I actually liked to spar with him because I never felt guilty about leaving bruises behind. I also enjoyed the frustrated look in his eyes as his skilled moves (his brown belt justly outranked my own purple) constantly failed to connect as well as they should.
Today there was something else in his eyes when he looked at the stitches on my chin, a hot edge of desire that seriously creeped me out. He was turned on that I had been raped. Either that or that I’d killed someone. I preferred the latter but, knowing Lee, it was probably the former.
“You are weak,” he told me, whispering so no one else could hear.
I’d been right about what had excited his interest.
“I killed the last person who thought that,” I said, and front kicked him hard in the chest. Usually, I tempered my speed to something more humanly possible. But his eyes made me quit playing human. I’m not supernaturally strong, but in the martial arts, speed counts, too.
I was moving at full tilt when I stepped around him while he was still off balance. Tournament martial arts have two opponents facing each other, but our style encourages us to strike from the back or the side—keeping the enemies’ weapons facing the wrong way. I stepped hard on the back of his knee, forcing him to drop to the floor. Before he could respond, I hopped back three feet to give him a chance to get up, this being only sparring and not a death match.
Our dojo did some grappling, but not much. Shi Sei Kai Kan is all about putting your opponent down fast and moving on to the next guy. It was developed for warfare, when a soldier might be facing multiple opponents. Grappling left you vulnerable to attack from another opponent. And I had no desire to get up close and personal with Lee.
He roared with humiliation-charged rage and came for me. Block and block, twist and dodge, I kept him from contacting me.
Someone called out sharply, “Sensei! Check out Lee’s fight.”
“Enough, Lee,” Sensei called from the far side of the dojo, where he’d been working with someone. “That’s enough.”
Lee didn’t appear to hear him. If I hadn’t been so much faster than him, I’d have been hurt already. As it was, I made sure he couldn’t connect any of his hits. For a while, at least, until I got cocky and overconfident.
I fell for a sham move with his right hand, while he slammed me in the diaphragm and laid me out on the floor with his left. Ignoring my lack of breath as much as I could, I rolled and stumbled to my feet. And as I rolled, I saw that Adam was standing in the doorway in a business suit. He had his arms folded on his chest as he waited for me to deal with Lee.
So I did. I thought it was Adam’s presence that gave me the idea. I’d spent some time at his dojo—in his garage—practicing a jumping, spinning roundhouse kick. It was developed as a way to knock an opponent off his horse, a sacrificial move that the foot soldier would not expect to survive. Mounted warriors had more value as a weapon than foot soldiers, so the sacrifice would be worth it. In modern days, the kick is mostly for demos, used in combat with another skilled person on the ground it is generally too slow, too flashy, to be useful. Too slow unless you happened to be a part-time coyote and supernaturally fast.
Lee would never expect me to try it.
My heel hit Lee’s jaw, and he collapsed on the floor almost before I’d decided to use the move. I collapsed right next to him, still fighting for breath from his hit to my diaphragm.
Sensei was beside Lee, checking him out almost before I landed. Adam put his hand on my abdomen and pulled my legs straight to facilitate breathing.
“Pretty,” he said. “Too bad you pulled it; if anyone deserved to lose his head ...” He didn’t mean it as a joke. If he’d said it with a hair more heat, I’d have been worried.
“Is he all right?” I tried to ask—and he must have understood.
“Knocked out cold, but he’ll be fine. Not even a sore neck for his trouble.”
“I think you’re right,” Sensei said. “She pulled it, and angled her foot perfectly for a tournament hit.” He held Lee still as the big man moaned and started to stir.
Sensei looked at me and frowned. “You were stupid, Mercy. What is the first rule of combat?”
By this time I could talk. “The best defense is fast tennis shoes,” I said.
He nodded. “Right. When you noticed he was out of control—which I’m sure was about two full minutes at least before I did, because I was helping Gibbs with his axe kick—you should have called for help, then gotten away from him. There was no point in letting this continue until someone got hurt.”
From the sidelines, Gibbs, the other brown belt, said, “She’s sorry, Sensei. She just got her directions confused. She kept running the wrong way.”
There was a general laugh as tension dispersed.
Sensei guided Lee though a general check to make sure nothing was permanently damaged. “Sit out for the rest of the lesson,” he told Lee. “Then we’ll have a little talk.”
When Lee got up, he didn’t look at me or anyone else, just took up a low-horse stance with a wall at his back.
Sensei stood up, and I followed suit. He looked at Adam.
Who bowed, fist to hand and eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses he hadn’t been wearing when I’d first glimpsed him in the doorway. Most of the werewolves I know carry dark glasses or wear hats that can shadow their eyes.
“Adam Hauptman,” he said. “A friend of Mercy’s. Just here to observe unless you object.”
Sensei was an accountant in real life. His day job was working for an insurance firm, but here he was king. His eyes were cool and confident as he looked at Adam.
“The werewolf,” he said. Adam was one of five or six of his pack who had chosen to come out to the public.
“Hai,” agreed Adam.
“So why didn’t you help Mercy?”
“It is your dojo, Sensei Johanson.” Sensei raised an eyebrow, and Adam’s sudden smile blazed out. “Besides, I’ve seen her fight. She’s tough, and she’s smart. If she had thought she was in trouble, she’d have asked for help.”
I glanced around as I rolled over and stood up, as good as new except for the pretty bruises I was going to have on my belly. Zee was gone. He wouldn’t have lingered, with Adam to take over guard duty. His nose had wrinkled at the smell of sweaty bodies when we’d come in—he’d been lucky it was relatively cool this fall. In full summer, the dojo smelled from a block away, at least it did to my nose. To me the scent was strong but not unpleasant, but I knew from the comments of my fellow karate students that most humans disliked it almost as much as Zee did.
Drama over, Adam went back to the sidelines, loosening his tie and pulling his suit jacket off as a concession to the heat. Sensei had us do three hundred side kicks (Lee was called from his position of disgrace to participate) first to the left, then to the right. We all counted them off in Japanese—though I suspected if a native speaker had dropped in, they might’ve had difficulty understanding what we were saying.
The first hundred were easy, muscles warm and limber from earlier calisthenics; the second ... not so much. Somewhere about 220, I lost myself in the burning ache until it was almost a shock when we stopped and switched sides. Wandering through the ranks of students (there were twelve of us tonight) Sensei adjusted people’s form as he saw necessary.
You could tell those of us who were more serious because our two hundredth kicks looked just like our first. Students less diligent lost height and form as exhaustion took its toll. There were still some students in good form on the three hundredth kick—but not me.