possible," Francesca explained to the circle of students surrounding her. "So you set your weight on one foot and lead with your sword foot, and then rock back and forth--into striking range and then away."
She and Steven were suddenly engaged in a rush of jabs and parries, making a dense clatter as they expertly fought o each other's blows. When her blade glanced wide to the left, he lunged forward, but she rocked back, sweeping her sword up and around and onto his wrist. "Touch?," she said, laughing.
Steven turned to the class. "Touch?, of course, is French for `touched.' In fencing, we count points by touches."
"Were we ghting for real," Francesca said, "I'm afraid that Steven's hand would be lying bloody on the deck. Sorry, darling."
"Quite all right," he said. "Quite. All. Right." He threw himself sideways at her, almost seeming to rise o the ground. In the frenzy that followed, Luce lost track of Steven's sword as it crisscrossed through the air again and again, nearly slicing into Francesca, who ducked sideways just in time and resurfaced behind him.
But he was ready for her and knocked her blade away before dropping the point of his and striking out at her instep.
"I'm afraid you, my dear, have gotten o on the wrong foot."
"We'll see." Francesca raised a hand and smoothed her hair, the two of them staring at each other with murderous intensity.
Each new round of violent play caused Luce to tense up in alarm. She was used to being jittery, but the rest of the class was also surprisingly jittery today. Jittery with excitement. Watching Francesca and Steven, not one of them could keep still.
Until today, she'd wondered why none of the other Nephilim played on any of Shoreline's varsity sports teams. Jasmine had scrunched up her nose when Luce asked whether she and Dawn were interested in swim team tryouts in the gym. In fact, until she'd overheard Lilith in the locker room this morning yawning that every sport except fencing was "exquisitely boring," Luce had gured the Nephilim just weren't athletic. But that wasn't it at all. They just chose carefully what to play.
Luce winced as she imagined Lilith, who knew the French translation for all the fencing terms Luce didn't even know in English, throwing her svelte, spiteful self into an attack. If the rest of the class were one-tenth as skilled as Francesca and Steven, Luce was going to end up a pile of body parts by the end of the session.
Her teachers were obvious experts, stepping lithely in and out of lunges. Sunlight glinted o their swords, o their white padded vests. Francesca's thick blond waves cascaded out in a gorgeous halo around her shoulders as she spun around Steven. Their feet wove patterns on the deck with such grace, the match looked almost like a dance.
The expressions on their faces were dogged and full of a brutal determination to win. After those rst few touches, they were evenly matched. They must have been getting tired. They'd been fencing for more than ten minutes without a hit. They began to fence so quickly that the arcs of their blades all but disappeared; there were only a ne fury and a faint buzz in the air and the constant crack of their foils against one another.
Sparks began to y each time their swords connected. Sparks of love or hatred? There were moments when it almost looked like both.
And that unnerved Luce. Because love and hate were supposed to stand cleanly on opposite sides of the spectrum. The pision seemed as clear as ... well, angels and demons would once have seemed to her. Not anymore. As she watched her teachers in awe and fear, memories of last night's argument with Daniel fenced through her mind. And her own feelings of love and hate--or if not quite hate, a building fury--knotted up within her.
A cheer rang out from her classmates. It felt like Luce had only blinked, but she had missed it. The point of Francesca's sword jabbed into Steven's chest. Close to the heart. She pressed against him to the point where her thin blade bent into an arc. Both of them stood still for a moment, looking each other in the eye. Luce couldn't tell whether this, too, was part of the show.
"Right through my heart," Steven said.
"As if you had one," Francesca whispered.
The two teachers seemed momentarily unaware that the deck was full of students.
"Another win for Francesca," Jasmine said. She tipped her