I nodded reluctantly because I knew he would follow through with his threat. Mumbling a good-bye to the newcomers, I hurried to the equipment room to shed my padded armor. Then I escaped the training area before Callum decided to feed me the nasty gunna paste himself, like he’d done on my second day of training.
The dark paneled hall in the training wing was quiet except for the muffled sounds of combat coming from behind the closed doors. Mohiri warriors spent a lot of time training when they weren’t out saving the world. The stronghold housed between thirty and forty warriors on a given day – not including the teams that came and went – so the training rooms were always busy this time of day.
I pushed open the heavy door to the women’s baths, relieved when I saw the empty chamber. Mohiri women were not timid or self-conscious, and they thought nothing of stripping down in front of each other, something I was still getting used to. If I was lucky I could get in and out of the bath before the room got too busy.
The first thing I did was go to a cabinet in the wall and retrieve a can of gunna paste. Scooping out some of the green paste with my finger, I grimaced and put it in my mouth. Within seconds, a dry, bitter taste coated my tongue and every corner of my mouth, and I had to force myself to swallow the paste instead of spitting it out. Even after the paste had gone down, the foul taste lingered, and I knew it would take at least another five minutes for it to go away. I silently cursed Callum as I did every day after training. It didn’t change things, but it made me feel a little better.
Stripping off my sweaty clothes, I immersed my body in the nearest of the six rectangular tubs sunken into the tiled floor. The hot cloudy liquid bubbled gently, and I moaned in sheer bliss as it began to soothe my aches and pains. I didn’t know what was in the water; just that it came from a deep underground spring that fed into massive tanks somewhere under the building. There, it was treated with special salts and purifiers and piped into the healing baths in a constant flow. That was as much as I cared to know about it, other than the fact that it did wonders for the body if you stayed in it long enough.
I closed my eyes and tried to relax and not think about my abysmal training session, or the dozen other negative thoughts that often plagued me in the week and a half I’d been here. It’s not as if you expected it to be like home. I just had to give it some time, to get used to the people and my surroundings. I had never been comfortable getting to know people, and making new friends didn’t come as easily to me as it did to Roland and Peter. A wry smile touched my lips. One more thing I had to work on.
When my thirty minutes were up, I climbed out of the tub to stand beneath the shower. Cleaned, dried, and dressed in a fresh pair of drawstring pants and T-shirt, I left the bath chamber and headed to my suite on the third floor of the north wing. Westhorne was a Mohiri military stronghold, but there were no barracks here. My suite was almost as big as my loft back home, with a much larger bathroom and a small combined living room and kitchenette. The furnishings were richer than I was used to, but I did love the antique four-poster bed. And the fireplace would come in handy if the winters in Idaho were anything like I’d been told.
I opened the window and took a deep breath of fresh air. The view outside my window was so different from the one I’d grown up with. I missed the ocean, but there was something about snowcapped mountains that made my breath catch every time I saw them.
If only I had the freedom to explore them, I might have felt better about my change in scenery. So far, I had been pretty much restricted to the grounds. Not that I hadn’t tried to go beyond the border of the property, only to be caught and returned twice. They told me it was standard procedure for new orphans and it was for my own good, but I suspected my past escapades might have had a little more to do with it. I longed to walk in the woods and hike on the mountain trails without someone treating me like a five-year-old who had wandered away. It wasn’t like I was going to run off. We were in the middle of nowhere and the closest town was five miles away. Even if I did head for town, Butler Falls had a population of a whopping four thousand and more farm supply stores than restaurants. Not exactly a magnet for vampires, especially with a Mohiri compound next door.
I turned away from the window with a sigh and hunted for a pair of jeans and a shirt in my ridiculously huge closet. Who needs a closet the size of a small bedroom anyway? My clothes took up half a rack and two shelves. A few days ago, the rest of my boxes from home had arrived, and most of them still sat unopened on the floor of the closet. That still left almost three-quarters of the closet bare. Claire, the woman who had shown me around the day I arrived, told me they had set up a line of credit for me to buy anything I needed, but so far I hadn’t bothered. It wasn’t as if I had anywhere to go, and my old clothes served me well enough. Besides, I felt weird about spending Mohiri money when I barely knew them.
I grabbed a warm coat and a paperback from my nightstand. The book was one of Nate’s and I’d read it before, but reading it again made me feel a little less homesick. I tucked the book in my pocket as I left my room.
As I descended the stairs, the murmur of voices grew louder. It was lunchtime, but the last place I wanted to be was in the crowded dining hall. Instead, I left by the door in the training wing that opened to a courtyard at the rear of the building. To my right was the wide, deep river that bordered one side of the property. I started that way, but the call of the woods was stronger. Besides, I always had the feeling someone was watching me when I went near the river. No doubt they were making sure I did not fall in and drown myself.
I passed a group of warriors carrying bows and swords, and they nodded politely but didn’t speak to me. As beautiful as Westhorne was, I was constantly reminded that it was a military holding. The Mohiri had dozens of compounds across the US alone, and at least ten of them were like this one. The rest were community compounds that were even more fortified than Westhorne, but were less involved in military operations. I did not have to ask why I hadn’t been sent to one of the Mohiri communities. No one wanted to take a chance of the Master attacking a compound full of kids if he ever figured out I was alive. So I came here instead.
Home sweet home.
The scent of pine surrounded me when I entered the woods. Overhead, I could see only patches of blue sky through the canopy of branches, but the sun still managed to seep through, its rays casting a dappled pattern of light across the ground. It was so quiet here, and the only sounds came from the birds in the branches above my head. I took a deep breath, imagining I was in the woods back home in New Hastings, and I could almost pretend Remy or one of his little cousins was about to sneak up on me like they used to.
I shook off my melancholy because the woods were too beautiful to allow sadness to mar them. Sticking my hands in my pockets, I wandered aimlessly, content just to be outdoors and alone for a while. It will get easier, I told myself like I did every day. They had a lot more rules here than I was used to, but the people were not unkind, even if they were different. Just because I didn’t feel at home here, it wasn’t fair of me to judge the whole Mohiri race after less than two weeks.
You mean it’s not fair to judge them because of him.
Thinking about him would only make me angry, so I made an effort to focus on anything but him. I stepped into a small sunny glade where the air felt ten degrees warmer than in the shade of the big trees. It was a chilly day, almost too cold to sit outside, but it was infinitely better than being inside. I closed my eyes and raised my face to the sun, listening to the quiet sounds of the forest and breathing in its rich, earthy smell. Yes, this will do nicely, I thought as I stretched out in the grass with my book.