Airel - Aaron Patterson [96]
“The rings are the first stage of your training and schooling. I will train you in hand-to-hand combat and teach you to use your abilities. You will be able to control them at will soon.” He stood with his feet slightly apart, his hands in front of him at chest height in a kind of salute, grasping a long pointy stick.
I was beyond flabbergasted. I responded coolly, cocking my head to one side as if appraising his sanity. “So. It’s hand-to-hand combat, then.” I inhaled, still trying to take it all in. “Did you not get the memo? I’m seventeen—” Before I could do anything else, he had stepped to one side, drawn back a spear, and hurled it at me with blinding speed. The end of it plunged into the shallow of my gut, shredding me right through, the leading edge exiting through the small of my back. The pain was so sharp that it was indescribable. I began to black out, and I fell to my knees.
Kale was upon me in a flash, standing before me like a warrior thirsting for the kill. I could feel him panting heavily. He grasped the weapon firmly and yanked it straight out from my body, my blood flowing.
He brought the heel of the pike down with a shattering crack on the floor, the weapon standing vertically, a spray of blood showering me as it vibrated powerfully from the violence of his grip. He reared his head back as he towered over me, as I collapsed sideways, and released a blood curdling shout that seized me, head to toe, with icy fear. My head bounced off the matting of the floor and the room started to spin as my eyes involuntarily squeezed shut in pain.
I saw blue pink and white stars floating across my vision, then an unbearable tingling itch grabbed at my gut in tiny fingers of intense pain. It itched so badly that I seriously considered death as a viable choice for a few seconds. I lifted my shirt cautiously, in horror, and watched in awe as the huge gash closed up and smoothed over as if it had never been there. The itching subsided gradually, but my track jacket was hopelessly shredded and bloody. I looked up at Kale, quite beside myself with shock and rage.
He smiled down at me and laughed.
Chapter V
Kale’s grinning face looked stupid to me; I was beyond irritated. He held out his hand to me. I looked at his fingers as if they were attached to the hand of Satan. “Nice. Attention getter. Okay then, what’s for breakfast?” I finally took his hand, deciding to ‘just roll with it,’ as Kim would say. I cooed, an aftershock of my injury wracking my body one last time as I regained my feet.
Kale cracked a joke: “You shouldn’t train on an empty stomach.”
“Hilarious.” I placed my hands on my knees and breathed hard. “That’s why I’m asking about breakfast—mine’s killing me.”
I stood there like an outfielder for a while, just taking everything in. I guess you always want what you can’t have—now that it seemed impossible for me to die, I felt trapped in my own life. More so than usual.
He must have heard some of my doubtful thoughts. “In time you will have your answers. For now you must just accept things as they are.”
There was real, honestcompassion in his voice. It was refreshing, I decided.
“You have been given a gift—will you accept it?” He still held out his hand, though I was standing already.
Kale standing before me like that triggered something in me. I knew it, too. Something had let go way up at the top of some gigantic mountain of me, and an avalanche was going to come down and change everything. My eyes filled with tears. “Do I have a choice?” Destiny was coming for me again, I could feel it, the moment was beginning to crash in upon me, and I had been stripped of my defenses against it.
“You always have a choice.” His words