Chapter 1

one

Iwas seventeen when I met the devil.

Sister Mary Alice had just given us our first knives—training knives, made of black rubber which bent if you pressed too hard—and Bryn and I were sparring. Not that it could be called that, even charitably, because we were too nervous to actually strike at each other. The knives might have been made of rubber, but the idea of the knives was real enough to make us shy.

Bryn and I had been training in the sisters’ dojo since we were twelve. Six days a week I was on its old red carpet or its beaten blue mats, sweating, pushing, kicking, punching. There was sparring, self-defense, katas. Rattan canes and wooden swords when we’d turned fifteen, and bo staffs later on. We weren’t afraid of hitting each other, and we weren’t afraid of getting hit.

But there was something about the knives.

The bell above the door rang. Bryn and I had grown up hearing that bell and so we didn’t bother looking. No one ever came to this place who didn’t mean to come to this place. The entrance to the sisters’ dojo was two stories below, a black door squashed between a parking garage and a thrift store. It didn’t even have a sign above it, only the number of a Bible verse painted in faint green letters.

Psalm 144:1. Which if you flipped to in the Bible, would read:

Blessed be the Lord, my rock,

who trains my hands for battle,

my fingers for war.

The sisters’ school didn’t have a name that I knew of, they had never even attempted a website, and their phone was an ancient thing made of yellowed plastic that I only saw answered once. People came through the door because they were delivering something or because they were supposed to be here, and that was it.

So it wasn’t until Bryn got past her nerves and finally made her first strike that I saw him.

Tall and broad-shouldered. A suit too nice for this place. Too nice for a lot of places, actually.

And he was watching us.

I turned back to Bryn, and she lifted a shoulder before settling into a sparring stance. She didn’t know who he was either.

Awareness prickled along the back of my neck as I tried to focus on the sparring, on the tip of Bryn’s fake knife.

What is it about being watched that makes us want to impress the watcher? I didn’t know him; I didn’t need to prove anything to him. And yet when Bryn managed to wedge her knife against my armpit, I was embarrassed. Tried even harder, only for her to catch me a third time with her blade.

A throat cleared.

I turned to see the man standing several paces away, his jacket off and his feet bare on the old red carpet. He was rolling up his sleeves to expose sun-bronzed forearms, his fingers working the fabric in quick, deft rolls. A wristwatch glinted, expensive but not ostentatious, which probably meant it was even more expensive than it looked.

“May I?” he asked, extending his hand, palm up, to Bryn. His voice was deep and rough and cold. Ice wouldn’t melt in that voice. But it was mannerly, polite.

Some devils hide, you see. Right in plain sight.

I watched then as Bryn placed her knife on his palm. We were used to being shown what we were doing wrong—any martial arts teacher did that—but our teachers were Catholic, so we were doubly blessed in that regard. We were trained to be excellent students. Trained never to miss a chance to learn.

But still. He was a stranger in a place that never had strangers. I might have refused on those grounds alone. Yet I faced him and bowed, just as he did to me. I shifted my weight until I was light on my feet and supple as a willow branch in the wind. And I watched as he didn’t shift at all.

I was so very aware of everything as I stepped to the side. Of the sweat between my palm and the rubber hilt of the knife, of where my gi jacket gaped open to expose my throat and collarbone. Of the heavy blond ponytail brushing against the back of my gi as I moved, a slow drag across the cotton. I allowed my awareness to expand to him, to his easy, upright posture, to the way he held his knife backwards, the blade coming from the outside of his fist rather than the inside. I’d only ever seen people hold a knife like that in movies.

I remember that I thought he was almost handsome that day. He had a strong nose, with a flare at the bridge which told me it had been broken before. He had a jaw straight out of my AP geometry textbook, shadowed with rough stubble. A high forehead with a thin scar furrowing into his dark blond hair, straight, thick brows, and dark blue eyes.

A mouth with a precisely formed upper lip and a curved lower one, which somehow gave the impression of softness and firmness at once.

I know now he was only in his early thirties, but at the time, he was in the same category as all adults to me—teachers, doctors, presidents, uncles, nuns, whatever.

There was only young and old. I was young. He was not.

But despite that, he moved easier than anyone I’d ever seen, including my teachers. As I stepped lightly in the almost-dance of sparring, he walked normally, his shoulders relaxed and his hands at his sides. To the uninitiated, it might look like he was asking for an attack by not having his guards up, by not having his knife out. Even then, I knew better. He never crossed a foot in front of the other as he walked; the looseness of his shoulders and arms meant he could snap into motion at any moment. He was baiting me, maybe. Or simply waiting for me to move.

Fine then. I could move. I’d been doing this almost my entire life, was the best at my school, and I wasn’t wearing impeccably tailored trousers like he was—

Before my knife hand had even made it an inch, I was blocked, seized, spun. By the time I registered what was happening, my back was to his chest and his knife was to my throat.

His chest was warm even through my gi jacket and the tank top I wore underneath. His arms around me were an iron cage, and the rubber knife to my throat pressed just hard enough to make me lift my chin. I didn’t smell cologne or any other kind of expensive scent, which seemed unusual for someone who would go to the trouble to wear such a nice suit; instead, I only smelled fresh and clean air, soap, perhaps, and something else underneath it. The way the air smells after rain, maybe.

He only held me there an instant, long enough to make his point, short enough to be sportsmanlike.

Still. I had no intention of repeating that particular humiliation.

But when I turned to tell him so, I saw Sister Mary Alice and Sister Grace watching me from the dojo’s front desk, their arms crossed. Sister Mary Alice lifted a pale, calloused hand from where it had been tucked into her elbow.

The message was clear. I was to continue.

I kept my breathing even and focused on settling my energy back into my belly.

“How long have you had that knife?” he asked as we bowed and started again. Like the last time, he merely walked while I danced around him—but now I knew the speed and strength that little deception of his hid.

“An hour,” I told him.

“They only showed you standard grip, I presume?”

“They didn’t show me anything. They wanted us to get a feel for them before we started formal lessons.”

He nodded again, and then tucked his tie into his shirt with his free hand. With a flick of his fingers, he was holding the knife like me. “This is standard grip,” he said. “Sometimes called a hammer grip. You can move your thumb to a saber grip, like so, but that’s still really just standard grip when you consider the direction of the blade.”

I braced my thumb on the edge of the hilt like he did, and then slid it back. “Okay,” I said quietly. I wasn’t sure why he was teaching me this, or why we were even sparring in the first place, but I was hungry to learn, desperate to push myself.

“This,” the stranger said, flipping the knife and then catching it expertly with the blade pointing down, “is reverse grip.”

“Like a serial killer,” Bryn chirped from over by the mirrors.

A corner of the stranger’s mouth pressed in, faintly. “Yes. And now it’s easier to use my fist as a fist if I need to. Now I have more leverage for slicing, and more force for stabbing.”

I followed his lead and changed my own grip to reverse. It felt strange—it wasn’t the way you’d first think to hold a knife—but it felt powerful too. I could feel how much faster I could cut, how much harder I could stab.

“Good,” he said, and when he said good in that rough, cold voice, something flickered in my chest, in my thoughts, gone before I could really perceive it. “Now, do you see the difference?”

“Standard is blade up,” I answered, “and reverse is blade down.”

A shake of his head. “Standard,” he said slowly, “is for a fair fight. But reverse?” Once again, he moved faster than I could stop him. This time I landed on my back, with him on top of me. The tip of his rubber blade was lodged against my windpipe. “Reverse is for when you mean it,” he finished.

I blinked up at him, too stunned for the humiliation to sink in, although it would dig its teeth into me later. In a fast, graceful movement, he was standing, and then he grabbed my forearm and pulled me to my feet.

He dropped my arm as soon as I had my balance and then crossed the space to return the knife to Bryn. She and I watched as he strode over to the area by the door and put on his socks and shoes with elegant, efficient movements. Sister Mary Alice and Sister Grace were gone.

“Well, Isolde,” the stranger said as he stood up. His sleeves were still rolled up and his jacket was slung over his forearm. “It was lovely meeting you.”

He left, the bell on the door ringing long after it had shut.

I turned to face Bryn, who was still staring at the door he’d walked through. When she swiveled her head to look at me, there was a question written all over her tan, heart-shaped face.

“How did he know your name?” she asked.