Hotbloods (Hotbloods #1)(69)

“What?” he said, eyeing me. “Why are you smiling like that? Are you plotting your next near-death experience?”

“No,” I said, scowling. “You make it sound like I’m some sort of adrenaline junky.”

“Well . . . are you?”

“I don’t think so. I was just . . . I don’t know. I don’t want to say I was enjoying myself, because we’re in Siberia, hunting shapeshifters, but . . . there is a part of me that is kind of enjoying this.”

He grinned. “See? I told you—adrenaline junky.”

“But really, though, you can’t force me to stay in this ship the whole time. I want to help. I want to do something productive. I might not know exactly what that is, but I have a feeling it’s going to require me getting out of the ship at some point.” I grinned. “You never know—I might just end up saving your life.”

“You sure are stubborn.”

“I’m not trying to make things more difficult. But I’m here, so you can’t just force me to stay inside the whole time. I have free will, and I am choosing to be here and participate and help out in whatever way I can. And nothing you say is going to change that.”

Navan sighed. “Fine! Fine. I was studying some of the maps while you were sleeping. And it seems that there’s a bit of a pattern with the villages that the shifters are hitting.”

“There is?”

“Yeah. Enough so that I feel pretty good about going to this one—” Navan unfolded a map and pointed. “I think if we went here today, we’d probably be able to intercept at least one shifter. That’s my feeling anyway. It’s not too far from here, either, so it won’t take long to get there.”

“What do we do once we get there?”

“We’ll want to find you something to eat, maybe somewhere to get warm. We can take things as they come and see how it’s going. But before we do any of that, we’ve got some preparations we need to see to first.”

“Like what?”

“We’ve got a whole cache of weapons here that you’ve probably never encountered before.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to let me use them?”

“I’m not saying that—but if the situation comes up, I think it’d be good if you were at least a little familiar with them.”

I followed him over to the back corner, where a large metal toolbox sat, the sort a construction worker might have permanently installed in the back of a pickup truck. Navan opened the lid and stood there, staring down at its contents. I stood next to him and peered inside.

There wasn’t much that I hadn’t seen before, or at least some variation of it. There were boxes of bullets, two of the silver long-barreled pistols, something that looked like an assault rifle, a sword, and a stack of knives.

“What are these?” I asked, pointing to the knives. They weren’t regular-looking knives, like the kind you’d see in a kitchen—they were more like daggers, long pointed triangles with a slender handle and a hollow ring at the end.

“Those are throwing knives,” Navan said. “They’re very sharp, and you should stay away from them.”

“But you said you were going to show me how to use some of the weapons.” I reached out and ran my fingertips along the handle of one of the knives. There was something about it that seemed to be calling to me. “I want to try this.” Navan opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, but then stopped. “I’ll just ignore that look on your face,” I said.

His eyebrows shot up. “What look?”

“That look that says you don’t think I have any clue what I’m doing, and that I’ll probably end up hurting someone if I try to use this.” I picked up the knife I’d just been touching. “Do you know how to use these?”

“I do,” he said. “And that’s because it’s something that I’ve practiced. It’s not something that you’ll instinctively know how to use.” He held his hands up. “I’m not trying to discourage you. Well, maybe a little. I was thinking you might try something more like . . .” He looked at the weapons laid out in front of us. I waited, curious to hear what he thought I might be drawn to, but a second passed, then another, and it became clear that he didn’t know what to say.

“I get it,” I said. “You think I can’t do this, or that because I’m a girl or something I shouldn’t be handling a weapon. Well, let me try this thing out.” The knife had a nice weight in my hand. It felt balanced, like this was just the thing I should’ve picked up. I might’ve been nervous to hold the gun, or that samurai-looking sword, but for whatever reason, the knife just felt right.

“Easy there,” Navan said, reaching down into the box. He handed me the rest of the knives and pulled out the rifles and the sword. “Let’s go outside. These sorts of things aren’t meant for close quarters.”

Outside, the sun was just starting to rise, a glowing orange illuminating the pale blue sky. We crunched across the hard snow, heading toward a copse of fir trees. I followed Navan beyond the trees, into a clearing.

“While I doubt anyone’s going to randomly stumble upon us out here,” he said, “it’s better that we’re a little hidden from view. Now, you have those knives?”