I didn’t just whup your ass and piss you off,
you actually learned. The question now
is: what next?”
What next, Della thinks. “I don’t know,” she says.
“All right,” Jamie
says with a nod. “Maybe that’s for the
best. Hit the bag for a bit. We’ll meet again tomorrow night.”
Della nods, takes a deep breath,
and decides to take her frustrations out on John Q. Everlast.
1 comment:
And just in case the phrase "trashing bozos" means nothing to you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMIfAmQYig8
(It's not the original - that's blacked out due to copyright issues. But this is a pretty good reenactment, with a fun twist ending.)
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