Trials. I’d finally found out what that meant, even though Benjamin didn’t want to talk about it. Where they slug it out over who gets to be in a particular group—in this case, one of my bodyguards. I didn’t like the notion. I mean, I can see the benefit of someone who will successfully beat the shit out of someone else as a bodyguard, but . . . it just didn’t seem right.
Besides, someone had tried to kill me in a Schola before. Several times. What’s to say that whoever won the Trials wouldn’t be someone who would try to put me in front of the suckers again? Or even . . .
Once I started going down that mental road, I started wondering about Benjamin and his entire crew. What if one of them had a reason to hate me? I saw them every day. Their rooms were right next to mine.
I ate lunch with them, for Christ’s sake.
“I’m not looking to hold Trials.” I hitched my bag up on my shoulder and headed for the door, my empty latte cup crumpling in one fist.
He got there first, swept the heavy door open, and glanced out into the hall. “Very wise of you. Or not.”
“My thoughts exactly.” I pushed past him, out into the hall, and stamped away.
It was going to be one of those days.
Of all my classes, Basic Firearm Safety was probably my favorite. Maybe because the first time I’d shown up, the lean dark unsmiling instructor—Babbage—had asked me what I knew about guns. I played a little dumb, asked him what he meant, and he smirked and showed me a table with a range of handguns, four different rifles, an AK-47, and a crossbow. There was ammo set off to the side, and he asked me if I had any idea what to do with any of it.
In front of the class, I checked, loaded, and laid each handgun; clipped the magazine into the AK-47; and was loading the rifles when the teacher coughed and said, “Well, I guess we know who my assistant this semester will be.”
Everyone had laughed, and I’d finished loading the rifles too. There was no reason to stop, and it felt good to have my hands performing movements they knew by heart.
I didn’t touch the crossbow, though. It looked like a polycarbon recurve, not a compound. The arrows were weird, with a head I’d never seen before. Even the gang down in Carmel who went out to clean sucker holes—the only time I ever heard of humans taking on suckers and winning—used guns, more guns, and flamethrowers. Nothing even close to a crossbow, for Christ’s sake.
I couldn’t wait for vampire anatomy to be covered in the Paranormal Biology class. Right now we were on basic wulfen anatomy because it was closest to humans. But finding out how to use a crossbow on a sucker—wow. I mean, you never want to be face-to-face with a sucker. But still . . . a crossbow.
It really says something about you when that’s your idea of fun. Just what it says kind of isn’t nice, though.
I loaded the 9mm, checked it, raised it, and squeezed off three rounds.
The echoes died away. I hit the target button to bring it home. Nicely grouped and even, star-shaped holes. I laid the gun down carefully, checked twice, and we all took our ear protection off. The hole-starred target was unclipped and passed around.
Babbage held up the remains of a fired bullet, showing how it had fragged apart on contact. “This is what happens—when it hits tissue, it explodes. Why is this important?”
I could have answered in my sleep, but I didn’t. He called on a blue-eyed djamphir with a round babyface.
“Bleeding out,” Babyface said. I think his name was Bjorn or something, but I wasn’t sure. “They heal quick, especially if they’ve just fed and have a lot of fresh hemo in their systems. So, you gotta cause enough damage to drain ’em. Make ’em weak.”
“Even a weak nosferat is a dangerous one, though.” Babbage laid the bullet down. “So when you go in for the kill, keep your weapon handy. I repeat myself only because so many Kouroi have failed to do so and been uncomfortably surprised.”
Nobody laughed at that one. We’d all seen the pictures. Big, glossy 8x10s, bigger versions of the ones you’d see in forensic textbooks. Vampires are only messy sometimes when they feed. But when they kill a djamphir, they like to make a statement. There’s nothing like hating something that’s part of you to make you really savage.
Leon, over near the steel door, had settled back against the wall and half-closed his eyes. He’d probably heard this all a million times before.
“Now let me pose you a question—Matthew, do not touch that!” Babbage’s tone held a definite warning, and the boy yanked his fingers away from the .22 on the table.
Freaking amateurs. You keep your hands away from a gun unless you’re paying attention. It just works out better that way.
“Yessir,” Matthew mumbled. His spiky inky haircut was fashionable last year, but the sullen-frat-boy look he always wore never goes out of style.
Babbage continued while I toyed with my ear protectors. “You have a wounded vampire down, bleeding out quickly. What is the weapon of choice for dispatching it?”
“Anything that gives you reach,” Babyface muttered.
“I second that.” This from a tall lanky djamphir towhead with thistledown-fine hair. “Headshot, more shots to the torso to bleed, or malaika.”
Babbage nodded approvingly. I felt like I’d been pinched. Christophe had brought me a set of malaika—wooden swords, of all things—and promised to teach me how to use them. They’d probably burned when the redheaded vampire exploded my room at the old Schola.
Someone else asked before I could. “Do they still teach malaika anymore? I thought those were—”
“They’re still efficient.” Babbage glanced at me. A djamphir in the first row handed the paper target to me. The shots were nicely grouped, even if I did say so myself. “They are traditionally held to be a svetocha ’s weapon, since a female’s greater reflex speed and coordination gives her an edge. Hawthorn is also deadly to the nosferat, for reasons you’ll learn in your chemistry and Sympathetic Sorcery classes.”
That perked my ears right up. “Sorcery?”
Babbage inclined his head. He leaned a hip against one of the tables, easily and obviously not resting any weight on it. “Surely you’ve noticed that a djamphir’s weapons are not all physical. We are in the process of rediscovering djamphir arts and processes that were lost when we were almost extinguished as a species.”
I almost hopped from foot to foot. “Are you talking, like, what kind of sorcery? Witchcraft? Ceremonial magic? Hexes, or—”
The interest in his sharp dark eyes mounted a few notches. “Djamphir sorceries are largely sympathetic and combat-based. They share some commonalities with standard European witchcraft. Asian and Middle Eastern djamphir, few as they are, have inherited some notable sorceries and resistances that we haven’t been able to study much, mostly because they are few and secretive. They are also fighting a war on both fronts, with the nosferatu and the Maharaj.”
I was getting answers, but they were too slow. Babbage was good about answering though. He never looked at me like I was a moron. “What are the Maharaj? I’ve heard of them, but—”
“You’ll hear more about them in the fourth—or is it fifth?—semester of Paranormal Biology. The short answer is, djamphir are the products of unions between vampires or djamphir and human women. The Maharaj are a clan of descendants of human women and beings referred to as jinni.”
“I thought everyone knew that,” someone said.