Legally Undead by Margo Bond Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

man who could do the splits.
    As far as I could tell, we were the only two people in the small suite of rooms. When I asked Nick about it, he said, “I’ve rented the dojo out for the next three hours.”
    Three hours. I didn’t think my occasional afternoon workouts at the campus gym had really prepared me for this.
    I was right. I warmed up with him, stretching out on the floor in a variety of unlikely poses. Luckily for me, I remembered enough of my childhood dance and gymnastics lessons—the kind that practically every girl my age had taken as a child—to keep up with him. More or less.
    Then we got into the lesson itself.
    “When you’re fighting vamps,” Nick said, tossing me a sharpened stake, “you really only need to know two things: how to hit them in the heart and how to keep them from grabbing you. We’ll start with staying away from them.”
    I spent the next forty-five minutes learning to duck and weave without dropping my pointy stick.
    “Vamps are fast,” Nick said, “but even they usually telegraph their next movement. It’s a bad idea to look at their eyes, so you have to watch the way they sway, watch for twitches that might indicate which way they’re going to move next.”
    He demonstrated several moves, and I copied them over and over until they felt almost natural. I was again thankful for early dance training.
    “Good,” he said. “Now let’s see you do that against an opponent.” He moved across from me and grabbed at me. I ducked and spun away from his hand. He nodded approvingly.
    I was still basking in that approval when he reached out and snagged my arm. He twisted it up and behind me until I winced in pain and dropped the stake in my hand. As soon as this was over, I was going to sign up for yoga lessons. I clearly needed to be able to twist my body in unnatural directions.
    “You can’t quit watching a vamp, even for a second,” he said.
    “Okay, okay, you’ve made your point.” I pulled away from him and rubbed my arm. I was ready the next time he grabbed for me and I twisted away, dropping down to a crouch and sliding away by shifting my weight. This time I didn’t wait for his approval, but danced around behind him. We did this for another half hour, and he rarely caught me.
    “Now let’s add the stake,” he finally said. He rummaged around in his black gym bag at the side of the room and pulled out a vest of some sort. When he strapped it on, I saw that it had several red circles painted on it.
    “Body armor,” he said when he noticed me watching him. “It’s new—both bullet- and knife-proof. If vamps were smart, they’d start wearing these. It would be almost impossible to kill them if they did. Lucky for us they haven’t figured it out yet.
    “These targets,” he said, pointing to the red dots, “are kill zones. If you hit a vamp hard enough with a correctly-angled stake at any of these spots, you’re almost guaranteed a killing strike. So. Hit me.”
    I thrust a stake at his chest, hitting slightly below the heart target. Nick reached down and corrected the angle of the stake.
    “Don’t hold back. If you can knock the wind out of me, then you’re hitting hard enough to kill a vamp.”
    It took me four or five tries to finally hit him in a way he found acceptable.
    “You’d be dead by now if I’d really been a vamp,” he said.
    “Thanks for the encouragement,” I muttered.
    “I’m not here to encourage you. I’m here to teach you to kill vampires.”
    After about thirty minutes, I was fairly consistently hitting the kill zones.
    “Okay. Let’s put it all together now,” Nick said.
    By the end of the three hours, I could dance and spin around Nick as he lunged for me. And about half the time, I could actually kill the “vampire” attacking me.
    “Nice work,” he said. He tossed me a towel from a stack by the door. “I always like teaching these techniques to women. They may not have as much upper body strength as the guys on my