Callum smiled at the man and turned back to me with his training face on again. I expected the newcomers to leave, but they leaned against the wall like they were planning to stay and watch. Great. All I needed today was more people watching me get my butt handed to me.
I watched Callum warily as he moved to a spot ten feet from me and faced me with the calculating gleam in his eyes that I had come to dread. “Open yourself to your Mori, Sara. Feel its power, and let it guide you. Its survival instincts are strong, and it wants nothing more than to protect you. Without you, it cannot exist.”
Do you hear that? I said to the beast crouched sullenly in the back of my mind. You need me a lot more than I need you, so you’d better behave. I forced my mind to block out everyone else in the room and focus only on Callum’s face. His eyes always gave him away a split second before he made his move, not that knowing when he was about to strike had ever helped me. I lowered the wall holding back the demon, feeling it flutter with excitement as its cage opened. At the same time, I reached for the glowing power at my center and pulled back a thread to wield if the need arose. The demon was strong, but it was no match for my Fae power and we both knew it.
My Mori and I saw Callum’s eyes flicker at the same time, but the demon reacted first. It rushed forward in an attempt to fill my mind and make my body obey its commands. For a second, I allowed it – before the old memory surfaced. I could still feel the scorching heat of the demon beneath my skin, and the helplessness of floating in the vastness of the demon’s mind.
My walls shot back up a split second before Callum plowed into me and sent me soaring backward again. This time, instead of colliding with the wall, I found myself snatched from the air and pulled against a hard chest.
“I think our little bird has had enough flying for today, Callum.” Laughter rumbled through the chest of the man holding me before he set me on my feet. Embarrassed, I looked up into the sapphire eyes of the blond stranger, but there was no mockery in his expression. If anything, his smile was kind, indulgent.
“I think you are right,” Callum agreed, looking at me. “No less than thirty minutes in the baths, Sara, and take some gunna paste.” I made a face, and his expression grew stern. It was no secret that I would rather suffer a few aches than eat the awful putty-like medicine. “If I see you limping at dinner again, I will hold you down and feed it to you myself.”
I nodded reluctantly because I knew he would follow through with his threat. Mumbling a good-bye to the newcomers, I hurried to the equipment room to shed my padded armor. Then I escaped the training area before Callum decided to feed me the nasty gunna paste himself, like he’d done on my second day of training.
The dark paneled hall in the training wing was quiet except for the muffled sounds of combat coming from behind the closed doors. Mohiri warriors spent a lot of time training when they weren’t out saving the world. The stronghold housed between thirty and forty warriors on a given day – not including the teams that came and went – so the training rooms were always busy this time of day.
I pushed open the heavy door to the women’s baths, relieved when I saw the empty chamber. Mohiri women were not timid or self-conscious, and they thought nothing of stripping down in front of each other, something I was still getting used to. If I was lucky I could get in and out of the bath before the room got too busy.
The first thing I did was go to a cabinet in the wall and retrieve a can of gunna paste. Scooping out some of the green paste with my finger, I grimaced and put it in my mouth. Within seconds, a dry, bitter taste coated my tongue and every corner of my mouth, and I had to force myself to swallow the paste instead of spitting it out. Even after the paste had gone down, the foul taste lingered, and I knew it would take at least another five minutes for it to go away. I silently cursed Callum as I did every day after training. It didn’t change things, but it made me feel a little better.
Stripping off my sweaty clothes, I immersed my body in the nearest of the six rectangular tubs sunken into the tiled floor. The hot cloudy liquid bubbled gently, and I moaned in sheer bliss as it began to soothe my aches and pains. I didn’t know what was in the water; just that it came from a deep underground spring that fed into massive tanks somewhere under the building. There, it was treated with special salts and purifiers and piped into the healing baths in a constant flow. That was as much as I cared to know about it, other than the fact that it did wonders for the body if you stayed in it long enough.
I closed my eyes and tried to relax and not think about my abysmal training session, or the dozen other negative thoughts that often plagued me in the week and a half I’d been here. It’s not as if you expected it to be like home. I just had to give it some time, to get used to the people and my surroundings. I had never been comfortable getting to know people, and making new friends didn’t come as easily to me as it did to Roland and Peter. A wry smile touched my lips. One more thing I had to work on.