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"You didn't need to come and pick me up," I said.
He just gave me that blank look that was his response whenever I said something or asked a question that he deemed wasn't worth answering.
Without a word, he turned and walked down the hall, but when he passed the training room, I froze. "Where are we going?"
He cast an irritated glance over his shoulder. "One of the private rooms. We’ll be training with a different kind of weapon today, and I don't want you around the others in case there’s blood."
My face grew warm as his words sank in. So he thought I was going to smell blood and go into a feeding frenzy, like a shark. I guessed I could see where he was coming from. If he thought it was enough of a risk, though, I wasn't crazy about the fact that he was going to be trapped in a room with me, but admitting that was the surest way to piss him off. Whenever I held back in training, he got furious.
To be fair, I guess it was kind of ridiculous, considering I had yet to even be capable of landing a single blow on him without him explicitly allowing it to test my strength.
The private room was larger than I had expected, and longer than it was wide. The tiles on the floor had the same black-and-white checkerboard pattern as in most of the Abbey, and with the white walls, and little in the way of furnishings save for the metal rack that took up all of the furthest wall, the room had a surreal feel.
Castor said nothing as he walked over to the far wall, and as he stood studying the various weapons, I realized he wasn't going to ask me to pick this time. He finally selected two katanas and grabbed what looked like a couple of belts off another shelf before walking back over to me.
I watched in confusion as he set the blades down on a simple table by the wall and brought one of the belts over to me, unclipping it. There were two loops dangling down from it, and every last brain cell in my head was fried when Castor slipped the belt around my waist and clasped it in front of me.
Evidently, it was easier for him to just dress me like a child than try to explain how to put it on, but I couldn't even bring myself to care about that. Not when he was so close, and actually touching me.
Arrow was right. I really had to get a handle on this. Whatever this was.
Castor fit the sheath of the katana into the holster he had just affixed to my side and gave it a tug to make sure it was secure.
"All right. Now, I'm going to show you how to unsheathe the blade without flaying your arm open," he said, giving me a look. "No action movie bullshit."
"I know the drill," I mumbled.
When he disappeared only to turn up behind me, putting his arms around me the way he had done before, I felt like my heart was going to give out. I wasn't sure if that was some weird aftereffect of the vampire blood, but I doubted it when my own patheticness was more than enough of an explanation.
"Every single time you unsheathe the blade, the first thing you're going to do is push the scabbard up like this," he said, shifting the sheath up through the holster a few inches. "From there, you pull back the scabbard while you bring the blade forward and out." As he spoke, he maneuvered my hands, wrapping my right around the hilt of the blade and walking through his instructions. "Keep your left arm back until you've got the blade in position, understand?"
"Yeah, I think so," I said, even though part of me was tempted to have a “hard time” understanding this hands-on part of the training in hopes that he would repeat it. I was pretty sure he would see right through that, though. And he would definitely punish me for it. Not in a fun way, either.
"Good," he said, keeping his hand on mine. "Now, sheath it slowly. Let the blade find the scabbard naturally, but wait until the end has made contact with the interior before you go full throttle."
"Yeah, I'm kind of attached to all my limbs," I said.
To my surprise, he actually laughed.
Okay, it was more of a snort, but it was definitely laugh adjacent.
He stepped back and circled around to my front. “Now, you try."
I knew he was giving me slow, detailed instructions because he didn't have faith in me, but I kind of appreciated it, all the same.
For the most part.
I repeated what he had just guided me through, taking it slow since I was admittedly kind of wary of how sharp the blade was.
Castor nodded in satisfaction and took another step back, fastening a holster belt around his waist and situating his own blade at his side.
“Good. Now, mirror what I do," he instructed, drawing the blade.
That was easy enough, but echoing his exact stance was a bit harder. I wouldn't have thought there was so much involved in just standing, but if all my training had taught me anything, it was just how far away I was from having a solid grasp on even the most rudimentary aspects of the hunt.
Castor continued to go over the basics, from how to grip the blade to the proper foot stance, in the same slow, careful way as he had shown me how to draw a sword. I wasn’t sure if he was this gradual and deliberate with all his students, or if he merely found me to be a particularly hopeless case, but either way, it was a struggle to keep up with everything.
Especially when it came time to put my nascent skills into practice. I felt like a clumsy idiot as I tried to block and parry his attacks, even if they were only at a fraction of the speed I had seen him and the others fight at. Even during training, Castor’s movements were smooth and graceful, like a cat’s. He was breathtaking to watch, and even if he was using kid gloves on me, by the time we had been training for a solid hour, I was even less confident than I had been when we’d begun.
