The air was cold as John wandered over to the eastern wall of the estate. It was mid-morning, but still too chilly for his liking. Then again, he thought, huffing out a breath onto his icy fingers, he could likely move to the Bahamas and still think it was too cold.
But he had a goal to achieve today, and he wanted peace and solitude to go about it, so braving the cold was a necessity. For this particular task, he found his bedroom too claustrophobic, and sitting anywhere else in the manor would likely attract unwanted attention; some dull-minded idiot asking him what the hell he was doing and then falling over in surprise when he told them.
The truth was, over the past few days Andre had been teaching him to meditate. John understood the concept well enough, but actually managing to do it properly had proven harder, so after a number of failed attempts in which he’d got distracted, restless or bored, he’d come out here today, determined to spend a minimum of ten whole minutes sitting still, his mind serenely blank.
The sitting still wasn’t usually a problem, of course, as John could sit for hours at a time reading a good book. And blanking his mind wasn’t hard if he had something physical to do, such as taking out his anger and frustration on a punching bag, for example. But put the two together and John invariably found himself drowning in dark thoughts, spectres of his past rising to haunt him, gory visions flitting through his mind of all the ways he wanted to kill those who had held him captive for all those years. But thanks to Andre, he was now convinced that stillness and peace should not be mutually exclusive, so he’d come out today to try and conquer his own mind, ten minutes a modest goal, but one that might take him the rest of the day to accomplish.
There was a wide tree stump not far from the wall and he sat down, crossing his legs beneath him. Taking a deep breath, he opened his senses to the world around him, just as Andre had taught him. Meditation, he’d said, was equally good for reaching out into the world, as for reaching inside oneself. It could heighten the senses, make you aware of sounds and scents that most people didn’t notice. A distant bird call. A subtle change of temperature on the wind. As a wolf, that side of things was even more important. A wolf’s senses were vastly superior to those of a human, but many shifters never quite took the time to learn to use those senses to their full capacity. Listening to his own breathing was also an important step, something to keep his mind occupied even in small ways, so he sat still, focusing on that slow rhythm, letting his eyes rest without focusing as he tuned in to the bird calls, the faint rustle of the leaves… Then, when he felt himself beginning to get restless, he changed things up a bit, focusing his eyes on a pine tree just past the wall, working hard to detect all the minute variations in colour on the bark, even while he kept half his mind on his breathing, in, out, in...
He couldn’t have said quite when he became aware that he was looking not at a tree, but at a person, expertly disguised to look like just another piece of foliage, but once he’d seen her, she was unmistakable.
She’d done a superb job of it, he was forced to admit. Her outline was masked by the interwoven branches of the pine tree, her clothing mottled to look exactly like the bark, and she sat so utterly still that John actually doubted himself for a moment, wondering if he was merely imagining a face where none existed...
Li Khuli sat motionless in the tree, even her breathing at a bare minimum, ghostly exhales as she tried to work out whether the boy had seen her or not. He was meditating, that much was clear, but from this distance, she couldn’t quite work out whether he was looking blurrily at the entire tree, or specifically at her.
He stood up suddenly and shifted, a smooth, lightning-fast change that thrilled Li Khuli to her core. She’d seen these creatures shift before, of course, but never one so fast and sleek, the faint crackle of blue electricity like a sparkle of magic on -
Where the hell were these fanciful thoughts of such nonsense coming from? She should be planning how to kill this boy, how to stop him from revealing her secret, not revelling in his display of power.
In wolf form, he leapt cleanly over the gate, and Li Khuli had the answer to one of the many questions circling around in her head. One did not need to open the gate if one could jump over it so easily. The padlock, therefore, was only designed to keep intruders out, a deterrent so that wandering tourists didn’t accidentally venture onto private property.
Once over the gate, the boy shifted again and stood beneath her tree, peering up into the gloom of its branches. “Hello,” he said, when she still didn’t move, and though she’d already suspected he’d spotted her, the greeting left no doubt. Li Khuli lithely detached herself from the trunk of the tree, stretching stiff muscles in a way that was designed to appear like she was merely changing position to see the boy better.
“Good morning,” she said, rapidly assessing the forest on the other side of the wall, relieved to find it was empty. Just the one target to kill, then. Did this boy know what she was? Did he know what she was capable of? He didn’t look particularly alarmed to have found her.
He peered up into the tree, head tilted, hands stuffed into his pockets. “You’re here to kill Miller,” he said at length, a statement, not a question, and that told Li Khuli a great deal more about him. He knew of the Khuli, then, knew that one would have been dispatched to hunt down the traitor. But if that was the case, why was he standing there so calmly, not prepared to defend himself, not showing the slightest fear? Who was he, that he could look his own death in the eye with such composure?
“Does that bother you?” she asked, trying to goad him into some sort of reaction. She’d faced many opponents before, and each one had always given her a hint of what they were planning to do next. This one had yet to give himself away.
The boy shrugged. “I have no problem with you killing Miller. I’ve thought about killing him myself, actually. But see, the problem is that it wouldn’t just be Miller. You’re a Satva Khuli. And that means you wouldn’t stop until everyone on this estate was dead.” He raised his lip in a hint of a snarl. “I like some of the people here. So that makes it a little more complicated.” Seeming distracted for a moment, the boy looked up and down the tree, from the branch she was perched on, to the ground, and back up again. Then he began walking around the tree in a slow circle.
Li Khuli watched him closely the entire time. He was contemplating how best to attack her, searching for a good angle or an easy vantage point. But she had spent days planning how to kill someone if they happened to find her in this tree, so she already knew the boy wouldn’t have any luck in his ill-advised plans.
He circled back around to the front of the tree – insofar as trees could have ‘fronts’ – and eyed the branches on either side of her. Then, in a smooth motion that would put even a Khuli to shame, he launched himself up the tree, wiry limbs hauling his slight weight upwards with startlingly little effort. Li Khuli braced herself, drawing a knife as she prepared herself to...
The boy landed on the branch opposite her, settling himself quickly and easily into a curve that made a comfortable seat. Li Khuli already knew it did, from having spent several hours sitting in it. The boy glanced over at her and smirked at the knife in her hand. “Oh, for goodness sake, put that away. You’re not going to kill me.”
“How do you know that?” Li Khuli demanded. She didn’t like people telling her what to do – her master notwithstanding – and she didn’t like people assuming they knew what she was going to do next.
“Because you’d have done it by now.”
Li Khuli sat back, startled and baffled by his reply. No, it wasn’t his words that were shaking her confidence. Plenty of people in the past had told her they didn’t think she was going to kill them, quaking in their boots the whole time, and invariably they had all ended up dead about thirty seconds later. No, the thing that was making her so off balance now was the boy’s utter confidence in his own statement. He sat on the branch, legs dangling, calm and relaxed, watching her watching him like he hadn’t a care in the world.
Li Khuli looked him over again, once more getting the strong impression that there was more to him than met the eye. This one was no assassin. He had perfect balance and a lithe, clean way of moving, but at the same time, he lacked the refined grace of the few assassins she’d seen in the past. There was something wild and uncultivated about the way he moved... though it was nonetheless efficient and effective. So, not an assassin, but...
What the hell did he think he was doing, sitting in a tree with her?
“What’s your name?” she asked, not expecting an answer.
“John,” he replied, a sassy smirk on his lips, and she couldn’t help a wry smile of her own. A ridiculously common name, here in England, and no doubt a fake one. But it was something to call him by, something to think of him other than ‘the boy’, so she would work with it. “What’s yours?” John asked, his expression saying he, too, held little expectation of a real answer.
“Li Khuli,” Li Khuli told him. “All of us are ‘Li Khuli’. It’s the only name I’ve ever known.” Why had she just told him that?
“You were raised by the Noturatii, right? An assassin once told me that you lot begin training when you’re about five years old. It that true?”
“What’s it to you?” Li Khuli felt uneasy. Why was this boy refusing to behave like a normal victim, scared, throwing out acts of bravado, trying to run away and tell his friends about her? In a week when she had broken so many rules herself, having someone else break them even more effectively than she had done was unnerving, to say the least.
“I’m curious,” John said, looking her in the eye, the unwavering stare of a predator.
“I’m not telling you anything about my training that might give you an advantage,” she told him sharply. “I don’t know why you’re sitting in my tree, but we are not friends, and we are not going to share secrets together like ridiculous politicians plotting an election.”
John tilted his head again, and Li Khuli got the impression it was something he did fairly often. “Well, that’s good,” he said, after thinking it over for a moment. “Because I’m not going to tell you anything about this estate, or the people in it, that might give you an edge. But what I asked isn’t secret information. I’ve already been told you start training young. I’m just asking you to confirm it.”
There was some trap here, Li Khuli thought. But to spring it, perhaps she would have to take some of the bait. “Yes,” she said finally. “We’re chosen when we’re four or five years old, and we begin training straight away.”
“How old were you when you killed your first person?”
What was the point of these questions? “Ten.”
“Hm.” John looked away, seeming to be calculating something in his head. “I think I was older than that. I don’t actually know how old I am, but at a guess, I would say I was... maybe twelve? I ripped his throat out.” His expression couldn’t quite be called a smile, but there was an unmistakable glee in his eyes. “How did you kill yours?”
“I smashed her head against a rock until she stopped moving.” Some unknown force compelled her to continue. “That wasn’t my first kill. Just my first human. I killed a chicken when I was five. A sheep when I was seven. I think there was a cat in between somewhere. And then after I killed the other girl, they made me fight dogs. I’ve killed a lot of dogs.” It wasn’t a boast; just a simple fact.
Shadows appeared in John’s eyes, and he nodded slowly. “Yes. I know all about killing dogs.” He had a far-away look, and Li Khuli wondered just where he’d wandered off to. She felt the world sway slightly beneath her, in a way that had nothing to do with sitting in a tree.
“Who are you?” she asked quietly. “How did you become so familiar with death and pain?”
The momentary reverie vanished, to be replaced with a sly sort of pride. “I, Madam Khuli, am just like you. Raised as a Noturatii slave until I was able to break free of my shackles.”
That was it. That was why the way he moved was so familiar. He didn’t move like as assassin. He moved like her; like a Khuli.
“You were not raised as a Khuli,” she said, derision thick in her voice. A Khuli would never lower themselves so far as to become a shifter!
“Not as a Khuli, no,” John said. “As a captive in a Noturatii lab. An experiment, if you want to call it that. A toy for their sadistic curiosity to play with.”
A pause followed. “Interesting,” John said, when Li Khuli made no attempt to fill the silence. “You’re quick to denounce the idea that I could have been a Khuli-in-training, but say nothing at all about the idea that you’re a slave to them.”
Li Khuli shrugged. “I am a slave. This isn’t the first time that has occurred to me.”
John raised an eyebrow. “But maybe they don’t have as firm a grip on your leash as they think they do. That was certainly the case with me.”
“Why do you not fear me?” Li Khuli snapped suddenly, unable to stand this strangely baffling situation any longer. “I could kill you in a heartbeat if I so chose.”
John had the audacity to laugh at her. “I’ve just told you I was raised in the same level of hell as you. But if that’s not enough, then let me tell you this: you’re not the first Khuli I’ve met.”
“And you lived to tell of it?”
“An assassin was there at the time. He killed her. Otherwise, no, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”
Li Khuli felt her eyebrows rise, an unexpected thrill coursing through her. “You saw the assassin kill the Khuli? What was it like?” she asked, her excitement getting the better of her. “How did they fight? Was it a close match? How did she die?”
But rather than reply to her question, John’s eyes narrowed and his body tensed ever so slightly. “The assassin? Not an assassin? You know what happened, then.” He glanced out of the tree and over the wall. “You know a lot about this estate by now, I’d reckon.”
Li Khuli shrugged. “Your assassin is the reason I haven’t killed Miller yet. I know he killed one of us, and I have no desire to add my name to a list of failures.”
“I’m not going to tell you anything about the fight,” John said firmly. “Nothing that would give you an edge, remember? But I can tell you this; from the moment she set foot in the room, there was never any doubt about her intentions. She was going to kill us, or we were going to kill her.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Li Khuli asked. “This says nothing about why you don’t fear me.”
John smiled, a slow, sage look. “You’ll figure it out,” he said simply, and then, without any warning, he dropped lithely out of the tree.
“I’m not going to tell anyone you’re here,” he called, as he backed away, heading towards the gate. “So long as you stay on your side of the fence, that is,” he added. “But consider this: the scuff marks on that tree say you’ve climbed up and down it at least a dozen times in the past week or so.” He raised a sardonic eyebrow at her. “A whole week and you haven’t managed to kill even a single one of us? I’d be reviewing my career options, if I were you.”
A moment later, he was once again in wolf form, leaping effortlessly over the gate, and then he was gone, loping gracefully off into the trees.