Page of Swords (The Demon's Apprentice Book 2) (25 page)

I went to the first one on the left and held my right hand out until I could feel the phantom heat of the flames against my aura. Once I was familiar with how it felt, I moved my hand along the outside of the ring, until I found the tiny variance where the circle had been started and stopped.

“
Perturbare incaendium Infernum,”
I intoned.

The flames flickered, then chased themselves around the circle. I repeated the incantation three more times before it made it all the way around the circle and stayed out. The real trick to this was that I had no idea how long they would stay out. It was a terrific motivator to work fast. The paper was slightly smaller than the fragment, so I centered it on it and rubbed the length of the charcoal stick against the page until the whole thing was covered. Once that was done, I grabbed another sheet and did the edges in four vertical lines, with the sides labeled as carefully as I could with the little time I allowed myself.

After that, it was a repeat of the same thing with the other three. My hands got singed on the third one, and by the time I was done with the fourth, I was starting to sweat. The eight pages I’d torn out of my sketchpad were tucked into the leather-bound journal, with a page between them to keep them from smudging each other. Now all I had to do was convince Thraxus that I hadn’t just cheated by taking rubbings of four closely guarded pieces of Lemurian lore. I risked a quick glance at my watch. Just under ten minutes left.

When Thraxus came in, I was sitting in front of the first fragment, sketching madly away. He frowned at me as he reached down and tore the page from the pad.

“I only gave you leave to study the fragments, not to draw a reproduction of them. I hope you remember what you drew,” he said as he balled the page up and tossed it at the ring of Hellfire. It went up in a flash.

“I have a pretty good memory,” I growled at him. Then I bowed and took on the formal tones of the Graces. “My apologies, Lord Thraxus, for abusing the privilege you granted me. I misunderstood the terms and intended no offense to your hospitality. I hope that the destruction of the offending sketch in some small way amends my error.”

He gave me a gracious nod of his head. “Your apology is accepted. I believe that the loss is sufficient recompense for the offense.” His tone was just as formal, though he made it sound more natural than I ever could. He turned for the door and gestured at me to follow him.

“You are most gracious, Lord Thraxus,” I told him as the vault door closed behind us.

Shade and Collins came up out of the heavy leather chairs in front of Thraxus’ desk when we came back in. Two nearly full glasses of wine and a pair of untouched plates of some kind of tiny pastry and cheese sat beside them. I gave Shade a smile, proud that she’d remembered what I’d told her last time we were here. Beside me, Thraxus gave a low laugh.

“Honored guests, you are here at my invitation. The obligation tonight is mine. You incur no debt by accepting my hospitality,” he said with a smile.

I gave them a nod off their glances to me, and Shade reached behind her to take one of the little bite-sized offerings. Her eyes closed as she savored it, then she offered a contented moan.

“The canapés taste as good as they smell,” she offered after she finished it.

Collins took one of his own, but he didn’t offer an opinion on it.

“I’ll convey your compliments to the kitchen staff,” Thraxus said with a slight bow of his head. “Now, lest we forget our purpose here, Apprentice Fortunato accepts my reasons for withdrawing my protection. Detective Collins, do you convey your claim against Etienne to Apprentice Fortunato?”

“Yeah, I’ll let him have my claim,” Collins said.

“So be it, then. Apprentice Fortunato, given your previous complaint against Etienne, his further actions against you, and Detective Collins’ claim that has been conferred in trust to you, I find that I can no longer offer him my protection as his sire in good faith. You have my leave to act against him as you see fit, coming the next setting of the sun.”

“What?” Collins and I asked at the same time.

“Why tomorrow night?” Collins demanded.

“The forms must be followed. I must inform him of my decision, so that he has the opportunity to plead for mercy and amend his ways.” The vampire’s tone sounded so reasonable, but I was still fuming.

“You can’t be serious!” I said.

“I am deadly serious, apprentice. I will not forsake the rules which have kept us safe and out of the public eye for millennia over a fifteen-year-old boy’s protests. Officially, sunset is at ten minutes after seven. Until then, he is still under my protection. Have we an accord?”

“Yeah, we do,” I grumbled.

Collins gave his yes a second later, and Thraxus nodded.

“Very well, then. Our business here is concluded, then. You’re welcome to stay and enjoy the night’s entertainments of course, but I doubt you will find much to your liking.”

We didn’t bother to agree with him out loud. After this visit, all I wanted was to be somewhere else.

Chapter 18

~ Long odds mean nothing to a mage. ~ Modern mage proverb

I came upstairs from the workroom in the basement less than fifteen minutes after we got back to Dr. C’s place, and found Collins asleep on the sofa in the front room, with the borrowed pistol draped over the arm. I retrieved the gun belt and put it in the small storage space under the stairs until I could have Dr. Corwyn put it back wherever he stored it. I was just closing the door when Shade came down the stairs without a sound, a quilt in her arms. She stepped past me and laid it over Collins, then came back and put her arms around me. Our foreheads touched as we stood there quietly. My body loved having hers pressed against it, and the scent of her filled my nostrils as we stood there in the half-lit hallway. Under my hands, I could feel her tremble and shift slightly, and that set off a shift of my own.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she whispered.

“I was wondering how you knew what those little things were that Thraxus served. Canopies?” I said.

“Canapés,” she corrected me, saying the word slowly. “My parents work at Essex University; they go to mixers and cocktail parties all the time. And you’re a terrible liar.”

I shrugged in her embrace and gave her one of my lopsided smiles.

“You feel good in my arms,” I said.

“Nothing else?” she said.

“Plenty else. Just nothing I want to say out loud yet.”

“Yeah, me too,” she whispered.

We stood there for a little longer, until it got too hard to keep my hands where they belonged.

“I . . . uh, I need to go tell Dr. C about tonight.”

“And keep your hands to yourself,” she whispered softly. “It’s weird, you know? Being . . . well, having a guy in my life who isn’t pawing at me all the time. Who treats me like . . .” Her words stopped with a little hiccup. I kissed the tip of her nose before I pulled her to me so she couldn’t see my eyes water up. She squeezed me tight, and I gave an involuntary grunt as my ribs twinged. Reluctantly, she pulled back.

“I have to get back to the Pack anyway. If I’m gone too long, Deek might try to take over,” she told me, and turned away.

I let her go, with a hundred things I wanted to say still on my tongue.

After the door closed, I headed upstairs to find Dr. C. He was standing in the doorway to Mr. Chomsky’s room, with his hands in his pockets, his head down and his shoulders slumped. I stopped in my tracks and watched him for a few moments, unsure. He looked so defeated, worn down. If the smartest guy I’d ever met was feeling beat, how was I supposed to figure all of this out?

For a moment, everything came crashing down on me. The Ordeal, finding Crystal, beating Etienne. I was just a fifteen-year-old kid with a bad attitude and lots of issues. How was I supposed to do all that, when a full-fledged wizard couldn’t figure how to handle even
one
of them? I didn’t know what to do. The floor seemed to shift under my feet, and I wanted to run and hide. I might have been mad at Dr. C for what he’d pulled with my mom, but he’d still been the guy who knew what to do. He was my mentor, damn it! He wasn’t allowed to fail.

I crept back down the stairs and slipped out the kitchen door. I needed to move, to be away from everything for a little while. I had no idea where I was going. I just walked.

Walking in a suburban neighborhood turned out to be a bad idea. At best, animals don’t like me. They can see all the crap on my aura, and it scares them. Most of the time, they try to get as far away from me as they can. Walking through an area with a dog confined in almost every yard or house, once they got to the end of their space, all they could do was bark like mad and generally go nuts. Lights started coming on as I walked, and I decided I needed to get out of this neighborhood. A couple of streets over, I found myself near railroad tracks, which meant no houses, and no household pets dropping dead of fear-induced heart attacks.

I tried to get a handle on things, and figure out what was going on in my head. Feeling sorry for myself was something I tried not to do. It never fixed anything. But here I was, wandering down streets, pissed because I felt like I was on my own, like Dr. C had failed me somehow because he wasn’t perfect. And I just couldn’t shake that. That thought pissed me off even more, because I had never relied on anyone before, and it was turning out to be more trouble than it was worth. My thoughts kept going in circles, and I couldn’t seem to get them moving in a different direction.

The sound of a dog yelping in pain brought me out of my own thoughts for a second. It was ahead of me, so it wasn’t reacting to me. Besides, dogs usually barked at me, they didn’t yelp like they were hurting. Before I knew it, I was jogging toward the sound with my wand out and all the mad I’d been feeling had a direction to go. It led me to the chain link gates of a junkyard, where I could hear men yelling over the dog’s barking and whining. The lock was an easy pick with the TK wand, even if my mundane breaking and entering skills had gotten rusty, and I slipped inside. Only a couple of security lights on the outside of the cinderblock main office lit the front, but the sounds were coming from further in. I walked past the office to see racks of parts in rows leading to rows of half-disassembled cars. The rows made a path that led further back toward a smaller building. Light shone on the far side, and the voices seemed to be coming from there.

“Nah, hit him again!” one of the men said. “Just makes him meaner.” There was a slap of something against skin, and another yelp came from the dog.

“Don’t think it’s gonna take with this one, Mac,” a higher-pitched voice said amid a shuffling of feet.

“Damn well better. I got no use for a guard dog that don’t earn his keep, and just barking ain’t gonna cut it in my yard. Now hit ‘im again!”

I came around the corner in time to see a skinny man in blue jeans, work boots and a vest over a t-shirt bring a strap of leather down on the flank of a rangy dog. Its short fur was mottled in brown and black, and it had a short, almost stubby muzzle with floppy ears. A short chain connected to a choke collar around its neck, and it held its whip of a tail low. The skinny guy turned as I came around the makeshift wall of tires that stretched from the building’s edge to make a low fence. I saw that he had a baseball cap on over short, sandy hair. His narrow face was weathered from years of being out in the sun, and the look in his hazel eyes reminded me of a kid caught misbehaving.

Behind him was the other man, this one at least six feet tall, and pretty damn broad. If there was any fat on him, he hid it well. He wore black jeans and a tight black t-shirt that showed off arms like tree trunks. He had an almost chiseled jaw and cheekbones, and hard brown eyes under a pair of dark eyebrows that were pretty much the only hair on his head.

“Sic him, Buzzsaw!” the big guy yelled, and the dog leaped toward me. Unfortunately, the chain was way too short, and he drew up against the choker with a raspy bark. I knelt down in front of him, so our heads were at almost the same level, and he backed up a step. His thick head cocked to one side as I made myself less of a threat to him. Shade had been trying to teach me how wolves reacted, and a few lessons had stuck. Evidently, what worked for wolves worked for at least one dog, too. We looked at each other for a moment, and I noticed he had pale, almost white blue eyes.

For a second, our eyes locked, and I got a fleeting impression of him. A life of pain and abuse by his pack, constant beatings, and food only if he was subservient to the alpha human. Never understanding what the human wanted, or why he made other people come and beat him, never understanding what he did wrong, only knowing that he was hurt when his human brought other people around.

The connection between us broke, and I fell back on my ass. The bigger guy started toward me with a tire iron in his hand, and the dog turned to put himself between us. His head went down and a rumbling growl emerged from his throat. I struggled to my feet, and wondered if I’d just shared a Horus Gaze with a dog. The big guy took another step forward, and the dog jumped at him and barked savagely. He jumped back with a surprised look on his face, then turned his beady dark eyes on me.

“What’d you do to my dog, you little sumbitch?” he demanded.

With what I’d just seen, I wasn’t about to waste my breath on an explanation. I just raised my wand and said “
Ictus
.” The TK blast knocked him through the door of the shed behind him. His friend’s eyes went wide as he turned back to face me.

“Hey, this wasn’t my idea, man. He just had me come over and whip the dog to make ‘im tougher, ya know?” he whined at me.

“Get the hell out of here, before I do the same thing to you.” My voice was soft, and I even scared myself a little at the pure venom I put into it. Slim put feet to pavement, and scampered away. The dog watched him run, then came over to me and sat down. I squatted down in front of him and stayed still for a moment, so he didn’t think I was going to hit him. He sniffed at me for a moment, then turned his head to one side and put a paw on my knee. It was the first time I’d been near a dog or any other animal for more than eight years.

“You’re a good dog, you know that?” I said to him softly as I slipped the choker off. “I wish I could tell you that so you’d understand.” I ruffled his ears and ran my hand down his side, relearning the simple pleasure of petting a dog. Ridges of old scar tissue ran in lines down his side, and I felt the rage from earlier tonight building again. “At least I could help you a little,” I told him as I stood up. “Seems to be more than I can do for anyone else.” When I turned to walk toward the front entrance, he followed, and I felt like my face was going to break in half because my grin was so big. I’d always wanted a dog, but I’d given up on that dream after Dulka bought me from my father. Big, fat tears of pure happy ran down my cheeks. If nothing else went right, this one thing did.

I had a dog.

My life still sucked as I walked back toward Dr. C’s place, but with Junkyard beside me, all that seemed a little distant. At least for a couple of days, I had a dog. Somehow, that took the edge off all the suck that was going on in my life. For his own part, Junkyard seemed to care less that his new human might not be around by the end of the week. His tail wasn’t down between his legs anymore; instead it stuck straight out and wagged every now and then.

Dr. C and Collins were coming out of the side door to his house when I walked up. His face clouded up when he saw me, and he headed for me like a storm on two feet, but I could almost see his feet skid on the sidewalk when Junkyard lunged in front of me and growled at him. I squatted down beside him and put my arm over his shoulders. I could feel him quivering, coiled to spring.

“It’s okay, Junkyard,” I said softly to him. “This is Dr. C. He’s my friend. He’s okay.”

Dr. C squatted down too, and offered his hand. Junkyard leaned forward to sniff the air for a few seconds, then took a slow step forward to put his nose directly against Dr. C’s knuckles. After a few more seconds of sniffing, he licked his hand, then sat back down and offered up a gruff little half-bark. I felt his tail hit my ankles a couple of times when I stood up and went to Collins to repeat the whole process.

“Not sure where to start now,” Dr. C said after a few seconds. “First of all, are you okay? Second, how did you end up with a dog?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. The dog is . . . well, I’m not sure how that happened.”

I laid out the story as we went inside, including the funky Horus Gaze Junkyard and I had shared. We ended up at the kitchen table, Dr. C and Collins on one side, me on the other, and the dog slurping water from a mixing bowl. When I finished, Dr. C put his head in his hand and shook it slowly.

“You assaulted a cowan with a witness around,” he moaned. “At least you didn’t try to alter their memories.” His head came up with his eyebrows arched. “Right?”

“No, I made them both believe they were four-year-old girls who love Pretty Pretty Princess and ponies. Come on!” I snapped.

“I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me to assume,” he said with a hand raised in surrender. “It’s just been . . . a long day. For all of us. As for the
udjat
you shared with um, Junkyard, here, that was more of a familiar bond. I hadn’t covered that because we still had other things to overcome before I thought we’d have to deal with it.”

“Like my aura,” I interjected.

“Exactly. After that incident at the Humane Society, I figured it would be a long time before it came up. Remedial lesson: animals and magi often bond because they see the world in much the same way. Animals are sensitive to magick, and some magi think it’s a sign of our real duty. Stewards of the Earth and all that. Originally, familiars watched over us, protected us from harm, both physical and mystical.”

“So, why didn’t he run away from me?” I asked.

“Given what you described of his treatment, I don’t think one kind of aura was any different to him than another. Normal humans hurt him all the time, but you didn’t. All he had to go on was what you did.”

Junkyard put his wet chin on my leg and looked up at me with soulful doggy eyes. My eyes got misty again as I laid my hand on his head, and his tail thumped a few times against the table leg.

“Good boy,” I told him in a choked whisper. Rage and pain flashed through me again, and all I could do was stroke his fur and try to keep my cool.