Persie Merlin and the Witch Hunters - Bella Forrest
One
Persie
An arm slithered skillfully around my neck and squeezed. It might have been a tentacle suckered to my throat, for all the good it did me, trying to pry the thing away with desperate fingers. The pressure against my windpipe had the mark of an expert: not too much, not too little. The Goldilocks of headlocks. My eyes were beginning to bulge, inky spots dancing in my field of vision.
I knocked my fists against the arms that held me in a vise, tapping out.
As soon as I submitted, the pressure released and I slumped out of the headlock like toothpaste flopping off a brush, half-expecting my body to land with a similar splat as I collapsed sideways onto the lurid blue spring floor of the training room. I lay there in a fetal position, panting hard. I had three-months’ worth of bruises that could not even be soothed by the industrial-strength bath salts my mom had sent. Everything ached. The continued training had layered more strokes of mottled purple and blush atop the yellow remnants of my last battering.
“Getting better there, lass! Not so soon to tap out this time.” Marcel McCarthy stood and bowed at my defeat, and I tipped my head in return. I could hardly manage that, the blood still trying to find its way back into my skull.
“Thanks for… humoring me,” I croaked.
As instructors went, Marcel had fast become one of my favorites, despite the fact that I left his classes completely exhausted. The pain and fatigue were relentless, as Marcel’s martial-arts training was held three days per week, providing insufficient time to recuperate from the repetitive defeat. Fortunately, the Institute gods had been gracious enough to slot the class into the last period of the day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so I could immediately rush to my room and grimace under a shower. The hot water was my best effort to preemptively unknot all of the bodily cricks I’d have in the morning. Even Teddy, lord of the biceps and perpetual hogger of the gym’s weight machines, struggled under the strain of Marcel’s sessions.
Marcel snorted. “Nae humoring about it, lass. If you can’t beat ‘em, at least you can stay conscious.”
As the scholar of Martial Arts, Marcel was something of a walking paradox. Before we’d started these sessions, I’d expected to see some willowy, balletic guy who moved with the stealth of a tiger and had limbs that flowed like water. Instead, we’d been met by this brutish bouncer of a Scotsman. He weighed 250 pounds, easy, with a perfectly oiled ginger mustache that curved up like Salvador Dalí’s, and not so much as a memory of hair on his shiny bald head. And yet, he moved as gracefully as a gymnast, able to flip and somersault his hefty weight through the air as though he weighed nothing at all—though the aftershocks when he landed still rattled my teeth. That was the beauty of Marcel: he could’ve used his beastly force to floor anyone, but he didn’t. He preferred technique over muscle, style over brawling. He never let anyone leave the room feeling desolate, even if he did dole out penalties for those loitering at the bottom of the class… and I was usually one of them.
“Up you get, lass.” Marcel offered his hand and hauled me up so fast I almost got whiplash. “Right, then, since everyone else is licking their wounds, I’d say there’s only one of yez left. And dinnae forget, the quickest to yield gets the joy of sweeping the dojo. Currently, that’s—”
I lifted a limp hand. “Me. I know.” I glanced around the dojo as I caught my breath, well aware of how much of a pain it’d be to clean. This wasn’t my first rodeo. The dojo itself was a large studio of sorts, with high-beamed ceilings and paneled walls of pale wood and white canvas, as well as sliding partitions that could be drawn for small group practice. Green and red dragons coiled along the beams, adding a hint of the Far East, where most of our fighting styles hailed from. It was clean and minimalistic, aside from the bright blue spring floor, which had been installed to take the edge off harder landings.
“Ah, dinnae be so glib about it. One of these days, someone else’ll be at the bottom of the pile.” Something of a backhanded compliment, but he had a manner of delivery that made you believe the compliment part, no matter how impossible it seemed.