Page 26 of Mortal Blood
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’twantCole 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 atme, 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 tooeasy.”
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.Shefinished 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 partthat 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 leastpartof 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 trylookingat 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 alotof 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’tyougive 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.
