On the Line (Alternate Places Book 3) Read online

  It had gotten colder outside, as they walked together through the dark toward the gym. No one went outside here without a coat, hat and gloves. Not this time of day at least. Her nose stung a little bit from the cold air, the inside of it feeling like the small hairs had frozen together, even though she didn't have hair inside her nose. Just like she didn't have to shave her legs or under her arms. If having hair there became popular again, it would grow, but right now the consensus told her biology to keep those areas bare. She still had pubic hair, but it looked perfectly managed all the time. Again her body simply doing what most people around her thought most pleasing. No one really understood how that worked, but every Alede saw the effects of it over time, with some of them being more sensitive to the effect than others.

  Brit took her to a changing room, since Humans exercised there regularly. There were lockers, but she could just stuff her clothes in her bag and take it with her, she decided, not having a lock with her. She dressed quickly, so that everyone wouldn't have to wait for her while she dithered.

  The other girl checked her out while she changed, staring at her and making small gestures that hinted at wanting her. It made Kate feel appreciated, though it wouldn't be strictly needed. Alede could and did have sex with each other, mainly because it felt good and helped them bond, but they couldn't share energy that way. Or at least if they did, one of them lost energy while the other gained, to a net loss in the end, since no energy transfer was ever perfect. When they got energy from Humans or members of a few other groups, like Weres, they actually harvested waste energy after it had already been given off by the person. They needed that energy to live, and other Alede didn't produce it.

  The boys had waited for them on the hard wood floor, polished to gleaming. Both of them stretching lightly while they waited. Without being told, the girls started doing the same as soon as they reached the place the others stood. There weren't a lot of people in the room, only about six others. One, a girl, doing some rather impressive looking stretches. Yoga, it seemed. She managed to orient her body toward their group before bending over backwards and splaying her legs. An obvious sexual signal, though it wasn't clear who exactly she was trying to impress. Blaine or Britney, most likely, though it wasn't out of the picture that Don would be her target. Not likely given everything, but not impossible. Some people, especially women, actually liked their lovers to be slightly less good looking than they were, or at least roughly the same. It had to do with fear, she knew and the desire to hold on to the person they loved. It was harder to hold on to someone really good looking. Everyone knew that, at least deep inside, Kate thought as she watched the scene unfold. This was Kate's first time here, so it wouldn't be about her, she knew. Not yet anyway.

  The others ignored the woman, except for Don, who glanced toward the limber woman, a slightly wistful look on his face. Sighing softly, he turned away and focused on what he was doing.

  Blaine finally took charge after a few more minutes of stretching and suggested they work without contact, sticking to percussives at first, since he knew that they'd all be able to do that, it being basic school training, then they'd work on grappling and throws, if Kate felt comfortable with that plan. She nodded. Seeing that Don had a strange look on his face, Blaine added an aside.

  “Percussives, that just means punches, kicks, knees and elbows. Any move that hits, it's what we normally do, you know... so that you won't feel all gay when grappling with me gets you turned on?”

  They broke into pairs, with Kate and Blaine going first, so that the others could observe what they did and come up with plans to take them down when it was their turn. It seemed clear to her that Blaine wanted to work with her first himself, just in case she sucked, or came from a school that didn't stress combative control. Some didn't, just sticking pads on the kids and telling them to go to, figuring that a real fight didn't need them to pull their punches, which was true, as far as that went. It also led to lack of fine motor control in her opinion, which impacted the ability to target on the move. Her school had required both, work with pads and without, as well as occasional full contact fights against the instructors, where they'd actually be punched and kicked, so that they wouldn't be taken by surprise when it happened in real life. Not everyplace had been so hard on the kids, of course, but since those lessons had literally saved her life more than once, she could see the value in them now.

  Today they'd stick to non-contact, punching or kicking within an inch or so of the other person, making contact only with blocks if possible. They could be hurt still, if someone mis-judged a distance or time factor, but at least they wouldn't be trying to hurt each other. Kate liked this, because it meant that Blaine had bothered to really think about what it meant to add a new person to their group for the day.

  They didn't bow or anything, though Britney did step forward, a hand between them and told them to begin, pulling away as fast as she could. Kate, dropped into a deeply focused state without hesitation. Not as deep as what Zack could do, she knew, but deep enough that the world seemed to slow around her a little bit. Blaine had started out with a round house kick toward her middle, which she saw coming, a line of energy running from her to him along the path he intended to follow, she noticed. Her friends Troy and Hilda both did that, though the Taoist masters Wu-Li and Dan both simply moved. Never showing intent, just pure focus. This, what Blaine did, made it a little easier for her compared to working with them.

  She raised her left knee to block the move and saw that he intended a double kick, a weak move, but dropping from the higher position on the first kick, then trying to take her knee on the second would still be effective. So rather than put her leg down after the block, she moved forward, falling toward him, her left foot suddenly trying to stomp on his left knee, a delicate target at the moment, since all his weight rested on it. She pulled back when her white sneaker rested in mid-air about an inch away, then drove her foot as far between his legs as possible shifting her weight again so that her left hip hit him in the right thigh as he tried to pull his leg back into place. It wasn't a throw, exactly, and she hit him, but only as part of a block. It seemed within the rules to her.

  Caught off guard, he scrambled back, wildly throwing a roundhouse punch toward her head, which she blocked easily, by simply raising her left elbow to eye level, pushing the punch over her head. At the same time she threw a back fist into his now exposed ribs. This was a throw away move. Too soft to cause damage in real life, that he didn't even bother trying to block at this distance. They went on this way, trading attacks and counter attacks for a while, neither doing anything that would have ended the fight had they really been attacking each other, since her moves were both weaker and lacked reach in this form, being a lot smaller than he was. For his part, he aimed good blows at her and used clean movements and clever strategies. He just couldn't seem to hit her or even come close enough to count. Finally, in frustration, he managed to speed up enough to slip a punch past her guard and hit her jaw with a dull thud. His eyes went wide, but Kate merely smiled at him and kept going, hiding the fact that it had her reeling a little bit.

  That had been one of the first things that Master Dan had worked with her on. The idea that if you got hit, you simply kept fighting. Too many fights, he'd told her, were lost when people responded to rather minor injuries by grabbing at them or trying to shy away from the next attack once hurt. When you fought, you had to commit to fighting even if you were injured. Since this lesson had been followed by several sound thrashings, she'd finally gotten the idea.

  For the following several minutes, they kept going, nothing else getting through her guard, even though Blaine finally started trying again, speeding up as much as he could to try and hit her. Most of his attacks left holes she could exploit, turning the block she used into the next attack, moving into the places he'd left open, since all attacks left openings like that, this had been something she'd practiced a lot over the last year.

  Finally Blaine jumpe
d back, calling the exercise to a halt. Kate stepped back, but kept her guard up while she did it, since faking an end to the exercise to create an opening would actually be fair in her book, she half expected him to do that now. Instead he relaxed and smiled at her.

  “You're good! Sorry about hitting you like that... Poor control on my part. I just couldn't touch you so I got reckless trying...” He wrinkled his nose in disgust when he spoke of his own poor control.

  Kate waved this away, "If you fight, you get hit. We all know how that one goes."

  Since they both needed to catch their breaths a little, he asked Britney and Don to go next, while they lounged around watching them. The way he said it could have been followed by him saying “dance monkeys dance!” from the tone, but he didn't add anything more. He got them started easily and then stepped back, letting the two of them go at it. Britney didn't look as good as her brother had, but then she worked with Don, who, while not bad, clearly wasn't up to the level of the other two in ability yet. He'd worked with the other girl enough that he knew not to try and hold back too much, even while making sure he didn't hit her. This would probably be difficult for him, because it required him to step away from his attraction to her, even as her nipples hardened from excitement while they worked. They seemed to be holding to a one punch, one block pattern, the most common one for martial artists. And the one thing that really got them in trouble if they fought good boxers. Most boxers would try to throw between two and six punches as quickly as possible by training, then pause, reset and move to the next combination. Two or three being the most common patterns. No matter how fast they did it, there would always be that pause afterward.

  Britney and Don both paused slightly between each move, punch, kick or block. Blaine hadn't done that, except when he'd gotten really frustrated. She realized that he probably wasn't really too far off of his goal of being an academy level practitioner. Meaning good enough to teach others higher level skills. She wondered how he'd do with weapons. If he could teach weapons too, he'd be about ninety-five percent of the way to his goal. The rest would pretty much be continuing to practice and marking time, because no one trusted an academy level instructor that wasn't at least fifty.

  They switched partners, Blaine asking everyone to work at super slow speed, which made things a lot harder for everyone except Kate, who'd practiced that way for years. Britney came closer to holding her own at these speeds than Blaine had at full speed, but that was to be expected. It seemed clear to Kate that Brit had held back a lot when working with Don, since she obviously didn't bother doing that now with her. She probably wasn't as good as Blaine, but their constant practice together meant that he'd pushed her along for years, keeping her sharp and growing along with him.

  The whole group moved over to some padded floor mats to practice throws and joint locks, an area in which she clearly dominated the others, knowing about a hundred more effective throws than the rest of them did, combined. That and joint locks had been something Master Dan had insisted upon. Of course he also insisted they practice on a concrete floor, not a soft cushy mat like this. She had to admit that she liked this better, if only to herself.

  When they finished Blaine tackled her, picking her up in the air and spinning her around. At first she thought he planned to slam her into the mat, also a fair move in her mind, even though he'd called a halt to things. One of the lessons she'd had drummed into her was that rules had nothing to do with fighting. She let her body go limp, which carried them both to the mat, truncating the throw, it being almost impossible to throw a person that didn't resist. As he lay under her on the ground, he laughed and kissed her on the cheek.

  “You're so good! Please, please promise you'll practice with us all the time? Pleeaasse?” He begged, looking at her entreatingly. “You're about twice as good as Britney or I am, and while I can't promise you'll get much out of practicing with us, we'll try hard... Please?”

  Laughing she answered.

  "Yes... We can do that. You don't actually have to beg." She needed to stay in practice, she knew and told them she doubted she was that much better than they were.

  Don shook his head at that though.

  “I don't know, you're really good. I don't know enough to stop you, but I can tell how hard someone would be kicking my ass, and working with you... Well, let's just say if you ever try to beat me up, I plan on running away, even if I do look like a chicken doing it!”

  This got a chuckle out of the rest of them, though she pointed out that anyone scary enough to make him leery should be run away from.

  “You're good enough that if that kind of feeling ever gets triggered in you, it's probably a real warning from your subconscious mind. And if I ever see you running, that brown blob beside you trying to pass? That'll be me.”

  Most of the people she knew would have ripped up all of them in a fight, at the same time. Possibly without even noticing they'd done it. Hilda for instance could throw a backhand so fast and hard that you could block it and still end with you laying on the floor unconscious, and that was her weakest move. She'd done it to Kate more than once in practice, and that had happened while they worked slowly and carefully to protect the girl from harm. The Vampires couldn't even be fought functionally by people like them. You just had to pray you could either talk your way out of things or hope someone else would come around that could save you. They just moved too fast.

  Zack could have beaten them all in a fight, too. Even if the Alede had turned on their full charm all at once. Well, he couldn't take them in a fair fight, but in a fight to the death? She'd seen him take out Vampires without even blinking. Literally just making their heads fall off with a look. Once she'd seen him do that to three Vampires at once and he hadn't even been looking.

  Of course she couldn't share this with Don at the moment, so she gave him a mildly sweaty hug instead, which caused him to pull away as he got aroused. A natural reaction on his part, after all she had to be pouring pheromones out of her system at the moment. Given who he hung around with, he probably would have been all right, having learned that the others and by extension her, wouldn't mind at all, but in a public place, wearing sweat pants, he started showing a lot more than he would have in jeans. A slightly panicked look came into his eyes.

  No one had noticed yet, except for the Alede, of course and the girl finishing up her Yoga routine. She winked at him, smiled alluringly and looked away. Kate tossed him her gym bag and asked him to carry it for her. He nodded and walked her back to her dorm room with the others, even though none of them were in the same building she was.

  Blaine marveled at her room nearly as much as Britney had, and did it again when she gave them all some of the juice that Merri had sent along for her.

  “That's it Britney... I'm leaving the family and getting myself adopted by the Swanson's instead. Or at least, well prostituting myself out to them wouldn't work, being family and all. I know, I'll trade you guys Donald here for an unlimited supply of that juice!” He pushed Don closer to her playfully, making everyone chuckle a bit.

  “I'll see what I can arrange... still, I don't think Don is yours to trade, even if you are his roommate. Besides, my mom would flip if I started trafficking in people and the others would have my head, possibly literally. I'll check with Merri about the juice though. She's really nice. I think you'll all like her when you get a chance to meet.”

  Britney turned then to her favorite topic, which turned out to be Hartley. She'd told Don all about the character it seemed, Blaine nodding along, since he'd obviously heard it all before himself, but knew enough not to try and stop her, since even getting a word in edgewise suddenly became difficult.

  “And everyone loves Hartley, except for the people that keep trying to kill him, you know? Lots of people even try to send him new wives and stuff, but he always says no, because he loves his current ones so much. Can you believe that? They say he's just a regular Human, but that he's really old, like hundreds of years maybe, but he looks
young, like one of us, not all wrinkled and stuff.” Blaine just smiled when Kaitlyn stiffened. Don nodding along with the story, not noticing that age reference as meaning anything other than looking like a college student. It was true as far as that went. Zack could have walked the campus grounds without anyone even noticing he was there. She made herself relax, realizing that the worst that could happen here would be Don thinking his friend had an over active imagination. She didn't. That was really a Human trait. They could create magical worlds in their heads, she'd heard. Sometimes even outside of them.

  “He has a lot of women, some of them really hot, Alede, you know? Succubi? Some of them are more normal looking, like Claire the Vampire, though she used to do porn, so she might be kind of cute...”

  Kate held her tongue, knowing that Claire hadn't ever been in porn, even though she had been used in sex shows by the Vampire Forest. Not gentle things either, but things bad enough that when Troy had found out, he'd wanted to go and find the Vampire that had done it to her and kill him. Zack already had though, luckily. Not that Troy couldn't have killed him, but six hundred year old Vampires didn't generally fall to twenty-four year old Humans. Claire had been in the movies back in the day, about the time talkies had first come into being. She kept silent as Britney went on.

  “And Libby who's a Were bat, she's kind of ugly, but has a good heart, even though, she like, poisoned Hartley and turned him over to Vampires that wanted to rape him and other bad things. He forgave her, because her whole family had made a deal with demons and she had to do it or they would have all been killed or tortured or something.” She shook her head looking at Don dramatically, since he seemed to be the only person paying close attention to her. Not that he had a big choice in the matter, Kate knew, since Britney had started leaking a lot of energy while talking, which made her seem a lot more interesting to any Human than she would have been otherwise.