Love Lines

21: The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning

Chapter Twenty-One

"Little Red, Little Red..."

I groaned from where I lay sprawled on the forest floor. "Have I told you how much I hate you?"

His chuckle seemed to reverberate from tree to tree, filling up the empty air around us. Catching my breath was proving hard this time and when I cracked open an eye, I caught Andrzej's smiling face hanging over me.

"I don't think you've told me in the past two minutes." He checked a pocket watch which resided in a small pocket in his vest. "Yeah, two and a half minutes. You whine too much."

I tried to smack at him but he was too far away so I tried to kick him but my legs wouldn't lift.

"You need endurance."

"You need..." I scrunched up my face in frustration when I couldn't come up with a good come back. "You need a haircut."

"Oh. Ok. Sure. Let's go with that. Get up."

"Can't I have a few more minutes?"

"No. Now get up." He kicked me gently in the calf. "You almost had it last time."

Begrudgingly, I carefully got up. My back was hurting, my legs felt like they were about to fall off, my arms were the only thing that weren't in pain at the moment but I knew once they had a chance to stiffen up, my shoulder muscles would ache. When I got to my feet, I stumbled a bit and like all the times before, Andrzej was there to steady me.

"You good?" I nodded and he took several steps back. "Scale of one to ten, easy to hard, tell me how the visions were."

"About a seven."

"You said that last time."

"Well, friend, it's not getting any easier."

"That's because you're thinking about it. You need to let go a little and let your particular do the work. Self preservation is always the highest on your powers list of priorities. If you don't exist, the particular doesn't exist and whatever higher functioning it's working on..." He stared at me hard for a moment. "Never mind. It's too complicated to explain at the moment. I think we need to get a little more life threatening."

"How much more life threatening?"

Without answering, he stalked over to the bundle he'd brought with him. When he opened it before, I hadn't paid much attention. My sole focus was on the landscape. We were in a forest, a barely there layer of snow covering the ground around us with more flakes coming down at a leisurely pace. Last time I checked it was only winter in the Southern hemisphere but the way the trees looked...

"Where are we?"

He hadn't told me then and as I watched him roll out the bundle now, I was suddenly hoping there was a town or village nearby when I ran away from him screaming.

"Those are pointy." Without looking, he tossed one to me and with better reflexes I never would've known I had before today, I caught it. "And very heavy. Are you sure swords are the best way to go about this?"

"I was going to use throwing stars," he said as he began to roll the bundle back up. "But I thought that was rather one sided. You need a fighting chance after all."

"You do realize I can barely lift this thing." I looked over the rather sharp edge, pointy end down, my face twisting up in a mix of wonder and fear. "I'm starting to miss normal high school drama."

Andrzej snorted, handling the weaponry with more ease than humanly possible. Then again we weren't human, well, I was more human than he was, but that wasn't the point. "There'll be plenty of that later." He took his eyes away from his blade and looked at me, that feral glint back in his eyes. "Do you need some instruction on how to handle it?"