Six rules undying book 2, p.11
Six (Rules Undying Book 2), page 11
“I don’t think I can do an upside-down sit-up or a one-armed pull-up,” Paige said as she took in all the athletes in the room.
“There was a time when I couldn’t either. We all work at our own pace here. In fact, why don’t we start with a nice warm-up mile around the woodland trail? It’s gorgeous outside and finally not so damn hot.”
“I do miss running. I haven’t gotten to jog in weeks.”
Nadia broke into a big grin. “Well, then, let’s see what you can do. What’s your normal pace for a mile?”
“Um, about ten minutes. I’ll probably be slower today, though.”
“Maybe you’ll be surprised just how much good a little rest can do you. Check your laces, do whatever you need to do, and I’ll meet you out back in about five minutes,” she said, pointing to a door on the far side.
Paige wandered across the creaking gym, stretching her arms, before hooking up her little holster on her waistband for her music player. She found a convenient chair to stash her gym bag and phone and then used the back of it to stretch out her legs a little bit.
As she bent down to touch her toes, she could see a new individual ambling out of one of the side doors. She tried to peek surreptitiously through her legs to see just who wandered inside, but her cover was blown quickly as Toy hollered, “Yo, Shorty Spice, your dream man is here!”
Even though Paige’s head was clearly below her heart, she could feel every bit of blood draining from her face as a pair of dark sweatpants stopped right behind her. The new visitor twisted his torso and bent over with the grace of a yoga instructor to give her a smile and a cheeky little wave.
“Nice to see you again, Miss Paige,” Lorcan said cheerfully.
She made a noise rather like, “Meep!” as she swung upright. In her rush to not have her bum sticking right in Lorcan’s face, she ended up stumbling and tripping over her own feet. After a few agonizing seconds of free fall, she found herself scooped into the very strong, very pale arms of a lanky Brit. He pulled her gently until her feet planted firmly on the floor, but Paige took the liberty of a few extra seconds with her nose planted in his smooth sweat-wicking T-shirt, breathing in a heady mix of sweat and synthetic fibers.
“Very nice to see you,” he said with a little wink as she finally stumbled away.
Paige straightened her own shirt and double-checked her laces.
“Nadia is waiting for me,” she choked out before hustling for the back door.
“What is wrong with you, Paige?” she muttered as she burst outside the gym. Her cheeks grew brighter and brighter as the blood returned. She smacked her lips a few times as the strangely pleasant sweat smell lingered on her tongue.
“Heyo! Ready to go?” Nadia cried as she jogged in place a few yards ahead.
Paige rushed to her and gave a thumbs-up.
“Let’s go,” Paige said.
The door swung open behind her. A second later a streak of black and white whooshed past her right ear. She gawked as the streak ran right off the trail and leaped over a fallen log.
“Well, are you going to let him beat us?” Nadia asked as she started running down the trail.
Paige picked up the gauntlet and took off after Nadia. Soon she settled into a steady rhythm of feet pounding against compressed earth, and Paige easily caught up with her purple-haired companion even with her shorter stride.
A branch snapped to the left. That same blur cut across Paige’s peripheral vision. As the girls followed a bend in the path, the blur slowed down just enough to wave as he grabbed a low-hanging branch and swung over a thicket of prickle bushes before grabbing another branch and continuing his monkey impression through the dark heart of the woods.
“Show-off,” Paige muttered as she quickened her pace.
“Indeed!” Nadia agreed before leaping over a fallen branch on the path. Without blinking Paige followed suit, flying over the obstacle with surprising ease.
The girls laughed as they continued with the run. Paige let the fresh smell of pine fill her lungs and the chirps of twilight creatures fill her ears. She laughed the next time the blur jumped into view, as this time he crash-landed into an enormous mud puddle—spraying his white shirt with a glorious streak of brown. He didn’t stop to make a fuss. Instead, he gave a salute as he scrambled by and then shimmied up an accommodating oak.
Paige continued to keep up with Nadia, running deeper and deeper into the woods. Soon the sounds of traffic disappeared, and
the light faded faster and faster through the tree line. Nadia let out a joyful howl as she whipped around a stump and splashed through a teeny little stream that cut across the path. Paige leaped over it in a single bound and joined her companion in a cheerful yowl. The curve of the path continued, leading the pair back toward civilization, but not before they crossed paths with the blur one final time. This time he stopped completely after swinging up into another tree. He wiped a mix of sweat and grime from his brow but didn’t seem winded as he taunted, “That the best you can do, volchitsa? My grandmother could outrun you, and she only had one leg!”
Nadia only responded with a snarl. Paige dug in her heels and summoned her long-lost inner sprinter. As she pumped her arms and legs faster, she could feel something welling up deep in her guts. It seemed like only seconds later that she burst through the edge of the woods and pounded onto the patch of grass behind the gym.
She clutched her sides and whimpered as she screeched to a halt, but she did tag the back steps seconds before Lorcan landed beside her in a righteous huff.
“You are like a greased piglet, woman,” he said as he huffed and puffed beside her.
“Thank you, I think,” she said before pacing around the yard and trying to stretch the stitch in her side. Nadia came lumbering in and checked the phone at her waist.
“Now you see why I’m moose and he’s squirrel,” Nadia said, laughing as she joined the pair. “How do you think you did, Paige?”
Paige took a deep breath and started stretching again. “I can’t believe I did that,” she said. She pressed two fingers against her throat and started the count. “Couldn’t be too fast; I’m only at 128,”
she said once she calculated her heart rate.
“Well, I ended up here at seven minutes, thirty-two seconds,”
Nadia said.
“That’s imposs—”
She pulled up the fitness monitor on her own phone. Sure enough, it stopped recording running steps after a little less than seven and a half minutes. She put her fingers to her throat again, but
this time Lorcan reached for her hand. Her pulse immediately shot upward.
“I told you rest would do you wonders, Paige,” Nadia said as she walked for the door. “Come on; let’s see what else you can do!”
“You all right, missy?” Lorcan asked, his voice slipping slightly more into the Irish end of the accent spectrum.
She stared at him in the fading April light. The shadows played with the sharp angles of his face, showing off just how angular his cheeks and jaw really were. His eyes were simply too bright green to be real, as if somehow he had managed to Photoshop them into the real world, and for the briefest of moments, Paige could see his canines poking out from under his upper lip. Paige blinked and Lorcan’s face softened, his eyes reverted to normal green, and he stared at her expectantly from under a wayward wave of dark brown hair.
She took another deep breath. She could smell the sweat and dirt sticking to them both. His hand remained an inch from her arm, as he didn’t dare just grab her, but her pulse continued to surge. He moved in closer. Her lip quivered. Finally, he took a very deep sniff, and much to Paige’s surprise, she found herself doing the very same thing.
“Nadia is waiting for us,” Lorcan said, breaking the spell.
Paige blinked and then made a beeline for the door. “What is wrong with you?” she muttered.
Mercifully as soon as Paige was inside the gym, Nadia had a myriad of fitness tests to subject her to. She watched as Lorcan slunk off to one of the side areas, while the damp pair of Toy and Freckles lounged in folding chairs. Kyle came over to measure her heart rate, check her eyes, and do an annoying snapping sound by each ear just to make sure she could pay attention after a round of crunches.
After struggling through pull-ups and hanging on a bar for a solid minute, Nadia and Kyle proceeded to review notes. Finally, Nadia gave her a big thumbs-up.
“Well, you are in phenomenal shape, Miss Carmichael,” Kyle said. “You have a resting heart rate a marathon runner would kill for.
You might hate me for it, but I’m pretty sure you are up for whatever pain Mistress Nadia is willing to dish out.”
Paige dropped to the mats. As she landed she cricked her neck and shoulders. She swung her arms around a few times and then grabbed her side.
“You’re a doctor, right, Kyle?” she asked. “Is there any way you can tell if someone has healed broken ribs?”
The redhead rubbed the scruff on his adorable pointy chin.
“Well, yeah, if I had some decent X-rays, preferably before and after, or you could give me a set of stripped bones and I could break out my secondary degree in forensic anthropology,” Kyle offered. “Any reason why?”
“Um, just curious,” Paige said softly. “What about concussions?
Are you familiar with them?”
He peeked into her eyes again. “Are you feeling any dizziness or nausea?” he asked.
“No, but is it possible for you to maybe lose time after having a concussion?”
“What, like in the crack of the sofa?” Kyle asked.
“Red, behave,” Nadia warned him. She drew in closer to Paige and peered deep into her eyes. “Paige, have you had the sensation of missing time recently?”
“It’s, um, nothing—” she stammered.
Both Kyle and Nadia swooped in. “Missing time is a rather loaded word, dear,” Nadia said as she took Paige’s hand. “It has connotations—”
Paige rolled her eyes. “Don’t I know it?”
“Wait, you’re the Professor Carmichael’s daughter?” Kyle asked.
“You were so not paying attention at the party,” Nadia muttered.
Paige muttered, “Oh boy, I know you must think I’m crazy—”
Nadia squeezed Paige’s hands again. “Please don’t put words in my mouth, dearie,” she said sweetly. “We are all products of our parents, but we aren’t actually our parents. Now, you were saying that you seem to have some sensation of missing time? Do you feel
like you’ve dozed off, or is it more like you blink and an hour goes by?”
Paige furrowed her brows and started scanning the floor as if searching for answers in the old wood. “I’m honestly not sure. As crazy as it sounds, I know that at one point I was going to watch TV
while my boyfriend went for curry, and then it was the middle of the night, and then it was like the next day and I can’t remember what happened.”
“Head trauma can cause some difficulties with short-term memory and psychological trauma can certainly distort what you recollect—” Kyle said.
“But normally there would be some fading in and out,” Nadia added. “Any nausea, dizziness?”
“I had really vivid dreams about my teeth falling out,” Paige said with a grimace. “But seriously, I would be less surprised to dream of little gray men and an anal probe at this point. I’m close to calling one of my dad’s friends and asking if he can hypnotize me!”
“Well, relaxation and even hypnotherapy have their place, but it’s important to know that those techniques put you in a highly suggestible state, and the prejudices of the doctor can easily influence the patient,” Nadia said. “When did this start happening?”
“A couple of weeks ago, after—after—”
“After what?” Nadia asked.
“I think I was attacked, but I can’t even be sure of that now. I know it’s crazy, but I seem to remember something completely different than my friends, my family, even my doctor. Nothing makes sense, and I’m not crazy enough to think that I must be right and everyone else is wrong, but I just know in my gut that I wasn’t hit by a car that night!”
Kyle and Nadia exchanged a look.
Paige buried her face in her hands and continued with, “Now you think I’m crazy too.”
Kyle tapped the little fitness band on Paige’s wrist. “Hey, do you wear this all the time?” he asked.
Paige nodded, still not removing her hands from her face. “I just take it off for showers and charging. Wait a second—”
“Why don’t we look at your fitness tracker, then, for the past two weeks? It might show us if your sleep has been interrupted, and if you were on an alien space—”
“Kyle,” Nadia growled.
“I can take the joke,” Paige muttered. “My phone was lost in the accident—”
“The car accident?” Nadia prodded.
Paige shook her head. “No, my phone wasn’t broken; it was taken!” She smiled. “My phone . . . The guy who attacked me took my phone. Finally, some damn detail backs up my memory.”
“The devil is in the details,” Kyle said. “Speaking of details, want to go over it at dinner? I’m sweaty and starving, two conditions I hate.”
“Dinner?” Paige asked.
Nadia nodded. “We were going to go over and see if Tina is still sane. Also, we usually get free food. Of course you’re welcome to join us, and if you like, we can sit away from everyone else and just talk,” she said.
“And I’ll bring my laptop and hide in the corner,” Kyle added. “I’ll brush up on my neurological conditions and see what I can find.
What hospital were you at?”
Paige quickly filled him in with as many details as she could muster while the redhead nodded and continued to rub his chin.
“Don’t you need to write this all down?” Paige asked.
“Eidetic memory,” Kyle said, tapping his head. “Well, technically I’m a trained mnemonist with a shocking degree of accuracy when it comes to processing visual memories, but that is really splitting hairs, isn’t it?”
“It’s OK to just nod and smile, Paige,” Nadia said. “Kyle comes from a long line of smarty-pants who perpetually like to get too big for their britches, but he is invaluable at weddings or when you forget some trivia.”
“If I can get a good look at your discharge papers and anything else you have, I can probably find a few more discrepancies,” Kyle added. “It’s what my sister and I do.”
“Well, it’s what you do when you actually pay attention,” Nadia corrected. “So, will you join us, Paige?”
“I’m glad I brought a gym bag,” Paige said. “Are you sure that it’s not too much trouble? I don’t want to, you know, be a pest—”
“We have a few rules around here, Paige. Inside these walls we are always honest, and we respect everyone in here. It means that we always try our hardest. We tell each other when it hurts, and we admit it when we can do more. We also treat anyone who comes in here like a friend. Does that answer your question, Paige, or should I just say, everything’s cool?”
Kyle looked over at one of the doors. “Maybe I’ll just—”
That same door burst open as a furious string of expletives erupted from the side room. Paige couldn’t quite follow exactly what language the voice was speaking, but the accent was unmistakably Irish. Her eyes widened as an icy-white glistening torso barreled into view. She gawked openly as the last rays of light pouring through the gym window cascaded onto the man wearing only a towel and his skin erupted into a disco ball-worthy shower of glorious sparkles.
The creature turned, his long wet hair sending a spray of more sparkles into the atmosphere, and his eyes practically glowed emerald green. Next to Paige, Kyle failed miserably at stifling his giggles, while Nadia was slightly more successful at containing her laughter.
“Shiny,” Paige choked out. Her response was quickly drowned in a wave of furious laughter from both Toy and Kayleigh on the sidelines.
Lorcan shook his head furiously again, sending wave upon wave of glitter onto the floorboards. He looked apologetically at Nadia as it rained metallic crap all around his nearly naked body.
Only a teeny little towel protected his modesty as he glared around the room.
“Toy?” he growled.
Latoya held her hand up in innocence. “Not me, boss. You know that if I was gonna glitter bomb you, it would not be coming off already,” she said in her defense.
“Every shampoo, every soap—” he snarled between huffs and puffs. It was only when he finally noticed Paige staring in dumbstruck silence that he straightened his posture, smoothed down his wild mess of hair, and adjusted his towel to make absolutely certain that none of his British crown jewels were on display. “I apologize, Miss Paige.”
Toy giggled. “I think she enjoyed the show. I know I did!”
Lorcan shot Toy, Kayleigh, and Kyle each withering looks before stomping back into the shower area. “I’ll be a few minutes,” he yelled as he disappeared.
It was Nadia’s turn to glower. “You are cleaning this up,” she snapped at Kyle.
He tried to raise his hands in the Scout’s salute. “I don’t know what you’re—” He trailed off as he faced an unmoving purple-eyed glare.
“I hope it was worth it, Kyle, because you know how viciously he can escalate—”
“Um, why did you just glitter bomb your friend?” Paige interrupted.
“Inside joke,” Kyle said. “I’m gonna get the vacuum and then hit the showers, I think.”
“Good call,” Nadia said. “Come on, Paige. We better get cleaned up before the Wonder Twin gets any more funny ideas.”
Paige followed dutifully. However, as she got closer to the pile of damp glitter, she did stop to sigh. She blushed and quickly shook her head a few times before anyone could notice her gawking, and made sure that her shower was bracingly cold before daring to rejoin the group.
- 8 -
Paige tried her best to settle into the darkest corner of the bar at Mayweather’s Pub, a comfy leather stool around the corner from the main line of raucous friends still laughing over their prank earlier in the evening. Toy, Kayleigh, and Kyle seemed determined to prove that their livers were invincible as they pounded shots and ate cups of deep-fried bacon, while Tina occasionally darted over to see if everyone was doing OK before some crisis took her back to the kitchen. Lorcan and Nadia had excused themselves to talk just outside the front door, and Paige could only see a bit of furious gesticulation through the myriad of notices and lettering on the front glass.
