Frostbite Page 0,25

night and had probably only just gotten back. Ugh. I wouldn't have been so quick to encourage him to help her if I'd known it'd result in this.

"Well," I said hastily. "I guess that means practice is canceled - "

"Be quiet and put these on." She handed me some training mitts. They were similar to boxing gloves but not as thick and bulky. They shared the same purpose, however: to protect your hands and keep you from gouging your opponent with your nails.

"We've been working on silver stakes," I said sulkily shoving my hands into the mitts.

"Well, today we're doing this. Come on."

Wishing I'd been hit by a bus on my walk from the dorm today, I followed her out toward the center of the gym. Her curly hair was pinned up to stay out of the way, revealing the back of her neck. The skin there was covered in tattoos. The top one was a serpentine line: the promise mark, given when guardians graduated from academies like St. Vladimir's and agreed to serve. Below that were the molnija marks awarded each time a guardian killed a Strigoi. They were shaped like the lightning bolts they took their name from. I couldn't gauge exact numbers, but let's just say it was a wonder my mom had any neck left to tattoo. She'd wielded a lot of death in her time.

When she reached the spot she wanted, she turned toward me and adopted an attack stance. Half expecting her to jump me then and there, I quickly mirrored it.

"What are we doing?" I asked.

"Basic offensive and defensive parrying. Use the red lines."

"That's all?" I asked.

She leapt toward me. I dodged - just barely - and tripped over my own feet in the process. Hastily, I righted myself.

"Well," she said in a voice that almost sounded sarcastic. "As you seem so keen on reminding me, I haven't seen you in five years. I have no idea what you can do."

She moved on me again, and again I just barely kept within the lines in escaping her. That quickly became the pattern. She never really gave me the chance to go on the offensive. Or maybe I just didn't have the skills to take the offensive. I spent all my time defending myself - physically, at least. Grudgingly, I had to acknowledge to myself that she was good. Really good. But I certainly wasn't going to tell her that.

"So, what?" I asked. "This is your way of making up for maternal negligence?"

"This is my way of making you get rid of that chip on your shoulder. You've had nothing but attitude for me since I arrived. You want to fight?" Her fist shot out and connected with my arm. "Then we'll fight. Point."

"Point," I conceded, backing up to my side. "I don't want to fight. I've just been trying to talk to you."

"Mouthing off to me in class isn't what I'd really call talking. Point."

I grunted from the hit. When I'd first begun training with Dimitri, I'd complained that it wasn't fair for me to fight someone a foot taller than me. He'd pointed out that I'd fight plenty of Strigoi taller than me and that the old adage was true: size doesn't matter. Sometimes I thought he was giving me false hope, but judging from my mom's performance here, I was starting to believe him.

I'd never actually fought anyone smaller than me. As one of the few girls in the novice classes, I accepted that I was almost always going to be shorter and slimmer than my opponents. But my mother was smaller still and clearly had nothing but muscle packed into her petite body.

"I have a unique style of communication, that's all," I said.

"You have a petty teenage delusion that you've somehow been wronged for the last seventeen years." Her foot hit my thigh. "Point. When in reality, you've been treated no differently than any other dhampir. Better, actually. I could have sent you off to live with my cousins. You want to be a blood whore? Is that what you wanted?"

The term "blood whore" always made me flinch. It was a term often applied to the single dhampir mothers who decided to raise their children instead of becoming guardians. These women often had short-term affairs with Moroi men and were looked down on for it - even though there wasn't really anything else they could have done, since Moroi men usually ended up marrying Moroi women. The "blood whore" term