Ninja Girl (Book 1: The 9 Wiles)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

In the final evening of the ordinary portion of Ashley Prue's life, she danced.

The ballet studio was filled with hopefuls, all sixteen, all waiting their turn for their final test. Sixteen was when you were tested, if you had the moxy to try. If you passed, the studio would take you on as an apprentice and you had a shot at becoming a true ballerina. If you failed, then ballet became your hobby, something you messed with on Tuesday and Thursday nights and gave up before you graduated high school, like piano lessons.

Ash knew she was strong, and she knew she was fast. She was light, poised and sylphlike. She went en pointe again and again, showing off how comfortable she was on the tips of her toes. Her black leotard and pink tights blurred under the studio lights as she locked her eyes on the instructor, Miss Claudia, and whirled through all thirty-two fouettés en tournant that were required at the end of Swan Lake.

"You are drifting, Miss Ashley."

Ash winced for a split second. She had to keep her place during fouettés and not float around the room.

"Thank you, Miss Ashley, that's enough."

Ash stopped, and with a set of petit jetés, approached Miss Claudia at the barre. Miss Claudia smiled down at her, and in her smile there was something sad. "You have studied ballet since?"

Ash grounded herself, feeling the floor pressing her heels, and with a breath, lifted her carriage. "Since I was three."

Miss Claudia sighed. "You are my strongest student. And when you try, quite graceful. And yet..."

Ash waited, setting her restless feet in the third position, heel of one touching the inside arch of the other. Her carriage slipped a bit, but she was too anxious to care.

"How tall are you?" Miss Claudia asked.

The words were a knife in Ash's heart. "Miss Claudia, I'm still growing."

"How tall?"

A hard lump appeared in Ash's throat. "Five feet."

Miss Claudia's sad smile vanished and her face became hard. "You are perhaps four eleven. Now I admit, you are wonderfully proportioned. Quite beautiful. Your weight is?"

 Ash swallowed. "Ninety pounds."

 "Yes, perfect. But perfect miniature. Look at the girls out there."

 Ash turned, but she didn't look. Her eyes traced the sheen of the studio lights reflected in the floor. She knew what the other girls looked like. The reflected lights slowly blurred, and she blinked to clear tears from her eyes.

 "Five foot six," Miss Claudia said. "Some of them, five eight. A ballerina must be slim, but also tall."

 "Miss Claudia–"

 "You are welcome to attend class, of course. But you are not our ballerina." Miss Claudia lifted her head to the line of girls. "Next!"

 #

 It was well past dark and the air outside the studio was cold. Ash flipped up the collar of her coat and waited for her friend, Mule Danneker, to walk her home.

 His real name was Samuel, but his folks started calling him Mule when he was a baby. He weighed ten pounds when he was born, and his parents figured, at the rate he was growing, that he'd be a linebacker by the time he was six. Ash knew the story, because Mule loved telling it. All but the linebacker part. Mule had tried out for the high school football team, but he didn't make it.

 He was big enough to tackle a mail truck. But he couldn't catch. No hand-eye coordination.

 Maybe that was why Ash liked having Mule around. She felt safe around him on late nights like this, because he was so big that no one would dare mess with him. But also, like her, he couldn't have what he really wanted.

 Ash checked her watch. She had left the auditions early, and he wouldn't be here for another twenty minutes. She stood there, outside the studio doors, with nothing to do but look in at the other girls, the ones who still had a chance.

 After a few minutes of that, she could feel her insides ripping themselves up. She decided to walk home alone. She would have called Mule's latest cell phone, but he'd lost it yesterday. It had lasted four days – a record.

 The walk wasn't far. She could cut across the high school campus and be at her house in a half hour. Mule would figure it out and meet her there, or she'd bump into him on the way, so he could still get his tutoring in English from her. Mule was awful at English – Huckleberry Finn was killing him – and she'd been tutoring him a lot this semester. Last semester, it was math.

 Ash crossed the parking lot and continued down the street. The air was biting cold and heavy with mist – spring in Seattle – and as she walked under each streetlight she could hear its sad yellow hum. She turned up the steps of Magnolia High School, dark and quiet at this hour.

 There were no lights here, and the noise of street traffic was dulled by the buildings. Ash stopped among the lunch tables in the quad, her hands in her coat pockets, imagining how bright and noisy this place would be tomorrow morning.

 She liked it better this way. It was peaceful.

 There was a noise behind her.

 She didn't turn. She just listened. It was probably a squirrel or a crow or something. All the animals they saw during the day had to still be around at night, right?

 The noise stopped, and all was silence.

 That unnerved her. She started walking.

 At the far end of the quad she had the overwhelming feeling that someone was behind her. She turned, listening.

 Nothing. Not a sound, and nothing to see but gray concrete and black shadows. Could it be Mule sneaking up on her, trying to scare her?

 No. Mule might try something like that, but he wasn't this good at being sneaky.

 Ash kept walking, faster now. She reached the other side of campus, where two rows of portable classrooms sat on concrete blocks. She disappeared into the shadows between them. Past them, all she had to do was cross the field to the street, then two more blocks and home.

 Her ears were freezing, and she could feel her pulse rapid-fire in her earlobes.

 She heard the sound of three quick steps, shoes on concrete, and it occurred to her that the apparent safety of being out-of-sight between the portables suddenly seemed confined, a trap.

 "Mule?" she called, out of hope and nothing else.

 Someone stepped from behind a portable and rushed at her. Ash saw a lot in a split second, even in these shadows: he wore a knit cap on his head and a bandanna tied across the lower part of his face, like an old west bandit. The shadows ate all colors, and he seemed dressed in black and gray, dull and featureless except for the sharpness of his outline and the gleam of the switchblade he held low in his right hand.