Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,39

shadows to avoid all security measures. I spread my arms to say, Here I am, and glanced around at the space he’d decided we should use for my next training session.

The span of even terrain ended several feet away at a pit full of deteriorating stone walls and arches that rose nearly to ground level. Strange to imagine that some two thousand years ago, gladiators and beasts had battled their way across this stage… and now here I was, about to enter a different sort of battle. Whether it’d be more with the hellhound shifter in front of me or my inner demons, I’d find out soon enough.

“All right,” I said. “What’s the big idea? Or did you just want a place with as much room as possible in case my powers explode?”

Omen gave me a narrow look. “If you’re going to play a significant role in taking Tempest out of commission, you’ll need to develop that focus of yours even more than I anticipated. Since you have a lot more practice with physical rather than mental gymnastics, I figured we’d start with that.” He tipped his head toward the broken ground ahead of us. “Let’s see you make a circuit of the arena. No falls.”

Yeah, I didn’t think falling that far would have been a good idea even if he hadn’t made it one of the rules. I dragged in a breath of the cool night air, a dry mossy scent filling my lungs, and made a running start of it.

I vaulted over the little metal fence meant to stop tourists who didn’t have a death wish from tumbling into the depths and landed on the top of the nearest arch with only a slight sway. This part was a piece of cake. I’d scrambled along ledges higher and narrower than this dozens of times.

Making my way around the arena was like a combination of a tightrope walk and an obstacle course, one that mostly involved leaps and bounds. Any part of it might not have been the most difficult feat I’d had to pull off, but I’d never had to play quite such an extended game of hopscotch. By the time I’d circled back around toward the platform, sweat was trickling down my neck beneath my ponytail and my calf muscles had a few things to say about my chosen nighttime activity, none of them pleasant.

I did make it back to Omen with nothing worse than a little fatigue and a tiny ache in my heel where I’d landed on an especially obnoxious lump on one of the crumbling walls. As per usual, the hellhound shifter kept any overt signs of approval to himself.

“Good,” he said in his terse voice. “We know you can survive the journey. Let’s make it challenging now.”

He vanished into the shadows and reappeared only as flickers here and there along the course I’d followed—where pale squares of what I quickly deduced was paper blinked into being on top of the aged stone protrusions. Omen had planted at least twenty of them before he returned to the platform, swiping his hands together with a hint of satisfaction with his work.

“You want me to light them all up?” I asked before he had to give the order.

The corner of his mouth curled upward just slightly, but that ghost of a smile was enough to bring back the memories of our interlude in the cathedral. I didn’t think the heat that washed through me at that thought was the sort he’d wanted to inspire, but it was a lot less likely to literally burn me.

Maybe we could enjoy an impassioned work break in here too? Make this a grand tour of fucking across the landmarks of Europe?

The flash of orange in his cool eyes suggested he might have guessed at my thoughts—or had similar thoughts of his own. But Omen was sadly very good at keeping it in his pants. He motioned to the path he’d laid. “You know how this works. Get to it. Extra points if you can light them all up on your first time around without having to stop.”

“And without lighting myself up in the process.”

“Yes, I assumed that went without saying.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes you like it when I bring out the fire up close and personal,” I teased, and sprang over the fence before he could grouse about me not taking the training seriously enough.

I couldn’t say I’d ever been an avid student, but I’d take this version of training