Max noticed me first and signalled to the others that I was coming. Most of them shrugged, unaffected. The others were pretending they hadn’t heard Max.
“So, you still think you don’t need me.” I folded my arms across my chest, squashing my bust so that my cleavage was more prominent. As expected, they all gave me their full attention. I wanted to see their faces when I acted on my plan.
“It’s just that we think we are okay as we are,” said Reuben.
Max’s face beamed with a cheeky smile. “Come on now, Sam, it’s not you. We just -”
“Don’t want to take orders off some chick,” finished Harvey in an arrogant tone. Damien and Stuart nodded in agreement. Wow, Jared had really been to work on this lot.
“It’s like Max said, it’s not you,” repeated Denny in a very soft, sensitive voice. “Why don’t you come hang out with us?”
“Yeah, hang out with us.” David seemed to have an inability to keep still.
I smiled at them and jiggled my head as if considering their offer. “Well I would...but I’m not convinced you don’t need some coaching.”
“Look, you’ve seen me in combat at the tryout.” Chico sounded bored. “Did I look like I needed help?”
“Same here,” said Butch.
“Help? No. But do I think you could both be better? Yes.”
Chico sniggered. “I exhale thorns. How much better can you get?”
I puffed. “Oh I don’t know…Can you emit them from your palms?”
“The horns come from within me.” His tone was stressing his opinion that I was dumb.
“You really think little poisonous horns are embedded inside you? Wrong. Your body produces toxins. These toxins travel in your blood, your entire body. They harden into horns the second that they meet the outside air. You can emit the toxins from your pores in just the same way. Your palms can be an outlet just the same as your breath can. Try it.”
Chico sniggered again and waved a hand at me dismissively before going to collect the basketball.
“You won’t even try? You’re that scared to fail? No wonder you never made Sergeant when you were in the police force. Got passed down for your brother too, didn’t you?”
Chico immediately stiffened. Slowly he swerved to look at me, his face grim and his jaw taut. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Oh I’m sorry, did I touch a nerve?” I knew I had. Preparing for a violent response, I absorbed the immediate energy, feeling it tingle and tickle as if eager to be released.
“You need to get away from here now, do you understand me?” His tone was deadly.
“Or you’ll spit some measly thorns at me?”
Without hesitation he forced out a heavy breath of poisonous thorns. Quickly I manipulated the energy I’d absorbed into the form of a hungry flame, burning the thorns to nothing.
“What about you, Butch? Think you can take me on?” I asked. I was a sponge of energy at this point. I was anticipating attacks from all angles and I needed to be prepared.
“You can fling all the flames you want at me, I’ll just negate them.”
“Negate this.” Before Butch could blink I had my energy whip in hand and slashed open his cheek with it. I knew that the crack of the whip would be too speedy for him to act in time. “You could have protected yourself, you know. All you’d have had to do was use the counteracting force you have to form a deflecting shield.”
“Negators can’t form shields.”
“Oh yes they can, Butch. I bet you’d love a shield that would help against emotional pain. Maybe then you wouldn’t still be feeling so raw about your mummy leaving you on the doorstep of a church.”
His eyes blazed red instantly and he came at me without thought. I let my hands shoot out in front of me and then spread them wide, pulling the energy to pop up my own shield. Butch ricocheted off it like a bouncy ball.
“Wouldn’t you like one of these, Butch? I can show you how to do it.”
He was too busy panting and sneering at me to answer.
“I’ve had an interesting afternoon talking to all your Sires and vampy friends. Turns out they were quite happy to divulge dark secrets. It must be jealousy because you were picked for the legion and they weren’t. Should I just carry on revealing them or shall we go to the arena now?”
“My Sire would never have told you anything,” said Stuart.
“Oh is that right? Would you bet your pride on that?” He seemed confident, how silly of him. “Come on, Stuart, shred yourself into nothing and come all the way over here and then I’ll only whisper to you what I was told. No one else has to know.”
He giggled at me without humour.
“You can’t move from where you’re stood when you do it?” I asked as if he’d said it first. “Not even when I’m telling everyone how you couldn’t protect your little sister and she became a drug addict and then a prostitute to pay for her addiction?” God he was pissed now: if looks could kill...
“And what about you, Damien?” I said. “Shall we share how just because your rich daddy left you bugger-all in his will you beat your brother half to death like an ignorant, bitter shit?”
“Bitch,” he cursed through his teeth.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that. Why don’t you astral project all the way over here and say it to my face? Oh that’s right, you can’t. Just like Reuben can’t weaken my power unless he holds on to me, not even when I tease him for the fact that his Sire abandoned him and he woke up to find nobody there to help him control his bloodlust and he more or less ate three people.”
Reuben started to charge at me but I raised a hand and released a tiny breeze at him as a promise of what would come if he proceeded. Wisely, he stopped.
“Slap-head, Slap-head, Slap-head.” I glared at him. “Aren’t you gonna silence me with that nifty power of yours before I blab about how you were abducted as a kid by a nut who couldn’t have a baby of her own? Stuck with her for three weeks, weren’t you?” There was plenty of cursing going on now. “Why not shut us all up and save yourself the earache? Or can you only attack one person at a time with it?” It was a rhetorical question. Max inhaled deeply but attempted no attack on me. Probably because he knew I’d just put my shield up.
I noticed that Denny and David didn’t appear challenging in anyway, as if they thought they might deserve a little payback. So I decided not to tease animal mimic Denny about not knowing his biological parents or psionic blaster David about being Turned against his will.
When I looked at Salem he knew what was coming and arched a brow in warning.
“What?” I said innocently. “You don’t want people to know how your gambling debts ended up getting your parents burnt alive while they slept in their bed?” I felt the ripple in the air as he aimed his invisible psychic boom at me to knock me out cold. My shield came in handy again. It almost hit Harvey as it bounced off the shield.
Growling, Harvey waved a hand my way, sending a force in the air that was intended to send me zooming backwards. I stamped twice on the ground and let the energy of the earth fill me and then grow into a mound of earth that rose before me. “What’s the matter, Harv?” I called from behind the mound of the earth. “Still upset that your girlfriend left you for your Sire even though you Turned into a vampire for her? Then why don’t you send a force strong enough to move this big rock out the way so you can get to me?”
Sucking the energy from out of the mound in front of me, I watched as it crumbled to pieces. “Or better still, why don’t you all attack me together...?”