Page of Swords (The Demon's Apprentice Book 2) (26 page)

“Chance,” Dr. C said softly. When I looked up, Collins’ chair was out and empty. “You’re normally not this emotional, and it isn’t like you to just take off, especially right now. What’s going on?” I took a shaky breath, and tried to tell him, and my mind just locked up.

“Want a list?” I managed after a second.

“It would be a start.” His voice was calm, and he managed a smile.

“You’re my mentor, you’re supposed to know everything, and be all cryptic and shit.”

“What shook your faith in my cryptic infallibility?” he asked after a few seconds.

“I saw you in Mr. Chomsky’s doorway earlier, and you looked . . . I dunno . . .”

“Tired? Defeated? Sad? That’s what I was feeling then.”

“How am I supposed to do all the stuff I have to do if
your
ass is kicked? You’re a wizard, damn it! You’re supposed to be all smart, and just
know
stuff! I’m barely an apprentice!” My voice had risen and I paused as I heard myself. “Hells! Do I sound whiny or what?”

“You do have a lot on your plate, Chance. A hidden sword to find, a missing girl to rescue, a vampire to confront, and Gilder to frame for it,” he said with a wan smile. “Frankly, you’re swamped.”

“Who’s Gilder?” I asked, and he laughed.

“It’s a movie line. We’ll have to watch it this weekend.”

“Assuming I’m around by then,” I muttered.

“I am. Chance, I know things look pretty grim right now, and I can’t say that I see a solution from here. Sometimes, you’re going to face some pretty long odds, and if you try to take it all on at once, things can look pretty overwhelming. You can’t control when it happens, all you can do is decide whether to face things head on or give up. You’re the Seeker, which means your destiny is woven toward finding the Maxilla. It’s been my experience that a wyrd doesn’t attach itself to someone who isn’t up to the task, so Someone has faith in you.”

“Who would be stupid enough to believe in me?” I asked.

“Want a list?” he said, parroting me. “Your sister. Your mom. Dani. Alexis. Lucas. Wanda. Collins. Junkyard. Me. Every single one of us, you’ve put yourself in harm’s way to help. It isn’t in you to leave someone in a bad way. Because of that, a lot of people have faith in you, Chance, and that makes you powerful. It also makes you unpredictable, because you tend to do the right thing, instead of the smart thing sometimes. The important thing is to never give up. You never know when you’ll find a way to turn things around.”

Every name he gave me made my heart lurch as I realized exactly how many people actually
did
believe in me. My thoughts went to the one name he didn’t put on that list, Dani’s girlfriend Crystal. If Etienne had her, there was no telling what he was doing to her. And right now, I was the only person trying to do anything about it. For that matter, there were eleven other missing kids he might have. I knew I couldn’t leave them in his hands, either. Damn, Dr. C was all kinds of right about me not doing the smart thing sometimes.

“You sound pretty confident that I’ll be able to do that.”

“We’re magi, remember? We can bend the Universe to our will, and what we say is an expression of that will. When you talk, the Universe listens, so assume success, and never give the Universe an out. Now, speaking of not giving someone an out, tell me about the hour of quality time you spent with Thraxus tonight.”

I laid out my time in the secure room with the G’Honn fragments, and watched his eyes get wider as I went on.

“I used the fixative on them to keep them from smudging, and they’re downstairs in the workroom,” I finished.

By then, Junkyard had moved around and was looking up at Dr. C. For his part, my mentor was looking more and more uncomfortable by the second.

“Do you know the kind of risk you put yourself in?” he asked sternly. “If he’d even suspected you’d done that, he would have ripped your head off! And that’s if he was feeling charitable!”

“I let him catch me trying to make a sketch, and he chastised me, I apologized then kissed his ass a little. It was what he expected from a fifteen-year-old kid.” I shrugged.

Dr. C, evidently thoroughly under the dog’s thrall, got up and went to the refrigerator.

“So, Thraxus told you Etienne stole one of the G’Honn fragments. Any idea which one?” he asked as he pulled a white package out of the fridge.

Junkyard licked his chops and let out a little groan, and Dr. C shook his head.

“I think the five he has are sequential. I’m not sure exactly which ones they are, but if I could find a copy of the Medici Codex, I could make a damn good guess.”

“Sorry, fresh out of illegal tomes,” Dr. C remarked as he pulled a bowl out of the cabinet and unwrapped a batch of raw hamburger. Junkyard’s tail swept across the floor non-stop. “The Medici Codex was banned as soon as it was written. Pope Sixtus the Fourth ordered the assassination of Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici for writing it.”

“I uh . . . might know where to get my hands on a copy . . . for a while.”

Dr. C’s left eyebrow went up at that, and he paused with the hamburger poised over the bowl.

“You know the Conclave would frown on that, to say the least.”

“What they don’t know . . .”

“Isn’t much,” he countered. “What would you have to do to get a look at a copy?”

“Pay the owner a ton of trade silver. Probably about a thousand ounces.”

“I could cover that,” Dr. C said.

“I’ve got it, it’s just in bearer chits. Which he’ll probably take. He’s one of the few merchants in the Hive who will.”

“Don’t worry about it. If you’re going to the Hive, then I’m coming with you.”

“I thought the Hive was supposed to be off limits to the Conclave.”

“It’s more of a strong suggestion. So long as we’re not recognized, we should be fine.”

Junkyard gave a little groan, then another of his short barks, as if to remind Dr. C that he was there.

“Sorry, Junkyard.” He dumped the meat into the bowl and set it in the microwave for a minute.

“I know someone who might be able to help with that, too. I just need to get a message to her.” Dr. C nodded, and we waited for the microwave to ding.

“I can handle the rest,” he said as he set the bowl down in front of Junkyard. “Avoiding the police watch, and the Sentinels,” he explained over the sound of a dog inhaling about a pound of hamburger.

I sat back in my chair and let myself relax a little. Dr. C was back to being mostly infallible, I had a plan for finding out what Etienne was up to with the G’Honn fragment, and the wyrd on me to find the Maxilla was probably going to be okay. I remembered the saying Master Draeden had quoted in his chamber Friday night.
'Wyrd often saves the undoomed man, so long as his courage holds.
Maybe I had a shot at all of this.

Chapter 19: (Wednesday morning. Last day before the Equinox)

~ Mistake not knowledge for wisdom. ~ Giovani de Medici, 1519

I woke up on the floor next to my borrowed bed with a warm, furry lump under my right arm. Junkyard was curled up next to me, with his head on my left arm. When I moved, he slowly got to his feet and stretched, then he came over and licked my chin before he trotted to the door and looked back at me. I stumbled to the door, and he headed for the stairs and to the kitchen door.

Dr. C was cooking something as I stumbled through the kitchen, and the smells of breakfast seemed to reach down my nose and into my stomach to wake it up. Junkyard went out into the yard and found a couple of trees to do his business on while I waited on the porch in my bare feet, sweat pants and t-shirt. Standing there in the early morning quiet, I was reminded that I hadn’t been on my morning run for a few days. My legs were feeling stiff and I actually longed to feel the sidewalk pounding under my feet. Somehow, though, today didn’t feel like a good day to run.

The morning was chill and gloomy again, and the clouds were low and heavy. They were red, and I wasn’t sure if that was the early morning sun, or if there was a more ominous reason for it. In the distance, I heard a rumble of thunder, and Junkyard decided he’d explored as much of the yard as he needed to.

“Big baby,” I muttered at him as he scampered up the steps and looked over his shoulder at me from beside the door. But I didn’t waste any time getting inside, either. I tried to convince myself it was because I was hungry and my feet were cold.

Collins headed home after his relief showed up; Dr. C sent him on his way with a covered plate stacked with biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, and thick sliced bacon. Then we headed up for the workroom in the attic. I could feel the restrained power of the elaborate casting circled engraved in silver in the middle of the hardwood floor as we walked around it to the workbench set up on the right side of the room. It had taken me a couple of months to get into the habit of not crossing the circle’s edge without a good reason, but now it came second nature. Dr. C had taught me a lot more respect for the tools of the trade than Dulka ever showed. I was pretty sure it had made my magick a little easier to use and a little stronger.

There were tall windows in each of the four walls, with benches and bookshelves scattered along each wall. On the wall behind us, at the rear of the house, was an angled table with a row of magickal reference books. Padrigal’s
Essential Ephemeris
sat next to
The Collected Works of Jabir ibn Hayyad
, which leaned against the thick
Annotated Translation of Voynich’s Ars Atlantea
. On the far side of the window was a mixing table for inks. On the wall to our left was the main alchemy lab, which also doubled as Dr. C’s paintball reloading station. The front wall held all of the ritual tools: wands, chalices, ceremonial swords, robes, and a dozen other things. Incense was stored in jars, both the powdered and the stick forms, though Dr. C preferred the powders on charcoal for a cleaner burn.

The workbench we went to was used for crafting focuses, so it was covered with crafting tools, like knives, sandpaper, hammers and stuff like that. Above it was a rack with finished focuses. Some were medallions and rings, but there were stone animal shapes, chunks of cut and polished crystal, and a series of what looked like wooden framework birds.

Dr. C pulled one of the bird frames down and set it on the bench, then handed me a notepad and the stub of a carpenter’s pencil. I wrote out a note and set it on the bench. Dr. C turned to me with the framework bird cupped in his hands. Up close, I could see it had a few feathers tied to it and little chunks of shiny black stone where its eyes went.

“Who are we sending this to?” he asked. “I need their name, and a description.”

“Her name is Synreah. She’s a cambion, red skin, black hair and eyes. She’s about six-and-a-half feet tall and really hot looking.” He nodded when I finished, held the bird up to his face and whispered a spell. Then, he pursed his lips and blew on it softly for several seconds. Feathers and skin seemed to fly onto it in reverse, going from the tail to the beak, traveling toward his face instead of away, like he was blowing the framework away to reveal the real bird on the inside. Finally, a pigeon rested in his hands, looking at him with black eyes and cooing softly.

“Seek Synreah, with red skin, black hair, black eyes, six-and-a-half feet tall. A cambion, pleasing of face and figure. Deliver this message to her, and your task be done.”

He rolled the note into a tube and tied it to the bird’s leg with a complex knot, then went to the window that faced the rear of the house and tilted it open. The pigeon took to the sky and he closed it up.

“How will we know when she gets the message?” I asked.

“I’ll know. In the meantime, you need to practice on your touchstones,” he said as he tossed a quartz crystal to me.

I fumbled it but managed to keep from dropping it on the floor. With a sigh, I went to the eastern edge of the circle and envisioned an opening in front of me, then stepped through. If I’d done that anywhere else, I would probably have gotten a little bit of feedback, which usually translated to minor shocks. Once I was inside, I imagined the doorway closing behind me and sat down in the center.

For most apprentices, the big challenge to getting a touchstone to work is actually getting the magick flowing into it, so for most of them, it’s like trying to fill a glass with an eyedropper. My original lessons had relied on brute force and willpower to make magick work, so for me, touchstones were more like trying to fill a sippy cup with a firehose at first. Once I finally figured out how to see the matrix of the quartz crystal, and shape my magick to fit through it, I tended to shove too much into it too fast. The first ten literally blew up. Now that I was starting to get the hang of it, the worst I did was crack them. Forty-five minutes later, I had finished one and cracked a second when Dr. C signaled to me to open the circle.

“She got the message. Do you think she can get what we need in half an hour?” he asked as we headed down the stairs.

“Yeah. I don’t think she’d have any other clients this early,” I told him. I stopped at the second floor landing. “I need to grab my satchel. I’ll be right down.”

By the time I grabbed my satchel and backpack, Dr. C was waiting at the back door in khaki cargo pants, hiking boots and a fleece vest over a dark green button down shirt, staff in hand, with Junkyard wagging his tail beside him.

The sight of his staff tickled something in my brain, but I couldn’t remember if it was important or not. I dismissed it, and figured if it was important, I’d remember it soon enough.

We slipped through the back yard and climbed into his Range Rover, carefully pulling the doors closed behind us once Junkyard had jumped into the backseat. Once we were in, he set a blob of modeling clay on the dash, then pulled a Matchbox car out of his pocket and set it in the clay. Finally, he carefully carved a couple of complex runes into the clay, and muttered a little. The air around us shimmered, and he sat back in his seat with a relieved grin on his face. To anyone outside the vehicle, we would look like the replica silver minivan he’d stuck in the modeling clay.

The cop watching the house was stationed where he could watch the front and the side of the house that actually abutted a neighbor’s yard, so he couldn’t see us pull out of the garage onto the side street, and we turned away from him when we hit Jackson. In the backseat, Junkyard had his nose pressed against the window, and I reached back to pet him for a few seconds. He leaned against my hand, and his tail thumped against the seat, then he decided there were things he needed to look at on the other side of the car, and stuck his nose against the far window.

Our first stop was at a pet store. I had to wait outside while Dr. C went in and picked up stuff for Junkyard. I’d given him the list of things I thought he needed, while Dr. C had a much shorter list of things he said he needed. In the end, he came out with all of his and most of mine. One thing neither of us had on our list was a collar. He pulled out of the parking lot as I handed Junkyard a thick strip of rawhide.

“So, Chance,” Dr. C said a little too casually a few minutes later. “What kind of clients does Synreah have?”

“Her owner pimps her out as a hooker.” I watched his face go hard at that. Even though I pretty much already knew he’d react that way, he still got major respect for not liking it. “When we get there, she might ask us for our discretion, if her owner doesn’t know we contacted her. She’s saving up for a contract.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m sure her owner won’t be happy to see her purchase her freedom back.”

“That isn’t a clause in her contract. He won’t survive the kind of contract she’s buying,” I said grimly.

“Even better,” he said with a feral smile that I shared. Most of the Conclave didn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other about the lesser races, especially half-bloods like cambions. They frowned on slavery for humans (unless there was a demon involved, evidently), but when it came to the lesser fae and demon-kin, you were on your own, unless you pissed them off. I was glad to see that Dr. C at least frowned on the idea of Synreah being a slave, and had no qualms about her buying a contract on her owner’s life, especially since she didn’t have a clause that let her buy her own freedom back.

We stopped at a parking garage a couple of blocks away from the Hive’s entrance and got out. Junkyard stayed at my side as we headed down the street for the side alley where I’d asked Synreah to meet us. We ducked into the narrow opening between two buildings, and took a second to let our eyes adjust to the gloom. Like I’d requested, there was a twine wrapped bundle waiting on the lid of one of the aluminum garbage cans. I cut the twine free and tossed a cloak and mask to Dr. C, then turned to the two figures who waited deeper in the alley as I slipped mine on.

It took more than a little effort to keep my cool, but I’d more than half expected her to have her owner with her. I’d gotten lucky the last time I’d come to the Hive, and caught her between tricks, before she’d been expected back. My note had just asked for escort services while in the Hive, and cloaks and masks for discretion’s sake near the Shadow Gate. That way, I figured, he wouldn’t know we’d done business before.

Once Dr. Corwyn had the mask on and the cloak settled on his shoulders with the hood up, we headed for Synreah and her owner. It was obvious to me which was which, because she was the taller and curvier of the two. Her owner, as we got closer, looked more like a meth addict from one of my Health Ed books. Where she was tall with ample curves, he was stick thin and bony. Her face was framed by a mane of thick black hair, and her almond shaped eyes were all black. His fragile-looking hair was almost dust-colored and short, and seemed to be trying to go in every possible direction at once. But it was his eyes that made me want to look away. They were full of a desire to hurt something, like the world was nothing more than a playground to him, and he had elected himself head bully.

He stepped up to me when we got close, and stuck his gaunt face in mine, a clear challenge. Junkyard growled and barked at him, but backed off when I put a hand out to him.

“What’s your name, boy?” he demanded.

The stench of intoxicants hit me like a wave, and I had no problem telling what he had smoked and drank last. Demanding a client’s name was a serious breach of protocol in the Hive, especially for dodgy deals like hiring a cambion as an escort. Before I could come up with a smart reply, Dr. C spoke.

“Step back.” The words were simple, and he didn’t raise his voice above a casual, conversational level. But he filled it with enough command and power that I felt each word hit the pimp like physical things.

He stepped away from me, but slowly. Junkyard gave him a warning bark and stepped up to my side.

“You’re not regulars, is all,” he said. “Why’d you send a messenger straight to her, but not me?”

Dr. C nodded at me, as if giving me permission to answer for him.

“Biladon Garnet recommended her by name. Your name never came up,” I said, adding as much disdain as I could and trying to keep the formal cadence of the Veil in my voice. “My Master wishes to have a thing of beauty on his arm while he is here.” It bugged me to refer to Synreah like that, but it made sense for the role we were playing.

“A hundred trade ounces for an hour,” the pimp demanded.

“Five hundred for the day,” Dr. C countered.

I could see the greed in the little man’s eyes, and he looked to Synreah for a moment before he answered.

“Until the hour before sunset,” the pimp agreed.

Dr. C nodded and held out his hand. Laying on his palm was a square cut ruby, a little less than half an inch on a side.

“That will be sufficient,” he said as the man plucked the ruby from his hand and waved Synreah over to us.

Dr. C held his hand out to her, and she took it, then turned so that she was holding his hand and half-way wrapped around his arm at the same time. Everything about the move and her body language said she was completely his. Even covered mostly in a dark cloak, she made herself look hot. With a shrug of her shoulders, the cloak fell to the ground, and I got to see what she was wearing today. It looked like she’d taken a couple of pieces of fabric and turned them into a top and skirt without sewing anything. Her top was a blue piece that came down from the back of her neck, crossed over her breasts then went behind her back to turn itself into a bow. The skirt was the same color, just wrapped around her waist so that it was at an angle, higher on her left leg than on her right with a silver chain belt adorned with bandanas and cloth pouches on her hips. She wore a pair of blue canvas lace up boots that came halfway up her long calves, with heels that made me dizzy just to look at. They were laced with a paler blue ribbon. Her arms were wrapped in bands of blue that came up around her thumbs and crisscrossed starting at her wrists and going to her elbows, where she had them tied off to leave long streamers that flowed with her movements. She even had her hair done up with a blue band that ran up across the top of her forehead, and her tiny horns poked through it. I was sure she was violating some kind of fashion rule, but she broke it well.