“If you want to distract me, we could have stayed upstairs and used one of the other bedrooms,” I suggested.
“This is better,” he firmly said as he hit the ground floor and made a sharp turn around the banister. He paused long enough to open the door under the stairs that led down the basement.
“Better than sex? I really doubt that,” I replied, pushing some hair out of my face as he started to descend yet another set of stairs.
Danaus said nothing in reply. He just silently continued down into the basement. Once in the center of the room, he none too gently dropped me on my ass on a thin mat. I gazed around the room in the bright overhead lighting. A couple months ago we had removed all the furniture, the wet bar, and the big screen TV. It had all been a facade in the first place to convince anyone who came into the house that there was nothing out of the ordinary.
In place of the items of leisure, Danaus and I had ripped up the carpet and replaced it with a covering of thin sparring mats. The walls were covered in a wide variety of weapons and sparring shields. The room was now a big open space for us to practice our fighting techniques. In here, blood was spilled and bones broken, but since we healed so quickly, the wounds were only a temporary distraction before we were back at it again.
As I sat in the middle of the mat, I watched Danaus walk over to the far wall containing the various staves and other blunt objects, all arranged according to discipline. I frowned as he paused, looking over the broad selection.
“What are you in the mood for?” he called out as his hand passed over a quarter staff and headed toward the Far Eastern fighting style weapons. As I watched him, I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my socks, preferring to be barefoot on the mat to give me better grip.
“For beating your skull in? Give me the jo¯ staff,” I replied. My aikido was far stronger than some of my other training, giving me what I hoped would be an edge. Danaus picked the jo¯ staff off the wall and threw it at me as I pushed to my feet. I caught it over my head and frowned as he pulled down a pair of eskrima sticks, as I expected. His kali training had proven to be much better than mine when we’d both fought with the medium-sized rattan sticks in the past, leaving me with more than a few welts and a broken forearm. I had learned that opposing him with the jo¯ staff tapped better into my aikido training, which was also complemented with more than a little Jeet Kune Do training. In this sparring session, it appeared we would be evenly matched. A small smile grew on my lips as he settled the two sticks in his hands and gave them a few lightning quick swipes through the air.
“What? No kalis or bankow?” I mocked, referring to the wavy blade and the spear that were commonly matched with one of the eskrima sticks in a traditional kali fight.
“Just blunt objects tonight. We’re playing a slightly different game,” he said with a smirk.
“Different scoring system? We going to twenty points instead of ten?”
“Better. If a hit is scored, the loser takes off an article of clothing.”
My eyebrows jumped and my mouth fell open as I stared at him for a second. “Strip sparring?”
“You needed a distraction and a way to burn off some steam.”
I gave a small chuckle and shook my head at him as I turned my jo¯ staff over in my hands, getting ready for his attack. “Grand Masters are rolling over in their graves right now.”
With my feet planted on the mats, I clenched my muscles and tightened my grip on the red oak staff as Danaus closed the distance between us. His face was completely expressionless, and I could feel the calm sweeping through his mind and down through his body as he settled into total focus on knocking the absolute crap out of me. I, on the other hand, was a ball of energy waiting to explode. I could find no calm, no center of peace, as thoughts of the Daylight Coalition, Rowe, Cynnia, and the Soga clan all danced through my head.
The second he was within striking distance, Danaus pounded me with a flurry of hits I barely managed to block. The hunter was a blur of motion, aiming striking blows from the top of my head to the inside of my thighs as he searched methodically for an opening. The speed at which he came at me kept me on the defensive, but I didn’t back up an inch, refusing to give him the satisfaction of overpowering me with his speed and skill.
After more than five minutes of nearly nonstop blows, Danaus stepped back and wiped the sweat from his left temple. He wasn’t breathing heavily yet, but the flurry of strikes had taken its toll. I took the opening and launched my own attack with the jo¯ staff. He caught a strike aimed for his neck with his eskrima stick, but before I could sweep the staff down to knock his legs out from beneath him, he hit me with a punyo, slamming the end of one of the eskrima sticks in the dead center of my forehead.
Dazed, I stumbled backward a couple steps until I finally landed on my ass in the middle of my mat. With my left hand, I touched my forehead to find a steady trickle of blood starting to slide down to the bridge of my nose. I wiped away the blood as the wound quickly closed. I had a feeling I would have a bruise there for several more minutes. My thoughts were scattered and my head throbbed, making me wonder if he’d succeeded in cracking my skull.
“I want your shirt,” Danaus proclaimed.
Frowning, I put down my staff, pulled my black cotton T-shirt over my head and tossed it at him. The hunter caught the shirt with one of the sticks in his hand and tossed it to the side of the room as if putting aside his prizes. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered to take off my shoes. My focus wasn’t on the fight as it should have been, and I was going to lose quickly if I didn’t get centered.
Grabbing up my staff again, I rose to my feet with a push of my powers. I stuffed all my stray thoughts down into a ball in the pit of my stomach so my mind was finally clear. Before I had my feet properly set, Danaus came at me again with sticks flying. I beat them back, and actually managed to overpower him enough to forced him to take a step back. My usual vampire speed was returning as I focused on the fight before me. Danaus struck out with his right hand, and I easily blocked it, but it was a feint. He jabbed with his left hand, hoping to catch me in the middle of the chest. I twisted out of his reach, balancing most of my weight on my right foot. As he started to pull back from the missed blow, I once again swept down with my staff. This time the jo¯ staff hit its mark, slamming into the back of both of his legs. Danaus hit the mat flat on his back, knocking the wind out of his lungs.
Grinning, I stood over him with the jo¯ staff pointed at his throat. “Shirt, please.”
“I’m still wearing my shoes and socks,” he patiently pointed out.
“And I said shirt. Now.”
I stepped backward, returning to my side of the sparring mat so he could sit up and pull his black T-shirt over his head. He tossed it to me and I caught it with one hand. Bringing it to my face, I pretended to take in a deep whiff. “Ahhh . . . I smell fear,” I said before tossing the shirt over to the side of the room.
Danaus gave a deep chuckle as he pushed to his feet again. A new feeling twisted in my stomach as I watched the play of muscles before me. His stomach was flat and lined with thick muscles, while his arms bulged as he flexed the muscles and took up position with the eskrima sticks. The shirt had been a mistake. I now had a new distraction, and this one wasn’t as easy to push away as it danced before my eyes. Damn it, I should have said shoes. I could only hope standing before him in a lacy red bra was having a similar effect, but I wasn’t willing to rely on it. Danaus had an unnerving focus when he wanted to win.
As we stepped back into the fight, I struggled to clear my mind so I could focus solely on the blur of eskrima sticks. As Danaus started to circle me, I thought I had an opening at last. I raised my jo¯ for an overhead blow, but he blocked it with one hand striking me with a redondo by whipping the free stick about to slam against the back of my head. My head jerked forward, but I had enough focus still to snap the end of my staff forward in hopes of catching him in the knee with the end. Unfortunately, he shifted out of the way in time and took a step back.
“Jeans,” he said, ignoring my attempts to strike when we were supposed to have already separated.
Temper and frustration rising, I threw my jo¯ staff down to the ground with a loud clatter while I unbuttoned and jerked off my pants. I threw them at Danaus and quickly picked up my staff. He had enough time to toss them over to where my shirt lay before I was attacking again. I was half naked and feeling more than a little vulnerable, but my temper was also flaring. Danaus and I were usually evenly matched in most of our sparing matches, but I was letting him take advantage of my distraction and losing to him in a most embarrassing fashion.
We exchanged strikes back and forth for several minutes, neither gaining the advantage over the other. I blocked one of his strikes with my staff, but his eskrima stick slid down the pole, smacking into my hand with enough force to bloody the knuckles. I didn’t release my jo¯.
