Fierce Lessons (Ghosts & Demons Series Book 3) (3 page)

Wilmington took my arm. “The eggs are powdered today. Skip ’em. The oatmeal’s real, though.”

“Real oatmeal and the mean, homicidal stares of the masses of Mr. and Mrs. MacJudgypants. Groovy.”

“Ignore them,” Wil said. “By the way, I don’t know if anyone has brought this up to you, but nice, pointy horns, Iowa!”

“Horns? What horns? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Good girl.”

“I’m hearing rumors spread. Right now. I can hear them.”

“I’m aware.”

“I want to kill about half these people.”

Wil frowned. “That would seem to work for their argument and against yours.”

“Well, yeah, but I’d feel better.”

“Did you ever feel that way before? Before the…you know.”

“Sometimes.”

“Let’s put off murdering anyone until after breakfast, shall we? It’d be a large undertaking on an empty stomach.”

“If you insist.”

We joined the food line and, as if a bell had rung, the room started moving again. I heard mumbles that made me want to jump on a table and tell them my home town had been blown off the map. Then it occurred to me that the fact that Medicament was lost on my watch might feed the flames instead of dousing them.

Stomach churning, I left Wilmington in the food line and went straight for the coffee station. The crowd parted. It seemed no one’s eyes met mine. They stared at my horns instead. I guessed all this attention must be what walking around with big boobs must be like, but with even less respect.

To avoid confrontation, I sat at an empty table at the far end of the room. I needn’t have bothered. Confrontation followed me.
 

“Hey, Iowa. Got a minute? We want to pick a bone.”

I looked up slowly from my coffee. One of the Spook Squad stood over me, arms crossed. I should have known it would be one of the CIA’s remote viewers that would get amped up enough to come at me first. I searched for this one’s name. Manny called him, “the muscly one.” The tag on his camo told me his name was Douglas.

“Do you have any idea how much shit my people had to put up with from your people after we got here?” Douglas asked.

Behind him, Wil and Manny sifted out of the crowd by the coffee station. They left their trays behind to come stand on either side of the spook. He ignored them and focused his fury on me.

“When we came here to help you people, we put out the call that there was at least one demon within our walls. Guess one of them was you. Was the other your brother? How many spies are walking among us right now because you people didn’t take us seriously? You treat what we do as a joke, but we were right all along.”

“I don’t know about spies within our walls,” I said. “And Trick was my half-brother.”

“I think you mean
half-breed
. My point is — ”

He stopped, raised his head and stiffened. The tip of Manny’s knife sat just under his chin.

“Here’s my point,” she said. “Like it?”

Douglas swallowed hard and I watched his Adam’s apple bob. When he spoke, all the bass that he’d put in his voice to try to bully me had leaked away. “What are you doing?”

The whole Choir was still again, watching and listening, but Manny and Douglas had their back turned to the room. No one but me could see the knife and only Douglas felt its sharp tip.

The guys at the Spooks table knew something was wrong, though. They all stood and Wilmington turned to face them, her hands on the pommels of the twin swords at her hips.

They stared.

Wilmington stared back.

They were unarmed. The Spooks wisely sat back down.

“Manhattan,” I said in a low tone meant only for her. “Put that away. I’ll handle this.”

“I’m getting his attention,” Manny said. “The Choir has a no discrimination policy. Black, Asian, White, LGBTQ…we’re all here, fighting the good fight. We even let this idiot in.”

“As a black woman, I gotta say I get edgy when somebody says the words, ‘you people,’” Wil said. “And you say it a lot, Douglas.” Her gaze was still fixed on the remote viewers’ table. “This isn’t about us and them. The fight is going to be tough enough. If we don’t work together, the war’s already lost.”

“How do we know this guy isn’t a demon spy?” Manny asked.

“What? I’m a patriot!” Douglas was still frozen by the blade at his throat. He began to tremble.

“Sewing the seeds of discontent and suspicion,” Manny said, cold as ice. “Sounds to me like something a demon spy might do, Mr. Douglas.”

“This is outrageous! I — ”

“Oh, you don’t
like
being accused of treason? You don’t like how that feels? Poor baby. We’ll get you something for that diaper rash,” I said.

“You weren’t here when the real shit went down, Mr. Douglas,” Manhattan said. “You didn’t see what happened the day the library was blown up and the demons came. You didn’t see my girl here take down a red demon with nothing but a belt, a wooden sword and a pair of big brass ovaries. That was her first official day on the job, man.”

“This is unacceptable,” he said.

His cheeks flushed and I could see waves of heat rising from his head.
 

“Manny,” I said. “Be cool. I mean…cooler.”

Manhattan made her blade disappear as suddenly as it had appeared. I spotted the sleight of hand — a hidden sleeve in her left gauntlet. That’s a neat trick everyone should learn in debating club.

I stood slowly and looked Douglas up and down. Remembering Manny’s trick in the limo, my eyes never left him, but I talked loud enough for everyone present to hear.

“You lost face,” I said. “I didn’t know I was half-demon. I didn’t know Trick was half-demon. Victor sent us away on a mission to unleash the demon in me so I could fight for the Choir. So…look at you and look at me. The little town where I grew up is gone and a lot of people are dead. Do you really want to put up what you’ve lost against my losses, Mr. Douglas?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed again. Its quivering movement reminded me of a small, fearful animal. Its motion felt like an invitation to rip it out and see what the little thing looked like in the light of day.
 

“You and your team want some props?” I asked. “Fine. Your Spooks did spot something. Good for you. That’s what you’re here for. But you want more than that. You want heavy respect.”

“I’ve earned it,” he said.

“Sure. You dare to stand with us. But you aren’t with us, are you? Not really.”

“That’s rich!” He raised his voice to match mine, performing for our audience. “Coming from somebody who looks like the things everyone in this room is sworn to kill — ”

“You aren’t with us,” I said, “because you look down on us. You refuse to train with us. You think of us as a bunch of amateurs playing war. Not one of the Spooks has strapped on a sword or taken the name of the place you defend. You want respect? Show some.”

He looked uncertain and hesitated. That’s when I knew I had him.

“If you want to chat, sit at my table and tell me your life story or tell me a joke because I could sure use one right now. You might want to learn some charm. I mean,
dude!
Seriously!
Some people here may not be sure about me, but before I got these horns, at least I can say I made a lot of friends. Nobody likes you.”

By the look on his face, I couldn’t tell if this revelation was a possibility that had never occurred to him or a secret fear now realized. His jaw dropped and a bead of sweat rolled down his temple. He’d wanted an audience a minute ago. Now the Choir Invisible was a witness to his evisceration.

(Verbal evisceration. Not the other kind…for now.)

“Look, if you’ve come to accuse me of something, we can take it to the courtyard and duel about it with
bokkens
in an old fashioned
Tombstone
throw down. You ever see that movie? I’ll play Val Kilmer’s part and I
will
be your huckleberry. When I’m done, your new name will be Lumpy. But if all you want is to stand and jabber, you are
boring
me.”

“I…uh — ”

Manny leaned close and whispered, “Walk away, man. She’s already got your balls in her hand. Don’t make her squeeze ’em harder.”

Douglas spun on his heel and marched away.

That felt good. Besides the taste of hot cocoa with a fudge brownie, my encounter with Mr. Douglas was the first thing I’d done that had felt good in days.

Lesson 158: Just because you’ve won an argument doesn’t mean you’ve changed anyone’s mind.

4

I
was stronger now, so my archery instructor, Devin Anguloora, worked me harder than ever. While I did pushups, the big Samoan planted his foot on my back. When that didn’t slow me down, he sat on me. I wasn’t breathing hard enough for his liking, so he switched to psychological warfare. “I heard you shot a shaman.”

“Arrow in the shin,” I said. “He’ll be fine, sir.”

Anguloora ordered me to switch to the kind of pushups where you stop halfway down so I got twice the work out of each rep.

“Should I be counting?” I asked.

“I’ll let you know when you’re done. How did it feel, shooting the holy man in the leg?”

“Bad.”

“The periosteum of the tibia is very sensitive. Getting an arrow there must have hurt him bad.”

“He’ll live.”

“So you don’t care so much?”

“I care that I was aiming for a huge blue devil and missed.”

“Some people think maybe you missed on purpose.”

“I am Iowa, Castrator of Demons. I didn’t get that title for playing nice with the enemy. Anybody who thinks that is a stupid bigot.”

“So you don’t worry about what your comrades think of you?”

“Of course, I care, but I’m trying to care about the right people. Not everybody’s opinion is equal. Are you saying I should have to consider the opinions of all those people who hate anybody in a turban…sir?”

Anguloora had a high, girlish giggle for such a large man. “I suppose it’s possible you’ve been demonized.”

I kept pumping out the reps. “How long have you been waiting to spring that one on me, sir? I’ve heard that pun several times already.”

“I’m in control of your conditioning program, Iowa. Do you think it wise to talk to me like that? Doesn’t that strike you as a tactical error? Like the one you made shooting poor Spider Richardson?”

“That wasn’t a tactical error. It was an error. I missed my target.”

“And antagonizing me?”

“Are you so easily antagonized, sir? You might want to think about why that is, sir.”

He laughed again, got off and made me run along the walls of the entire Keep as fast I could. When I returned, he glanced at his stopwatch and nodded. “Let’s see how fast you do it with me on your back.”

I scooped Anguloora up in a fireman’s carry.

“No, no. You be Skywalker. I want to ride like Yoda.” He jumped on my back and I piggybacked him around the Keep. He slowed me down considerably, but I still managed to jog at a good pace. When the path along the wall proved too easy, he made me switch to breaking new trails through snow drifts with each circuit. Anguloora was clever at making people miserable, but it was his conversation that fatigued me more.

“Do the Keep’s blessed stones bother you, Iowa? Any rashes or nausea? You’re half unholy, after all.”

“No, sir.”
 

Sword singers training in the central courtyard stopped to watch us pass. I couldn’t wait for them to grow bored of staring at me every second.

“How do you feel about humans now?” Anguloora said in my ear.

“Depends on the human. I still love Mama. I’m not crazy about you, sir.”

He giggled again.

“We don’t make you hungry? Now that the beast is unleashed, you don’t look at us and think, we’d be good with some A1 steak sauce?”

“Only you, sir.”

“How long before you start to grow fangs, do you think?”

“No idea, sir. No way to know. Trick got fangs right away. I got horns.”

“What if I were to grab your horns and steer you around the courtyards that way? What would you say to that?”

“I’d say that rodeo riders try to stay on the bull for eight seconds. You wouldn’t last half that before you got slammed to the ground.”

“Strong words from a strong demon girl.”

“Strong half-demon
woman
, sir. Our enemies would strip us of our dignity. Even if you’re a superior officer — check that.
Especially
if you’re a superior officer, when you try to take my dignity, too, I owe you nothing and you’ve thrown my loyalty away.”

“I’m concerned about your attitude, sword singer. I call you sword singer because you’re a lousy archer.”

“Are you saying there’s no sense majoring in my minor, sir? Should I get back to focusing on what I’m good at?”

“I’ll ask the questions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I heard about what happened in the cafeteria,” he said. “I heard about the knife, too.”

“Did Douglas squeal? That — ”

“No. The man said nothing. He’s too embarrassed to say anything. The Magicals watch over the Keep closely. They may be unreliable when it comes to demon detection, but they saw what happened this morning. They told Victor and Victor told me. Now I’m telling you. Judgment was passed on your friend before you had time to change into sweats.”

“What’s going to happen to Manny?”

“She’s lucky she’s so valuable. She got off easy. Manhattan has been demoted from training new recruits. We can’t have a hothead in charge of training anyone. She’s down in the parking garage. She’ll be washing every vehicle and greasing every wheel and tank tread until the end of the war. Tell your friend to start taking more vitamin D because she’s not going to see any sunlight.” He pointed to one of the towers that rose above the courtyard. “Do the stairs.”

“I’ll try not to drop you on your neck…sir.”

“Was that a threat to a superior, Iowa?”

“I don’t see how you could interpret my concern that way.” I let another beat pass before I said, “sir.”

“And that is why you fail,” he said. He giggled a moment as we bounced up the stairs.

I began to sweat and breathe harder. Burning some energy felt good. I tried to take the stairs two at a time. I could.