Map of Fates (15 page)

E
lodie and Colette were still sleeping when I woke up the next morning. The last thing I remembered was Colette making me eat soup while I sat in a nest of blankets on her bed. I must have passed out, because I woke up to find the covers tucked around me and Colette and Elodie sharing the next bed over.
Two more days,
was my first thought. The Saxons had left Beijing yesterday, were passing through London today, then headed to DC. I had two more days until the Circle marriage countdown clock ran out.

I pulled on a sweatshirt and slipped out of the room. Stellan was sitting on one of the bar stools.

He looked up when I came onto the deck, and set a little cup of espresso on the bar. A violent wave of unexpected emotion crashed over me, so strong I stopped still.

I was drowning last night. I was drowning and he saved my life, but all I could think of now was what had happened right after.

We could just have easily have swum straight to the swim ladder. I would have thanked Stellan, then cried on
Jack's
shoulder. Stellan would have joked about having to save me and ribbed Elodie and Colette for almost killing the purple-eyed girl.

That would have been what I'd expected. What actually happened wasn't.

Stellan broke the eye contact I wasn't able to break and took a sip of his coffee. “I was surprised to see Bishop all alone in his bed. I expected a
glad you're not dead
make-out session keeping me awake all night.”

The spell holding me in place broke.

“Good morning to you, too,” I said, my voice still scratchy and throat aching. I leaned on the end of the bar. Obviously any awkwardness was coming from me, and he thought nothing of it. That was a relief.

I gazed out over the bay. It looked so unthreatening this morning, the pinks and yellows of the sunrise glinting off the water.

“The training thing,” I said, but stopped myself. I didn't realize I was going to say that. It made sense, though.
Two days.
If we couldn't solve the clues, maybe I really would have to confront the Order directly. Despite any doubts I might have had yesterday, I wasn't wrong. No matter how much Jack disapproved, I knew I'd do whatever it took to save my mom, even if it was dangerous. We were getting into last-resort territory.

Stellan's face shifted into an infuriatingly triumphant smile. “What happened to the
thanks but no thanks
of twenty-four hours ago?”

I felt my face blaze with annoyance, and maybe a little embarrassment. I turned to go. “Never mind. I'll practice by myself.”

“Hey.” Stellan reached out, his hand on my upper arm. “I didn't say no.”

I looked down at his hand, and he removed it. “It's
not
that Jack is a bad teacher.” I looked over my shoulder toward the bedrooms, trying not to feel guilty.

Stellan shrugged and looked down at his own bare feet. “Give me a second.”

I barely had time to put on shoes and retrieve my knife before he reappeared. I tucked the knife into the front pocket of my sweatshirt, and Stellan rooted through the fridge.

“Bringing breakfast?” I asked.

He pulled out a paper-wrapped package. “No,” he said simply, cocking his head toward the end of the docks. “There's a hidden cove down on the beach. Come on.”

At this time of morning, the only people we saw were a couple swimmers far out at sea, bright yellow and white swim caps bobbing along in the turquoise water, and a few early risers having breakfast on their boats' sundecks. I pulled a baseball cap low over my eyes, anyway.

The cove was tucked away on the far end of the beach, white sand stretching to the foot of a rocky, brush-covered cliff. We had to take our shoes off and wade through the shallow water to slip past a fall of dark boulders, and when we got there, Stellan was right—we were completely hidden from the walkway and the rest of the shoreline. The gentle lapping of the waves echoed off the rocks all around, completing the illusion that we were shut off from the world.

Stellan put his shoes back on, but I squished my toes in the sand. “This place is beautiful.”

Stellan looked down at my bare feet and then up over my leggings and sweatshirt. The knife tucked into my pocket burned into the skin of my stomach, and I shifted self-consciously.

“Well?” he said. “I need to know what I'm working with. What have you learned?”

I took a deep breath and took my knife out, tossing its sheath on a rock.

Stellan laughed. “Oh, definitely not. I didn't come down here to die.” He picked up the sheath and slipped it over the knife, taking the whole thing carefully out of my hand.

“This is better to practice with.” He picked up a piece of driftwood as big around as my wrist and snapped it in half. He handed me a piece about six inches long and kept the other half for himself. “Well?”

I wondered if he was being more careful with me because of last night. He was probably thinking I couldn't handle this.

I cleared my throat. The piece of wood felt different in my hand than my knife. “Jack taught me how to stand. And hold the knife. Mostly self-defense stuff. He thinks I shouldn't count on fighting with the knife, so he hasn't taught me much about it, but I looked up some tutorials online . . .”

“You've been watching YouTube videos about knife fighting?” he said incredulously. “No wonder you've been having a hard time.”

I frowned. “What do you want me to do?”

He shrugged. “Stab me.”

I adjusted the stick in my hand, planted my feet, and—

Stellan threw his elbow into my “knife” and knocked it six feet away. He lifted his chin in the direction it had gone. “Try again.”

This time, I made a point not to prepare much so he wouldn't know which way I was going. I stabbed at his side, but he sidestepped effortlessly. “Again.”

I lashed out at his shoulder. Sidestepped again. At his side. Straight on, like I was trying to stab him in the heart. He grabbed my wrist with one hand. He was so much stronger than me, he pushed my hand back until it was against my own chest. I jerked away.

“So the baseline's nothing,” he said.

“You knew I wasn't good at this,” I grumbled. I hated being bad at things.

“All right.” Stellan shrugged out of his gray hoodie so he was just in a thin white tank that showed the tops of his scars creeping over his shoulders. “Let's look at this differently.
Tell
me what you've learned.”

I tore my eyes from him and described the stance I was supposed to take.

“Show me.” I did, and he corrected me, nudging my bare feet a little farther apart with his boots and pushing down on my shoulders. “You've got to loosen up. At least half of fighting is being ready to dodge, defend, or attack. That can't happen if you're tense.” He put his hands on my shoulders and shook them. “Relax. More.”

The second he let go, I felt my shoulders rise back up to my ears.

Stellan sighed. “Next?”

He corrected my grip and my striking posture. “You're not entirely terrible,” he conceded. “At least you remember a lot of what you learn. What else?”

Besides what Jack had taught me and the videos I'd watched, I'd read a lot on the Internet. “I learned about where the best places are to—if you want to, you know. Hurt somebody.”

“Or kill somebody,” Stellan corrected.

I felt myself hesitate, but nodded silently. He gestured for me to go on.

“The arteries,” I said. “I read that they, um, they bleed a lot.”

The sun had just popped over the cliff, and Stellan squinted into it before directing us into a shady spot. “All right, arteries. Like where?”

“The, um, the carotid artery? In the neck.” I looked at Stellan's and could just make out the throb of his pulse.

He nodded. “Come here. Put down your stick.”

I did, warily.

“You're right. You so much as nick the carotid artery and it'll bleed everywhere. Stab it good, and the person will be unconscious in fifteen seconds, dead in a minute. But . . . Give me your hand.” He pressed the tips of my fingers to the side of my own throat, pressing hard enough I could feel my pulse speed up. He moved my hand around, exploring the area. I felt my hard swallow. “Feel that? This is where the carotid artery is, but it's under a lot of muscle, even on someone as small as you. On someone bigger . . .” He moved my fingers to his own neck. It was harder, much less pliable than mine. “That artery is buried deep. And that's if you can even get a person in the position necessary to reach it.” He lowered his chin to his chest and brought my hand to his neck again. I could barely reach past his jawline. I pulled away, and there were red marks on his neck from my fingertips.

“If you have the element of surprise
and
are strong enough
and
have a big enough knife, you could take off somebody's head. You will probably have none of these things, so the carotid artery's going to be hard for you. Next?”

I tried not to think about Prada, about Luc
actually
taking off someone's head, followed by Stellan stabbing someone else in the chest. It seemed like so long ago now. “Um,” I said. “The heart. The heart is pretty much
the
place to stab someone, right?”

This time, he took my hand without asking and pressed my fingers to his chest. “Show me exactly where the knife would go.”

“I . . .” I felt awkwardly around the left side of his chest for just a second. “I don't know. Somewhere around here.”

He moved my hand lower than I'd had it and pressed down hard.
“Pretty small area,” he said, pushing up and down so I could feel between two ribs. “Through the back is easier.” He pulled my hand behind him so it probably looked from afar like we were embracing. His back wasn't quite as muscular as his chest, and I could feel the ribs more clearly. “But it's still a space barely big enough for a blade, and you'd need a lot of practice to get that kind of precision.”

He let go and I backed up a step, two.

“What else?” he said.

I shoved my hands in my sweatshirt pockets. “The femoral artery. On the Internet, it said you'd bleed out really quickly from there.”

A smile flashed across Stellan's face. “Very quickly,” he agreed.

“It's in the upper thigh,” I offered.

“The
very
upper thigh,” he said, his grin growing. Before I could stop myself, I was staring at his
very upper thigh.
He shifted his weight purposefully.

“I won't make you touch that one,” he said. “But suffice it to say, similar problems apply. Though there won't be as much muscle protecting it, it's usually covered by clothes, which are actually quite difficult to stab through. And besides that, men tend to have very good reflexes against attacks to that area.”

My eyes flicked involuntarily back to
that area.
He might as well have a glowing neon sign on his crotch. “Right,” I said quickly. “I guess I should have realized that.”

Stellan was still grinning. “You Americans are so puritanical. I'm teaching you how to
kill
somebody and you're being a tough little soldier about it, but I mention a man's crotch in a completely nonsexual way and you can't look me in the eye.”

“I don't think you've ever said anything in a completely nonsexual way,” I retorted.

“Innuendo is all in the interpretation,
kuklachka.
So that says rather more about your mind than mine, doesn't it?” He cocked an eyebrow.

I was not going to let him goad me. “So when are you actually going to teach me something? All you've told me so far is that nothing I know will work.”

Stellan plucked his wooden knife out of the sand, then tossed mine to me. “That's the most important thing there is to learn,” he said. “It's hard to kill or gravely injure with a knife when you don't know what you're doing and can't physically overpower your opponent. That's both a bad thing and a good thing.”

I remembered the club in Istanbul. I'd asked him why he used a knife.
It takes more effort to kill with a dagger,
he'd said.
Guns make it too easy.

“So why even learn?” I said.

“You know more than you did an hour ago, don't you? Now you might not make the mistake of trying to stab someone in the groin.”

I stabbed out with my stick and knocked him on the arm.

“Good,” he said. “The joints are a fine place to strike. A good hit to the elbow will throw your attacker off-balance.”

He held out his arm, showing me the vulnerable space inside his arm. For the next half hour, he tutored me, and by the time the sun had risen fully over the bluff, I was dripping with sweat.

“You're making progress,” he said when we stopped for breath. “Better than when you were practicing with Jack.”