Breed of Envy (The Breed Chronicles, #02) (10 page)

I gave a mental head scratch as he walked away and finished getting the rest of the room together. Teachers were weird, weird creatures, I decided, and then I went to help him.

Linc showed up a few minutes before class started. He spotted me, gave me the same what-are-you-doing-here look that Mr. Connor had given me. “I was wondering why you weren’t answering your door and why you didn’t show up for breakfast. You’ve been here?”

“Yeah,” I told him, nodding as Tasha came in.

She strolled up to us, shot Linc a look. “So this is where she’s been hiding.”

“I wasn’t hiding. I was practicing.” Well, that’d been my intention, but after I’d gotten here, I kinda just beat the crap out of the bag. But they didn’t need to know that.

“You should’ve gotten me. I would’ve come with you.”

“Sorry. It was early. And unlike one of us,” I said, giving Linc a pointed look, “I don’t like waking people up before the crack of dawn.”

Linc glared his response.

Tasha, who I loved more daily, shook her head at Linc. “You woke her up before dawn and lived to tell the tale? Amazing. If that’d been me, I would’ve killed you.”

Grinning at Tasha, I said, “I would’ve too, if I’d been awake enough. It was the day after I joined. I think I was still in shock over the whole deal.”

I wasn’t actually mad at him for it. At the time, I’d been annoyed as hell, but after I realized why he’d woken me up, I’d forgiven him. How could I not when he’d taken me to the catwalk that joined the North and South Towers together to watch a sunrise?

It was damn hard to be mad at someone when their intentions were almost always good. The jerk.

Mr. Connor called attention to the class, so me, Linc, and Tasha turned in his direction. He did his usual is-everyone-present checking and then talked about the new CMs for a few minutes before putting us into groups to practice. Brian was my partner again, and I had a feeling it was going to be like that for the rest of the Phase. I didn’t mind him so much, because he was pretty much the strong and silent type, but I missed being Linc’s partner. He was chattier. I hated being quiet.

Plus, Linc was easier to trick and I could almost always get him to fall for stupid stuff. Like sending him flying over my shoulder. Okay, so that might’ve been the main reason I missed Flyboy. As soon as I thought the name, I grinned. That was just…perfect and so Linc. Of course, he’d hate the nickname, which meant I’d have to use it. A lot.

Apparently, I really had grinned and not just in my head, because Brian was giving me a have-you-lost-your-mind look. “Sorry—”

“Is this fun to you?” Brian said in a really low, almost dangerously low, tone.

“What?” My jaw dropped. “No, I—”

“This isn’t a game. I get that your Director Greene’s favorite, but if you can’t take this seriously, I’m going to ask for another partner.”

I would’ve said something, but I was shocked into silence. My brain went completely haywire. I’d had a really bad morning and I’d done everything I could to make it better, and I had, for all of two seconds, and then Strong and Not-So-Silent had to go and ruin it.

I mean, as much as I understood his point, almost everyone here knew how serious this place was. We were training to be demon hunters for crying out loud, and most of us, if not all of us, had really good reason to be here, because we’d seen something we shouldn’t have or lost someone we shouldn’t have. Him implying that I didn’t take this seriously just pissed me off, and at the same time, it made me feel guilty. I didn’t know which made me madder.

“Fine,” I snapped, though I kept my tone low. “You want serious, you’ve got it.”

When we’d finished practicing the moves we’d learned last week, Mr. Connor demonstrated our next routine: A right jab to the left shoulder, a punch to the gut, then an uppercut to the jaw (or in our case, missing their jaw), followed by a roundhouse kick to the head (shoulder). He also showed us the blocks for the moves.

We were supposed to practice with the new CMs first, then our partners. I stormed over to our assigned CM and waited for Brian. “I’ll go first,” I told him, and he moved to the side and waited. The CMs were programmed for the defensive blocks we’d just learned, so it had no problem blocking the hits. If I’d been in a better mood, I probably would’ve been more impressed with them, but I was steaming mad so I didn’t really care.

Brian shook his head after my first round. “You’re not hitting the jaw hard enough.”

My hands dropped down. “I’m getting the feel for it,” I said through gritted teeth. “And I don’t need you to tell me what to do. Isn’t that Mr. Connor’s job?”

Brian rolled his eyes. “Are you just going to
get the feel for it
when a demon attacks you?”

“Just shut up.”

He turned and stared at me. I could see the disgust in his eyes, though I was completely baffled by it. “Everyone thinks you’re just so damn special, and you’re not. You’re no different than anyone else.”

“I never claimed I was.” I’d never once said I was special. Hell, I’d never even thought it. If anything, I’d been the one to say I
wasn’t
special, that I was just me, Jade Hall, your normal, everyday girl. Well, as normal as a girl could be living at a facility that trained demon hunters.

“Maybe that’s the problem, then.”

“What? Huh? How does that make any sense?!”

He didn’t say anything else. At all. But he stared at me with that same disappointed slash disgusted look that had my temper soaring. When my fingers curled into tight, almost painful fists, and I realized he was the one I wanted to use them on, I spun around and gave the CM an uppercut that had my hand screaming in agony and the CM’s head flying in the air. It bounced off the wall and flew toward a couple of kids beside us. They had to duck out of the way to avoid it.

The neck of the CM sparked and smoke drifted out. I dropped my hands and couldn’t decide if I wanted to laugh, cry, or scream.

I caught a look from Brian but I had no idea what it meant and I really didn’t care. I’d just broken a brand new CM within an hour of class.

Mr. Connor ran over. He eyed the mannequin, then me and Brian, and then the manikin again. His mouth parted but no sound came out.

“She just kicked its ass!” someone shouted.

I just stared ahead, my eyes on the CM, trying to decide what I was going to say or do. Running away sounded like a very, very good idea. And so did crying and laughing and screaming, because I hadn’t decided on which to do yet.

Linc and Tasha came over. Linc glanced at me with a mixture of amusement and awe. “Should’ve known.”

I didn’t have the heart to glare.

Mr. Connor cleared his throat as the rest of the class surrounded us. “Well, obviously this one was defective,” he said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Practice with your partners for the remainder of class. I want to have the rest of the CMs checked out before anyone else uses them.” When no one moved, Mr. Connor gave them all stern looks. “Now would be good.”

“I’m sorry,” I blabbed as soon as the rest of the class was out of earshot. “I didn’t mean to hit it so hard.”

“It’s fine, Jade. As strong as I’m sure you are, I think it’s a safe bet you didn’t actually knock its head off. They’re made to take a beating. It was just defective—it happens.” He spared the CM another look, shook his head. “Looks like one of those P3s might be getting their wish.” He lowered his gaze to my hands again. “Go see Doc.”

“I’m fine—”

“I don’t need you bleeding all over the classroom. Mr. West, walk her down to Doc’s.”

I decided against arguing, since I wasn’t sure I could do it without whining. In fact, I was sure I couldn’t. Not only did I have to go see Doc (who I loved but hated at the same time), but I had to walk down with Brian, the indirect cause of my blood shed and someone I was beginning to dislike more and more.

“This is your fault,” I hissed, casting him a dirty glare as we walked out of the room. “If you hadn’t antagonized me, this wouldn’t have happened!”

“You broke a combat manikin, big deal.”

“That thing probably cost more than everything I own five times over. And I wouldn’t have broken it if you weren’t such a jerk!”

“It was defective. It would have broken just as easily if I’d hit it.”

I wanted to say something snarky, like,
it wouldn’t have broken at all if I’d hit you instead
, but I decided it probably wasn’t best to antagonize him, especially after I yelled at him for all but doing the same thing. At The Pond, I probably would have said something like that, and then I would’ve had to put actions to words because the girls would’ve seen it as a challenge. I didn’t think that’d be a problem with him, but who knew?

There was probably a reason why he hadn’t been in any of our classes last Phase. For all I knew, it was because of this crap right now. Maybe he was a troublemaker. Maybe he had anger issues.

A small voice in the back of my head whispered about
me
being the one with the issues, but I ignored it because I didn’t have anger issues. I had Brian issues.

“Whatever,” ended up being my great retort.

We rode the elevator down in silence, though the tension was insanely loud. My blood was boiling, my nerves were shot, and everything inside me was screaming to hit him. I closed my eyes and chanted
Don’t hit Brian
in my head over and over again so that, by the time we reached the second floor, I still wanted to hit him, just not as badly.

I stepped out before him, stormed over to Doc’s door, and knocked. Apparently, I didn’t fool my subconscious into thinking I didn’t want to hit him as hard, because when I knocked, I pictured the door as Brian’s face and knocked hard enough to leave my knuckles stinging. And I left bloody prints, I realized, quickly trying to wipe them away before Doc answered and—

The door opened and Doc raised her eyebrows. “What are you doing?” she asked when I almost fell on her.

“Nothing. Sorry.” I walked in before she could say anything else and hoped she followed without paying any attention to the door, which pretty much guaranteed she would.

And she did, but only because Brian The Jerk pointed it out to her. She’d had the damn thing almost shut before he’d lifted his head toward it.

Doc eyed the door, then Brian, and finally me. “What happened?”

“It was just an accident.” I held up my hands for inspection.

“She lost her temper.”

My gaze darted to Brian who was leaning against the wall near the door. “I didn’t lose my temper. I lost my patience. Because of you. You walked me down. Now you can go far, far away.”

He shrugged a shoulder, turned, and left.

“Freaking jerk,” I muttered under my breath.

Wasn’t it bad enough that I had Felecia’s old gang on my case, but now I had to add
him
to my list of enemies? And if he wasn’t an enemy, then that just made it even worse. Mostly everyone in Felecia’s old gang was a P3 (except the P1 girl), so it was easy to avoid them. I couldn’t avoid Brian, not unless I wanted to A) skip my class, or B) ask Mr. Connor to switch partners. As much as I liked the idea of option B, I didn’t want to do it because then he’d know that I’d asked. And there was no way I was skipping class.

Doc said something, but all I heard was “smoke” and my name.

“What?” I said, pulling my gaze away from the door and up to her face.

“I said you’re thinking so hard that your brain is starting to smoke.”

I scoffed.

“Your knuckles look broken, Jade. Tell me what happened.”

I looked down at them, shrugged. “They’re not broken,” I said, ignoring her other question because if I answered, then I probably
would
have smoke coming from some part of me.

“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow. “And how do you know that?”

“Because they’re my knuckles and I said so. That’s how.”

Doc stepped back and crossed her arms over her chest. “What has you so irritable? This isn’t like you.”

I struggled not to glare at Doc. My issues weren’t with her, but I was beyond annoyed at everything, and right now, she was only adding to it. “Just fix me up so I can get back to class.” I refused to meet her eyes, because I knew if I looked at her face, there’d be hurt on it, and I didn’t want to see it.

“Like I said, I think your knuckles are broken, and if they are, you aren’t going back to class.” Her tone was hard.

“They’re not, and if they are, they’ll heal quickly.”

“I guess we’re about to find out. Let’s go.”

I figured she’d take me down to the first floor, to one of the med rooms for an x-ray or something, but instead she led me across the hall to the Terminator Tube room. “What are we going here for? Isn’t this thing for like, whole body scans? Seems wasteful to put me in for a stupid hand scan.”

“If your hand is broken, then this is the perfect time to use it. Your rapid healing is obviously due to the demon DNA, so this will, hopefully, give us the rate of your healing, and it could help the scientists.”

I didn’t reply and she didn’t say anything else, either. She handed me that stupid gown to change into and when I was done, had me step into the tube. At least she didn’t hook up any of the electrodes this time.

I stood quietly, fighting against the urge to fidget because I wanted to
move
. Not out of the scanner necessarily, just…move. Do something. Anything.

The beams of light moved and I had to fight even harder to hold still, otherwise I was sure she’d make me do this all over again.

“Your knuckles have hairline fractures,” Doc said, looking up from the console as the scanner beams moved past my hands and down the rest of the body. “Just like I—” She broke off and frowned as the beams went back up. “Hold on.” She typed something on the console and the beams moved again, this time hovering over my hands for a solid minute.

Doc turned off the scanner and when the glass panels slid away, motioned me to come over. “Watch,” she instructed once I was standing beside her. She pressed another button and a holographic image of my body appeared above the console.