“No need. They will.” He heard the confidence in my voice and his eyes immediately narrowed.

“What plan are you cooking up?” he asked suspiciously but with a smile.

“It’s already cooked, and it’s crispy round the edges.”

Still going to pretend you don’t want me? he asked as I advanced toward the door. I just thought you should know it’s not working too well. You’re far from Hollywood material.

Damn. At least I don’t shag a twig!

Your interest in my sex life adds further support to my argument.

Well file this away with all the info: you’re a prick.

It was far from shocking to find that the recruits were not waiting for me in the arena. I found them five or ten minutes later all on the basketball court. Chico, Butch, David, Max, Stuart and Damien were playing basketball while Reuben was observing. Denny and Harvey were deep in conversation about something and Salem was moonlight-bathing on one of the benches.

Max noticed me first and signalled to the others that I was coming. Most of them shrugged, unaffected. The others were pretending they hadn’t heard Max.

“So, you still think you don’t need me.” I folded my arms across my chest, squashing my bust so that my cl**vage was more prominent. As expected, they all gave me their full attention. I wanted to see their faces when I acted on my plan.

“It’s just that we think we are okay as we are,” said Reuben.

Max’s face beamed with a cheeky smile. “Come on now, Sam, it’s not you. We just -”

“Don’t want to take orders off some chick,” finished Harvey in an arrogant tone. Damien and Stuart nodded in agreement. Wow, Jared had really been to work on this lot.

“It’s like Max said, it’s not you,” repeated Denny in a very soft, sensitive voice. “Why don’t you come hang out with us?”

“Yeah, hang out with us.” David seemed to have an inability to keep still.

I smiled at them and jiggled my head as if considering their offer. “Well I would...but I’m not convinced you don’t need some coaching.”

“Look, you’ve seen me in combat at the tryout.” Chico sounded bored. “Did I look like I needed help?”

“Same here,” said Butch.

“Help? No. But do I think you could both be better? Yes.”

Chico sniggered. “I exhale thorns. How much better can you get?”

I puffed. “Oh I don’t know…Can you emit them from your palms?”

“The horns come from within me.” His tone was stressing his opinion that I was dumb.

“You really think little poisonous horns are embedded inside you? Wrong. Your body produces toxins. These toxins travel in your blood, your entire body. They harden into horns the second that they meet the outside air. You can emit the toxins from your pores in just the same way. Your palms can be an outlet just the same as your breath can. Try it.”

Chico sniggered again and waved a hand at me dismissively before going to collect the basketball.

“You won’t even try? You’re that scared to fail? No wonder you never made Sergeant when you were in the police force. Got passed down for your brother too, didn’t you?”

Chico immediately stiffened. Slowly he swerved to look at me, his face grim and his jaw taut. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Oh I’m sorry, did I touch a nerve?” I knew I had. Preparing for a violent response, I absorbed the immediate energy, feeling it tingle and tickle as if eager to be released.

“You need to get away from here now, do you understand me?” His tone was deadly.

“Or you’ll spit some measly thorns at me?”

Without hesitation he forced out a heavy breath of poisonous thorns. Quickly I manipulated the energy I’d absorbed into the form of a hungry flame, burning the thorns to nothing.

“What about you, Butch? Think you can take me on?” I asked. I was a sponge of energy at this point. I was anticipating attacks from all angles and I needed to be prepared.

“You can fling all the flames you want at me, I’ll just negate them.”

“Negate this.” Before Butch could blink I had my energy whip in hand and slashed open his cheek with it. I knew that the crack of the whip would be too speedy for him to act in time. “You could have protected yourself, you know. All you’d have had to do was use the counteracting force you have to form a deflecting shield.”

“Negators can’t form shields.”

“Oh yes they can, Butch. I bet you’d love a shield that would help against emotional pain. Maybe then you wouldn’t still be feeling so raw about your mummy leaving you on the doorstep of a church.”

His eyes blazed red instantly and he came at me without thought. I let my hands shoot out in front of me and then spread them wide, pulling the energy to pop up my own shield. Butch ricocheted off it like a bouncy ball.

“Wouldn’t you like one of these, Butch? I can show you how to do it.”

He was too busy panting and sneering at me to answer.

“I’ve had an interesting afternoon talking to all your Sires and vampy friends. Turns out they were quite happy to divulge dark secrets. It must be jealousy because you were picked for the legion and they weren’t. Should I just carry on revealing them or shall we go to the arena now?”

“My Sire would never have told you anything,” said Stuart.

“Oh is that right? Would you bet your pride on that?” He seemed confident, how silly of him. “Come on, Stuart, shred yourself into nothing and come all the way over here and then I’ll only whisper to you what I was told. No one else has to know.”

He giggled at me without humour.

“You can’t move from where you’re stood when you do it?” I asked as if he’d said it first. “Not even when I’m telling everyone how you couldn’t protect your little sister and she became a drug addict and then a prostitute to pay for her addiction?” God he was pissed now: if looks could kill...

“And what about you, Damien?” I said. “Shall we share how just because your rich daddy left you bugger-all in his will you beat your brother half to death like an ignorant, bitter shit?”

“Bitch,” he cursed through his teeth.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that. Why don’t you astral project all the way over here and say it to my face? Oh that’s right, you can’t. Just like Reuben can’t weaken my power unless he holds on to me, not even when I tease him for the fact that his Sire abandoned him and he woke up to find nobody there to help him control his bloodlust and he more or less ate three people.”

Reuben started to charge at me but I raised a hand and released a tiny breeze at him as a promise of what would come if he proceeded. Wisely, he stopped.

“Slap-head, Slap-head, Slap-head.” I glared at him. “Aren’t you gonna silence me with that nifty power of yours before I blab about how you were abducted as a kid by a nut who couldn’t have a baby of her own? Stuck with her for three weeks, weren’t you?” There was plenty of cursing going on now. “Why not shut us all up and save yourself the earache? Or can you only attack one person at a time with it?” It was a rhetorical question. Max inhaled deeply but attempted no attack on me. Probably because he knew I’d just put my shield up.

I noticed that Denny and David didn’t appear challenging in anyway, as if they thought they might deserve a little payback. So I decided not to tease animal mimic Denny about not knowing his biological parents or psionic blaster David about being Turned against his will.

When I looked at Salem he knew what was coming and arched a brow in warning.

“What?” I said innocently. “You don’t want people to know how your gambling debts ended up getting your parents burnt alive while they slept in their bed?” I felt the ripple in the air as he aimed his invisible psychic boom at me to knock me out cold. My shield came in handy again. It almost hit Harvey as it bounced off the shield.

Growling, Harvey waved a hand my way, sending a force in the air that was intended to send me zooming backwards. I stamped twice on the ground and let the energy of the earth fill me and then grow into a mound of earth that rose before me. “What’s the matter, Harv?” I called from behind the mound of the earth. “Still upset that your girlfriend left you for your Sire even though you Turned into a vampire for her? Then why don’t you send a force strong enough to move this big rock out the way so you can get to me?”

Sucking the energy from out of the mound in front of me, I watched as it crumbled to pieces. “Or better still, why don’t you all attack me together...?”

They glanced at each other as if assessing who might be willing. Then the energy in the air intensified as I felt Harvey preparing to use his telekinesis and Chico ready to exhale more thorns and Salem ready to aim his psychic boom at me. Simultaneously, Reuben, Butch, Damien and Stuart made moves to charge at me.

The massive dosage of absorbed energy within me was now begging to be released. I obliged. Drawing on every ounce of it, I expelled a concentrated air blast from my palms that was powerful enough to sweep every single recruit off their feet and send them crashing hard into the railings of the basketball court. God that felt good.

Impressive, said a voice in my head.

A fleeting glance to my left confirmed that Jared was nearby. He was lounging against the railings at the far end of the court. I wondered how long he’d been there watching.

“Keep denying you need help if you want,” I told the recruits as they scooped themselves up off the floor. “Or drop the ignorance long enough to realise that I can actually help you, that there is more to learn. I’m not trying to be a twat by bringing up your past. The point of all this was to show you that you need to snap out of this little zone you’re in. Yes, you got picked for the legion and, yes, that’s a big thing but it doesn’t mean you’re faultless or that you have the right to have rods stuck up your backsides. And it doesn’t mean you get to be arrogant or forget all the experiences that made you what you are, that gave you your strengths in the first place.”

Having seen how much everyone seemed to look to Chico for clues of what to do next, I concluded that if I was going to get through to the others then I had to drive the situation home to him primarily. I looked mostly at him as I continued to speak, “Like it or not, every one of you has excess energy swirling around you which means that you’re not using your gift to its full potential and you’re not controlling it either.”

Chico sighed. “Even if we said we’d listen and come to training, it’d do no good. You’re expectations of us are too high. You’re asking us to do things with our gifts that we can’t do. There are limitations, there’s no way I can shoot thorns from my palms.”

“Wrong. Let me show you.” I walked over to Chico and circled him.

He was looking at me curiously as he spoke, “What’re you doing?”

“Absorbing the energy that’s leaking from you so I can have your power for a little while.” With that I shot a dozen poisonous thorns from one palm in Jared’s direction. He dodged them, unfortunately.

Hey! His scowl was cute.

Chico gazed in astonishment at me. “You can teach me how to do that?”

I nodded slowly. “And if the energy hadn’t been leaking from you like that, I would have had to touch you or get shot by the thorns to get the power. In other words, you’re vulnerable like this.” Then I turned to Butch. “You don’t think you can make your counteracting force into a shield? Watch.” Like with Chico, I let my pores drink in the energy that seeped from Butch. “Chico, thorns.”

Nodding once, Chico puffed out a spray of thorns. I drew a circle in the air in front of me with my hand. The recruits all gasped as the thorns hit an invisible wall and fell to the floor.

Butch’s eyes darted from me to the thorns repeatedly. “But...I didn’t see any shield. The thorns didn’t bounce...”

“It’s different from the shield that I can generate with my own gift. Mine’s visible and vibrant because I feed off all the energy surrounding me; kinetic energy, solar energy – it all combines and mingles together crazily. The energy that generated your shield was your own energy, not a clash of varying energies. Want one?”

Butch laughed out of his nose. Not attractive, don’t try it. “Maybe.”

Next I looked at David. “The excess energy around you is absolutely wild. Your power is strong but right now it seems almost completely out of your control.” His expression was glum. “Ever hurt anyone by accident?”

He nodded, the picture of remorse. “You can help me keep a lid on it?”

It wasn’t difficult to sense that he resented having it. “Yes.” So suddenly that I gasped, a draft spread through my entire body. My extremities went cold. My head ached. My stomach lurched. Only one thing had ever had this effect on me. Subconsciously I turned my head toward the mansion.

What is it? Jared tensed.

Without a word to anyone I moved with vampire speed as I darted out of the court, past the training arena, across the gardens and into the mansion, almost colliding into Sebastian in the hallway.

His expression was grim and filled with annoyance as he confirmed what I already knew. “He’s here.”

Chapter Five

(Sam)

“Who’s here?” asked Jared. I didn’t realise he’d followed me.

“Sam’s Sire.” Sebastian sighed as he looked at me. “He appealed against your leave of his hold on the grounds that your request to be free of him was not made in person. Antonio had him brought here some twenty minutes or so ago, hoping to have this over with once and for all. We suspected that he would not let you go easily. He has requested an audience with you, and that Antonio be present as he seems to be confident that you will return with him and wants Antonio to witness your decision to leave here.”