The Revolt (The Reapers: Book Two) (8 page)

I followed him downstairs and walked over to
the stereo. I don’t train without music, and I wasn’t about to let
him choose the tunes. Cat liked to work out to ‘80s pop that made
my ears bleed, but she never stooped to argue about musical
preferences. It was an unspoken rule that whoever got to the stereo
first chose the music, and she’d always pretended like my choice
didn’t bother her. Still, she’d managed to be the first one in the
training room most days of the week. I’d never been good at getting
up early, even for the sake of decent tunes.

I removed Jed’s iPod and stuck mine in,
scrolling quickly through my options. It felt like a good day for
Killswitch Engage, which was about as hard as I liked it. I figured
I might as well listen to what I wanted while I had the chance.
There were a lot of screaming lyrics and pounding bass, but there
were some more mellow segments to the songs, too. I thought I was
being polite by not turning the volume up very high, but when I
turned to face Jed his expression suggested otherwise.

“Please tell me you don’t actually listen to
this? For enjoyment?” he said.

I couldn’t help but smile, which really
wasn’t very nice. He’d had a rough couple of days, too. I didn’t
care. I started wrapping my hands, shaking my hips to the beat. I
stretched and tried to work the soreness out of my muscles, I
couldn’t do anything about the bruises, but I knew once we got
moving I’d forget about them. The sound pumping through the
speakers made me smile and I even danced around a little to show
him just how much I enjoyed it. He rolled his eyes and shook his
head. “Could we at least listen to something a bit less… um…
obnoxious?”

“Obnoxious?” I asked, holding back a laugh. I
could see the signs, and knew that if I started laughing I wouldn’t
stop. I needed to hit something before I lost my mind. I walked
over to the punching bag. “What are you sixty?” I wound up and hit
the bag with a right cross that burned off my laughter.

He actually chuckled. “No, I just have taste.
I like to listen to music, as opposed to screaming and banging on
things.”

I shrugged and hit the bag again. “You sound
like my father.”

“I’ve met your father, and I’d have to
disagree. He might not love this music, but he is a Metallica fan,
so he’d probably appreciate it more than I do.”

That stopped me and I almost got hit by the
backswing of the bag. “Seriously?”

He nodded and some of the tension left his
face. “Yeah, he used to play it on the rare occasions he was at his
desk. My mom’s office was down the corridor from his and he always
had candy, so…”

“Huh.” I did my best to sound nonchalant,
though I was dying to ask more. My dad was a loser who’d
disappeared on me and my mom when I was eight, and I didn’t want to
care what kind of music he liked. Still, I couldn’t help the way my
heart leapt at the news. I was nothing like my mother, and it made
me kind of happy that I had something in common with my father at
least.

“How about we make a deal,” he said. “Whoever
can pin the other one first gets to choose the music.”

My first instinct was to shout no fair,
because he was bigger than me, but the idea of getting to hit him
appealed to me in a way I didn’t really want to think about too
hard. I stopped the bag and turned to look at him. For some
incomprehensible reason, he’d taken off his shirt, and he stood
before me in nothing but sweatpants. The boy was stacked and cut,
with muscles for days, and I had a hard time keeping the
appreciation out of my gaze. I focused on his face and reminded
myself how annoying he was.

“I’m pretty sure I can take you. You keep
talking about these superpowers you have but I’m beginning to
wonder if you just made that up to impress me.”

He didn’t move and his expression didn’t
change. I stood there waiting for him to say something, but what I
got was a forty pound plate flying past my head so close I felt a
breeze on my face. I leaned back, and fell flat on my butt as the
plate landed gently beside me.

“Do we have a deal?” he asked.

I was screwed and I knew it. There was no way
in hell I could beat him, but I didn’t want to give him the
satisfaction of backing down from the deal. He already had a smug,
self-satisfied look on his face that made me want to prove him
wrong. I spoke without fully considering the potential
consequences. “You’re on. But let’s up the ante.”

He waited without a word, his eyelids low and
a slight smile tickling his lips.

“If I win, I get to choose the music and I
get to go for a jog. Outside. With you as my bodyguard,” I added
when his expression hardened.

“You aren’t going to win, but I don’t really
think now’s the best time for an outing.”

I knew it was a long shot, but just knowing
that I couldn’t leave the condo was making me feel trapped and
suffocated. “What’s the worst that can happen? We get attacked by
reapers? Tucker already said they don’t want to kill me, so I would
get a real-world training experience.”

He looked away and rubbed his chin. “It’s not
an entirely bad idea, but—”

“Great. I’ll get my coat,” I said heading for
the stairs. Yeah, I know I said we’d fight first, but I was taking
advantage of him thinking it might be a good idea while I
could.

Before I made it three steps, I was flat on
my face, my feet swept out from under me. I lay there, gasping,
while Jed bent one arm up behind my back. I bit my lip not to cry
out in pain.

“That’s one for me,” he said and let go.
“We’ll talk about the jog after you manage to pin me.”

Obviously, he wasn’t going to go easy on me.
I pulled myself up to my knees. “If you’re trying to demonstrate
why I shouldn’t leave the condo—”

He wrapped an arm around my neck and pulled
me into his chest. “Enough talking.”

He might be thoroughly annoying, with
terrible taste in music, and an overprotective instinct, but his
bare skin against my back, which was also bare except for a sports
bra and low-slung yoga pants, made me think of getting close to him
in an entirely different way. I took a long slow breath and tried
to remember that I didn’t want to be pressed against him, that I
didn’t want to reach back and run my hands over his hard body, that
I didn’t want to spin around in his arms and kiss him. Nope, didn’t
want to do any of that. Not at all. It had just been way too long
since I’d had a date.

I elbowed him in the gut. The action garnered
only a small grunt from him. He didn’t loosen his grip in the
slightest. Him coming at me twice before I was prepared was
irritating, but his lack of reaction to my hit pissed me off. I
knew he wasn’t going to actually choke me and, if he’d been nicer,
I might have been gentle. He’d been rude, so I stomped hard on his
bare foot. He let go and dropped to the floor. I straddled him and
pinned his arms to his sides, feeling a tiny bit guilty about
actually hurting him.

“That’s how you do it,” he said, with a grin,
once he’d caught his breath. “There’s not a single reaper out there
who’s going to fight fair if given the opportunity. You use
everything you’ve got, but maybe while we’re training you should
take your shoes off so I don’t end up with a broken foot.”

I nodded. Cat had given me the same lecture
about fighting fair and his repeat of it annoyed me. “I’ve pinned
you, so can we go jogging now?”

“We’re still just warming up,” he said, his
grin big enough to split his face. Then he rolled over and got to
his feet like I wasn’t even there.

I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought he was
cute. “I don’t like you at all,” I said, regaining my feet.

We got down to serious sparring. I spent most
of it on my ass.

After what felt like three hours, but was
more like forty-five minutes, I stayed on the mat when he knocked
me down. “Uncle,” I said.

He plopped down next to me. “Thank god. I’m
exhausted.”

“You could have fooled me.”

He shook his head, but his breathing was slow
and steady while I panted next to him, every breath painful.

“I guess you get to choose the music next
time,” I said. I wasn’t about to get up and turn off Killswitch,
and he didn’t move either. After a few moments of silence, I asked
a question Cat had never been able to answer for me. “Shouldn’t I
be getting some sort of weapons training?”

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not our practice to use weapons. A bullet is too much
evidence and gunshots create too many questions. I’ve never needed
a weapon because—”

“You are a weapon.”

He nodded. “The reapers want to stay
unnoticed as much as we do and they come from the spirit world
where everyone fights with their life energy and their fists.
You’ll mostly be fighting in that world, too.”

“They used a knife on Cat.”

“Yeah, it happens, but not often. They
probably knew they’d lose if they went up against her in
hand-to-hand. Very few reapers have the time or the resources to
become weapons-trained, unless they were proficient in their
original life.”

“I’m smaller than most of the people who’ve
attacked me. I’d feel better if I had something.”

“Yeah, typically you’d be partnered with
someone like me who’d protect your living body, but with everything
that’s happened… I’m no weapons expert, but we can find someone at
Varius who is.”

I nodded and stared at the wall, too tired to
move. “So what can you do? Could you lift a car?”

He chuckled. “Maybe, but that would be all I
did for a couple of days. The heavier something is, the more energy
it takes for me to move. It also matters what the object is made
of. I can lift metal with accuracy, but I’m less reliable with
plastic, textiles or humans. If I’m injured, all bets are off. I
might be able to lift something, but I’d be just as likely to hit
an ally with it as I would be to hit an enemy.”

“Uh-huh. So you’re basically useless if there
isn’t anything metal around.”

He smiled and flexed his biceps. “That’s why
I have these.”

I laughed and started to stand.

“Not that my skills did any good when Caleb
kidnapped you.”

I sighed and flopped back down, kind of glad
for an excuse not to move for a bit longer. “If I’d been a better
judge of character, or even just listened to my instincts—”

“You felt something was off?” he asked.

I lay back on the mat and crossed my hands
over my stomach. I was starving and sleepy, and it took energy to
think back and remember how I’d felt. “Yeah. It wasn’t blatant, but
there were moments with him that felt false, you know? And he was
in such a hurry about everything. He hardly gave me a chance to
figure out if I liked him before he was telling me he loved
me.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you figure it out?”

“What are you asking? I’m not pining after
him, if that’s what you mean. I’d just as soon never see his lying
douche bag face again, no offense.”

“But if he hadn’t betrayed you. . .?”

I lifted myself up halfway and rested on my
elbows. “I haven’t really thought about it, Jed. What difference
does it make now?”

He shrugged and looked away, his face
reddening slightly. “It’s a measure of how badly he hurt you and
how much he could hurt you again if he shows up here.”

I lay back down and stared at the ceiling. It
bothered me that he was so worried and overprotective, but it was
also kind of nice that he cared if I got hurt. “Yeah, it hurt that
he was just pretending to be interested in me, and that he tried to
kill me. I mean I’ve had bad breakups before but, come on…” I said
it in a joking tone, but the truth was I hadn’t ever really had a
breakup before. All of my relationships had been casual and
short-lived. I might not have been as into Caleb as he pretended to
be into me, but I’d liked him, and I’d hoped… but it didn’t matter,
now.

“He really did care for you. The way he
talked about you… He thought you were special.”

“Right up until the moment he decided his
life was worth more than mine?”

He stared at the floor. “I’m under no
illusions about him. I know he was capable of some terrible things,
but I don’t believe he would have killed you.”

And that’s why I couldn’t trust Jed
completely “You’re wrong. He would have killed me without
blinking.” I could still remember the harsh tone of Caleb’s voice
and the tension of his body against mine when he held that knife to
my throat.

He shook his head and was silent for a few
moments. “I get that he scared you, but he’s my brother. I’ve known
him my whole life and I know what he’s capable of.”

“If you’re going to protect me from him, Jed,
you need to accept that he was and is capable of it.”

“How about if I accept the possibility and
keep my doubts to myself.”

I wasn’t convinced, but Caleb wasn’t there
and I thought it unlikely he’d show up. “Works for me.” I stood to
leave.

“I need to hear you say that if he shows up
you won’t go running off with him again,” Jed said. I looked back
to gauge his expression and try to understand why he couldn’t let
this go, but he met my gaze, his face void of emotion.

“What kind of an idiot do you think I
am?”

The muscles in his jaw worked, but he didn’t
give any other sign of being affected by my words. “We do stupid
things when we love someone.”

“I’d have to be a brain dead moron to go
anywhere with Caleb ever again.”

He nodded, but he didn’t look satisfied.

“I’m going up to take a shower. I’m tired.” I
headed for the stairs without looking back.

I stepped out of the shower to the warm smell
of tomato sauce. My stomach grumbled, and I pulled on sweats and
went out to the kitchen without combing my hair. If I was fast
enough, I thought I might be able to convince Jed to share.