Chapter Nine

My lessons in the feeding den were daily and torturous, between the dark looks Thaden kept giving me, the not-so-quiet whispers of the other students, and being forced to watch the humans being fed on. Combat class, at least, was only twice a week, which meant we were several days into the hellish semester before I had to attend my first. Plus side, Cole was with me. Downside, Cole tended to want to murder everyone who so much as looked at me the wrong way, and people were going to be trying (and succeeding, if past performance was anything to go by) to knock me onto my ass—and then give me a damn good kicking while I was on it. And that was before they'd known I was a halfbreed.

Yeah, I was pretty sure today was going to suck.

"You're sure you don't want to sit this one out, princess?" Cole murmured in my ear, rubbing his hands soothingly on my upper arms.

Sitting this one out was exactly what I wanted, but I couldn't duck combat for the entire year, and truthfully, I needed this class. There were plenty of people waiting to take a shot at me, and I needed to be ready for them. I had zero intention of meeting with one of those ‘mysterious accidents' that seemed to have a habit of befalling dhampirs.

I turned and wrapped my arms around Cole's neck, leaning into him and basking in the press of his body against mine.

"I'm sure," I told him, and stretched up to plant a gentle kiss on his lips. "Besides, what's the worst that could happen?"

Cole ground his teeth together in answer to that, and I quickly added, "Anyway, how am I supposed to learn to burn the world down if I'm scared of a little heat?"

"You're impossible," he growled against my lips, drawing me in for a kiss. His hands moved to wrap around my waist, holding me to him, and my fingers curled in his short hair, pulling him down to me.

"Hey!" I said, breaking the kiss abruptly, and glaring at him through narrowed eyes. "You're trying to distract me."

He shrugged unrepentantly. "Is it working?"

"No." Yes. "We need to get going before we're late."

Garrett wasn't my biggest fan inside these walls, but unlike the other instructors, he'd never hated me for what I was, just for being so generally crap at fighting, and so ‘pitifully fragile', as he was fond of putting it. Of course, that'd been before he'd known I was an abomination.

I squared my shoulders as we reached the open door to the combat gym, and stepped inside.

Several rows of desks and chairs lined the front of the gym, but I knew better than to be fooled. It would take less than a minute to clear those away and get to the ass-kicking. Still, in an effort to overcome my reputation for being supernaturally pessimistic, I made for two of the vacant desks. I mean, it was possible Garrett might have decided to start with a theory lesson, right?

Cole squeezed my hand, pulling me from the route to my chosen desks at the back and giving me a short shake of his head.

"No hiding," he murmured, low enough that I could barely hear it. "We're not going to let anything think you're afraid."

Well, that seemed like a shit plan to me. Sit at the front of the class so the rest of the students could spend the lesson throwing things at the back of my head?

"No weakness," Cole said softly, steering me to a desk front and center, and claiming the one next to it.

Right. Weakness and wolves. I buried the shiver that tried to work its way up my spine. Odds were, we weren't going to be sitting for long, and if everyone thought I was afraid, they'd be lining up to take a lump out of me as soon as we moved onto the practical part of the lesson. I thought it was overly optimistic to assume they weren't already planning to do that, personally. But at least this way we could maybe confine the attacks to within this class. Cole couldn't protect me constantly.

A spark of anger heated in my gut. I didn't want Cole to have to protect me. I wanted to be able to protect myself. And I was sick of the fact I needed protecting at all. It wasn't my damn fault I was a dhampir, for fuck's sake.

"I assuming you're not glaring at me, Ellis," Garrett snapped as he stalked into the room. My face reddened and snickers broke out behind me. Just great.

"No, Instructor," I said.

"Good. The fuck are the rest of you laughing about? Sit down and shut up."

A few chairs scraped and then silence fell, everyone looking expectantly at Garrett. Anything less than immediate obedience tended to result in a trip to the healer. I was starting to suspect he and Ryker had some kind of competition for who could put the most students on the med wing each year. I wasn't sure who was winning, but I was pretty sure I was the only one losing.

"If any of you thinks you're special because you made it through your end-of-year assessments, you're wrong," Garrett growled, glaring at the class. "Three quarters of you miserable curs made it through, which just tells me the assessment was too easy."

Some of the familiar faces were missing because they'd been held back, having scored too low on their individual lesson exams. But seven…seven weren't absent because they'd scored low. They were missing because they hadn't survived the final assessment. I'd almost been amongst them.

"The damn human survived," he continued, "so don't be patting yourselves on the back. You haven't achieved anything."

"She's not human," someone—Wes, I was pretty sure—muttered from somewhere behind me.

"Oh, so you think a dhampir is stronger than you, is that it?" Garrett demanded.

"No! She's—"

"Then kindly shut the fuck up. She finished the assessment conscious, unlike some people in this class."

A few low snickers rippled through the air, and I felt a stab of grim satisfaction. It was no secret that Cole had knocked Wes out after he'd ambushed us.

"Textbooks out," Garrett said, turning and striding to the whiteboard on the wall, which had a crudely drawn outline of a person on it. "I want twenty pressure points in the human body that will immobilize or otherwise incapacitate your opponent. Anyone who doesn't have anything to contribute to this lesson will become a test subject—so why are you all sitting there looking at me like idiots?"

There was a sudden scramble as people pulled textbooks from bags, me amongst them. I really didn't want to spend the next hour being knocked out a dozen different ways. Also, this was book work. This, I was good at. It was just the practical part that tended to cause me problems, what with the whole being-a-human-amongst-supernaturals issue. Except…I paused. Well, except I hadn't been. If I was part vampire, then I had to have at least part of their supernatural strength, right? I just needed to figure out how to tap into it. Of course, that had worked out so well for me with the weird partial shift thing I'd done all of one time.

"Ms. Ellis, I think you'll find that textbook of more use to you if you actually try looking at it."

I started, and the snickers this time were more muted. Right. Life altering revelations later. Study now. I flipped through the textbook until I found the page, and my eyes widened as I took it in. There were a lot of ways to knock someone out. I needed to pay more attention to this stuff.

"What are you all sitting there with stupid looks on your faces for?" Garrett snapped. "Start calling them out."

"Sustained pressure on the carotid artery, Instructor Garrett," Aaron called out, and Garrett nodded and marked it on the figure on the whiteboard.

"Strike to the common peroneal nerve," Tristan said, and Garrett marked that one up, too.

"Say something," Cole murmured in my ear.

"What?"

"Say something," he repeated. "Don't give Garrett an excuse to single you out."

He was right.

"A sharp blow to the sciatic nerve," I blurted and Garrett fixed me with a look before nodding his head.

"Glad you've decided to take your studies more seriously, given your…fragilities."

He turned and marked it on the board, but not before I caught the rumble in Cole's chest.

"Don't you give him a reason, either," I whispered sharply, and Cole pressed his lips together tightly, but I was certain Garrett hadn't missed the reaction.

The class rattled off more pressure points until he waved a hand.

"That's enough. Pair up and practice finding these spots. Do not use enough pressure to activate them—anyone knocking anyone else out without my express permission will be making a trip to the healer—and not as an escort. Do I make myself clear?"

There was a round of nods as people got to their feet and paired up.

"Hey, human, why don't you pair up with me?" Kallan called over from a couple of tables along. "Oh, wait, that's dhampir."

Cole rounded on him, but I placed one hand on his arm. I couldn't keep hiding behind him.

"That's ‘the one who kicked your ass in assessments last year'," I told him sweetly, and his face reddened. I smiled. "And to think, that was before I learned what I was. What do you think I can do now?"

His mouth snapped shut and he glared at me.

"Ellis, if you're going to flirt with someone, make it your mate," Garrett snapped as he walked past. "And make it outside of my lessons."

…And there went my big stand. Probably for the best—weird flukes and undiscovered powers aside, he could kick my ass without breaking a sweat.

Rolling my eyes, I turned back to Cole, and the fiercely proud look on his face stole the breath from my lungs.

"Good girl," he murmured.

"It's going to take more than tough words to put him off."

"And you'll have it. Come on, let's get practicing. I wouldn't mind seeing you use these on Kallan next time he tries to give you a hard time."

Now that was an appealing image.