"Not sure," he says. "I have never tried to teach this sort of thing before. And to complicate matters, I have no idea how much you already know, or can access because you are the Slayer and have been loaded up with all sorts of interesting muscle memory."

"I've watched a few hours' worth of aikido tutorials on the Internet," says Bella, shadowboxing a throw with a Japanese name she can't remember. "And about fifteen minutes of parkour."

"It seems I have some work ahead of me, then," he says. "Has any of this valuable research taught you how to properly throw a punch?"

"No. Aikido seems to be more of a throwing art. I do know that the thumb goes outside the fist?" she offers.

"Well, that's a start. Observe," he says, and stands beside her to demonstrate in slow motion.

She follows along promptly. "Is this all going to be shadowboxing or at some point do we hit each other and be glad we have super-regeneration?"

"For lack of better targets, yes," he says. "Unless you manage to accidentally knock my head off, the worst that will happen to me is I might start giggling and quoting Shakespeare."

"And this doesn't bother you? I don't think anyone I've read has remarked, however unreliably, on the relationship between turning and pain tolerance."

"There isn't much of one. I was nearly as unbothered beforehand."

"Did it make you quote Shakespeare then too?"

"You could say that," he muses, with a slight smile.

"Am I treading on personal territory?" asks Bella. Convinced that the shape of her fist matches his, she throws an experimental series of punches at the air.

"Oh, very good," he says, reaching to correct the position of her elbow slightly. Deadpan: "And no, not at all, the subject of my sex life is open for discussion."

"Technically I didn't ask if I was treading on forbidden territory," she points out, adjusting her elbow on the other side to match and having at the air a bit more.

"My mistake." He observes another few punches. "You can go much faster than that, I'm sure," is his commentary.

"Much better," he says. "You'll find that while plenty of nasty bitey sorts have superhuman speed, very few of them put it to good use."

"Fail to put it to good use how?" she asks, throwing in a kick to break up the rhythm of the punches. The air would be tripped, if it were not air.

"As simple as that: they don't use it," he says. "I don't believe I have any special physical advantage over other vampires, but I move and react faster than they do because I pay attention and I know my own abilities. They don't push themselves. Perhaps because they don't usually have to."

Bella pushes for a little extra burst of speed, which she can achieve but not sustain, and then she starts adding more kicks to the pattern, and then she spins once to make the front kick a roundhouse. "Don't vampires sometimes get into fights with each other? I'd think that would incentivize pushing even if most of them are never going to run into me or one of my predecessors. Or successors."

"They do, yes," he says. "But judging by how easily I kill them, they don't do it often enough. Try making that more level," he says of the roundhouse.

She adjusts the angle and tries again. "Some of them manage to live for hundreds of years. Have you tangled with many of those?"

"I think one or two of the gang who turned me had a few centuries behind them."

"What makes you think that?" Punchpunchpunchpunchpunchkickpunchkickkickpunchpunch -

"How they spoke, how they moved. It is sometimes possible to estimate."