It occurred to me that in the position he was in, Keane would be staring directly at my butt. I craned my head around to see if I was right, and sure enough …
My face heated with a blush I couldn’t help. Granted, I didn’t have that much for him to look at—my Fae heritage gave me a figure only slightly more feminine than that of a teenage boy—but it was still embarrassing. Worse, he met my eyes when I looked around, and he was grinning. I didn’t like the grin any more than I liked his usual scowls and smirks.
I wanted to say something witty and worldly, something to cut him down to size and make him regret that stupid grin. But everything I could imagine saying would only make things worse. I bit my tongue and closed my eyes, determined to wait him out. I’d take this time to rest up, and when he finally decided he was tired of ogling me, or whatever he was doing, I’d have a little more energy to fight back with.
I guess his mind-reading skills were back online, because the moment I relaxed under him, he let go and rolled off of me. Damn. So much for taking a rest. With a sigh of resignation, I forced myself to my feet once more.
We spent another half hour or so sparring. If you could call me repeatedly getting my butt kicked “sparring.” By the end of the session, I was ready to give up for good and leave the fighting to bodyguards. Who was I kidding, anyway? Buffy the Vampire Slayer might have been able to kick butt at the age of sixteen, but not me.
“Don’t look so glum,” Keane said as he began rolling up the mats. I probably should have helped him, but I was too tired and, well, glum. “You’re doing great.”
Obviously, he and I had a different definition of “great.” I plopped down heavily on the sofa, not minding that I had to climb over the coffee table to get to it. I’d move the furniture back into place later.
“I mean it, Dana,” Keane said, shoving the rolled-up mat aside and standing up. He pulled the coffee table out of the way, then sat beside me on the sofa.
It was a little too close for comfort, so I slid over to make more room for him. Being Fae, he was drop-dead gorgeous by birth. I couldn’t decide if his pseudo-Goth bad-boy look made him more or less so. I say pseudo-Goth because he didn’t quite have the look down. His hair was dyed jet black, his left ear was pierced about a gazillion times, his entire wardrobe appeared to be black, and he sometimes painted his fingernails black. Even so, there was something strangely … wholesome about his appearance. If the Jonas Brothers ever decided to go Goth, that’s what they’d look like.
I couldn’t help liking the packaging, but the personality beneath it grated on my nerves even at the best of times.
“You really get a kick out of humiliating me, don’t you?” I asked, then wished I’d kept my mouth shut. I should at least be pretending he didn’t get under my skin so badly.
I didn’t look at him, but I could hear him shrug. “You need to be motivated to fight hard, even when it’s only sparring. If you were a guy, I’d motivate you by hitting a lot harder. Would you like that better?”
I turned to glare at him. “Have I ever told you you’re a total asshole?”
He laughed. “I think you might have mentioned it a time or two.” His smile faded, his emerald green eyes losing their teasing twinkle. “I meant what I said. You’re doing great. I’ve been learning to fight almost from the time I could walk. You can’t expect to beat me. And if you could beat me, then you’d need a better teacher.”
Every time I convinced myself to despise Keane for good, there’d be one of these unexpected flashes of humanity that made me think maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. And I had to admit, I liked the fact that he didn’t treat me like either a weirdo or a fragile flower because I was the first and only Faeriewalker born in the last hundred years or so. Nor did he want to use me to further some political agenda. That made him comparatively uncomplicated, and that was why I was willing—in theory at least—to ask for his help.
I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, then turned to face him on the couch. “I have a favor to ask you,” I blurted before I could chicken out.
He looked startled for a moment, then raised his eyebrows. “You’ve managed to take me by surprise for once.”
I smacked his shoulder with the back of my hand. Luckily, he didn’t treat that like an attack and pounce on me. “Quit it. If you keep being a jerk, I’m not going to ask you.”
“And I take it this would be a bad thing?”
“Never mind.” I let out a grunt of frustration and started to get up. Keane grabbed my arm to stop me.
“I’m just teasing you,” he said, and that stupid grin of his was back.
My chin jutted out stubbornly, but I sat back down. “I’m sick and tired of your teasing. It isn’t funny.”
“I think I’m hilarious. You just don’t have much of a sense of humor.”
“Having people trying to kill me doesn’t really inspire me to yuck it up. What a shocker!”
The expression on Keane’s face smoothed out, the glint of amusement fading from his eyes. “The danger isn’t going to go away,” he said. “You have to learn to live your life in spite of it.”
I rolled my eyes. Keane was only two years older than me, which didn’t give him the right to go all wise on me. Never mind that he had a point. The moment I’d set foot in Avalon, I’d changed the course of my life forever. I was still trying to absorb the enormity of the consequences.