A Demon's Horns: Vice College For Young Demons: Year One

by Marie Mistry

  It was a two-piece purple gown; the top was long sleeved, boat necked and made of a sheer lace fabric, whilst the skirt was floor-length and made of tulle. Tiny flowers were embroidered upwards from the hem, and the design was finished off by a feathered mask in the drawing. The skirt would sit low enough on my hips to show off my caste crystal, whilst the top would end just under my breasts, leaving a large amount of my abdomen exposed.

  “Is this…”

  Jin wordlessly took the envelope and tipped out the remaining contents on top of the paper. It was the same mask from the drawing, tiny purple feathers perfectly aligned, finished off with glittering stones around the eye holes.

  “You’ll have to have the colours changed,” he admitted. “But any seamstress worth her salt will be able to make that dress for you.”

  “How did you get this?” I whispered, staring at the mask and the drawings in complete disbelief.

  “I know some people,” he hedged. “My father is a model. He’s worked with your mum before, so I asked him, and he went to your house and persuaded her…”

  “Just like that?”

  “She wasn’t happy about it,” Jin admitted. “But my father is very good at persuading women.” He frowned. “He’s too good at persuading women.”

  I flung my arms around his neck. “Thank you,” I whispered, eyes stinging with happy tears. “This means so much to me.”

  He squeezed me tightly against him. “Dad already got copies sent to another one of his friends. She’s kind of a hermit, so she doesn’t usually take commissions, but she’s a friend of my mother’s, so she agreed to sew the dress for you.”

  “I can pay,” I immediately offered.

  “Already taken care of.” Kain’s voice came out of nowhere and I looked up to see him leaning against the hallway wall, studying us both. “Don’t worry, it’s pennies to me.”

  “His mother practically throws money at him,” Jin added when I went to protest. “Let him do this for you.”

  I looked up at Kain. “Thank you.” The words didn’t seem like enough.

  “Just call us your fairy godmothers.” Kain smirked. “But whilst Jin’s motives may be pure, mine definitely aren’t.”

  I stared at him cautiously, I didn’t know Kain well enough to judge what he meant by that.

  “Don’t look so wary, Sunshine.” He smirked. “I won’t bite unless you ask very nicely.” He moved closer to me, a cat stalking his prey. “I paid on the understanding that your other mates and I have carte-blanche to dress you in whatever we like underneath that dress.”

  I blushed at the idea of five men trying to pick out my underwear. “If that’s what you want.”

  “We can choose anything we want,” Kain insisted. “You can’t say no.”

  I frowned, wondering what on earth he could want to put me in that would make me want to say no. He gave me a cheeky wink, and it somehow reassured me enough that I agreed. Besides, I was certain that if I did want to say no, neither of them would actually push me.

  “Whatever you want.” I looked down at the mask. “I won’t say no.”

  “It’s old, that mask.” Jin changed the subject before I could linger too long on thoughts of what could possibly go under the sheer fabric of the dress. “Some of the oldest masks were created by filukinetics, and change colour to match the outfit they’re worn with.”

  I looked at him incredulously as he slipped the mask from my hands and held it up to my robe. There was a faint ripple of power, and when the mask was pulled away, the tiny feathers were the same white as my robe.

  I stared, open mouthed, at the mask for so long that Kain chuckled. “I think you broke her,” he commented, reaching over to gently close my mouth for me. “Get dressed, Sunshine, we’re escorting you to breakfast.”

  Still clutching the mask and the drawings as though they might disappear at any moment, I shuffled back inside my room, so distracted that I didn’t even notice the men following me until Kain whistled. “Your rooms are nicer than ours,” he complained, immediately going to my dresser and opening the drawers.

  “In what way?” I asked, gently putting both the mask and the drawings down on my dressing table and coming up behind him to watch what he was doing.

  Before I could even peek, however, he passed a purple bra and panty set over his shoulder, followed quickly by a matching garter belt and suspenders. I kept the former but raised an eyebrow at the suspenders. “It’s cold,” I complained. “Tights please.”

  Kain shook his head, and Jin took my shoulders and moved me away from the meddling Pride demon. “Just go with it, Pet. He does this all the time.”

  I was going to ask what it was he was doing, but Jin passed me a hanger with the rest of my uniform already on it, and shooed me into my own bathroom. Sighing, I turned on the shower and tried to let the pulsing warm water distract me from the fact that there was a man going through my underwear drawer on an unknown mission.

  When I exited, fully dressed and wearing the damned suspenders, Kain had moved on to my wardrobe. I sighed, but Jin caught me before I could go and investigate again, guiding me to sit at my dressing table and producing my brush from thin air.

  I was going to protest, but the first swipe of the brush between my horns shut me up. What girl could honestly complain about having her hair brushed for them? Certainly not me, and I sat as quiescent as a lazy cat, my eyelids drooped slightly when his fingers replaced the brush, efficiently plucking strands from my scalp and braiding them around my horns. Jin created a tiny braided nest around each one whilst leaving the rest of my hair hanging straight down my back.

  By that point, Kain had moved on to my jewellery box, and I finally saw what he was doing. The laid-back, cheeky man was patiently organising everything into the correct places. Usually I just chucked all my jewellery into the box, but Kain was painstakingly securing studs into the tiny designated holes, poking rings into those strange flaps which took up a row on one side of the box. On top of that, he was sorting the whole thing by colour, so looking into the box was like looking into a perfect spectrum of gems.

  When he absently held out a set of gold flower earrings with swallows and amethysts dangling from them, Jin obediently slid them into my ears, finding the hole with more care and gentleness than I usually did. In fact, something about these two men dressing me was making my usual morning routine seem kind of heavy-handed and messy.

  When Jin held up a hand to help me up from the table, I had to admit that I looked a lot better than I had in recent weeks. When I went to grab my coat and my bag, Kain was already holding them out for me. I peeked inside the bag, half expecting him to have organised that too.

  “I’d never go in a woman’s bag.” Kain looked aghast as he helped me into my coat. “I’m OCD not crazy.”

  I smiled. “I never would have guessed that about you.” I looked at my hair in the mirror and trailed a finger along one of the tiny braids. “And where did you learn to do hair?” I asked Jin.

  “I’ll tell you on the way to breakfast; I’m starving,” he promised.

  I led the way out of the Tower. The moment we set foot on the gravel, Jin launched into his story.

  “I lived in South Korea for most of my childhood, with my grandparents. Grandma was a Pride, but the arthritis in her hands was so bad that she couldn’t do her hair in the morning. She refused to leave the house with a hair out of place, so Grandpa – who had been a hairdresser when he was a younger man – did it for her every day. Eventually he taught me, because my hands were nimbler and worked faster. Grandmother had shorter hair than you, but the principle is the same. Then later, when I moved to England to be with my parents, my father would take me to his modelling gigs. To keep me out of trouble, he put me under the charge of the hair stylists.” Jin smiled. “They said it would be a good skill for spoiling my wife when I grew up.”

  “They were right,” I murmured. “It’s so cold.” My breath was misting the air in front of me.

 
Jin frowned, and instantly the air around us warmed. “Better?”

  I nodded. “Thanks, I would have done that, but Aeron’s been avoiding me, so I’m a bit low.”

  Jin raised an eyebrow. “It sounds like our services may be required yet again, Kain.”

  “We should really start charging,” Kain agreed. Stopping us in our tracks, he whirled me around and held me gently against him before proceeding to kiss the living daylights out of me. His lips were hot against my own, and for a brief second I forgot I was supposed to be drawing power from him. I let myself revel in the languid motion of our mouths against one another.

  When I let my power open up to him, his power burst over me like the warmth of a small sun, tangling with my own and feeding it. I’d only just pulled away when his hands on my hips twirled me around again and my mouth was taken over by Jin. His kiss was just as unhurried and twice as sweet, making me feel lazy and petted as I skimmed the top of his power with my own.

  When the second kiss ended, I was sandwiched between two warm male bodies, their hands lazily stroking me.

  “Food,” Jin groaned. “Come on.”

  That evening, when I was sitting in the common room with Babette, Nelly and Lulu, I daydreamed over the way my two mates had taken care of me, playing lightly with the dangling pieces of my left earring as we waited for Vrosis to appear. There was a low level of chatter in the room; most people were wondering, as I was, why Vrosis had chosen now to restart his evening lessons after a month of silence. Aeron arrived late and took his usual place, standing sentinel against the wall. He’d just settled in when Vrosis finally did enter, silver hair glistening at his temples. He was holding a manila folder that he slid across the glass top of the coffee table to land in my lap.

  “Good evening,” he began, sweeping into the old chair just as he used to, and poured himself his traditional large whiskey from the decanter nearby. “I’m sorry for my absence. I have been away sorting out vast improvements to our caste’s finances for the past month. However, despite the busyness of my schedule, Professor Saxon has seen fit to require I set an examination for the end of the year.”

  Nearly everybody groaned, me included. Babette raised her hand.

  “What will the exam be on, Elder?”

  Vrosis rolled his eyes. “She wishes to test everyone’s knowledge of the history of their caste.” He waved a lazy hand towards his office door, which swung open. Two towering piles of books shot out. “There are enough copies for everyone to have one. It’s a recent work by one of our caste elders from the States. Whilst she embellishes heavily on certain aspects,” his mouth quirked downwards in disapproval as books started to shoot across the room and into people’s laps, “her work is an acceptable starting point. I have included a reading list in each book that will cover everything she does not.

  “The other elders and I do not have time to set up something as tedious as an exam, so I negotiated with the Headmistress. Instead, you will each craft a ten-thousand-word dissertation on one subject from the list that is also inside the book. Each evening, I will make time at the end of my session for a one-to-one tutorial, which will be assigned alphabetically. Every week on Wednesday, I will be meeting with five of you for group discussion on your topics and progress.”

  He sighed, taking a large gulp of his whiskey. “To be quite frank, it is much more involved than I would like, but Professor Saxon was most insistent.”

  I flipped open the heavy, leather-bound book titled ‘A Modern History of the Lust Caste, Deeds and Works from 200 BCE to the Present Day’ to find two sheets of paper inside. I was just scanning the exhaustive list of required reading when Vrosis continued.

  “There is a signup sheet for essay topics on my office door. For my sanity, there is one topic per person. I don’t know if I could stand reading about the same subject twenty times. If anyone hasn’t picked a topic by the end of the week, I will assign them randomly.”

  There was a scuffle as some people who had already read the topic list scrambled to get to the sheet. Lulu was among them, and I noticed her writing in two boxes, most likely picking a topic for Nelly.

  I scanned the options, but nothing jumped out at me. A sense of panic fogged my mind slightly as I tried desperately to see something interesting among the subjects. Aeron, sensing my distress, leaned over the back of my seat and tapped twice at the title third from the bottom.

  “How instrumental was Lust Caste in the founding of Vice College?” I whispered, smiling.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than the other options. I rose to my feet, but Aeron pushed me back down gently, strolling over to the signup sheet and writing both of our names down.

  A few minutes later, and the signup sheet was full except for two names. “Ryon Haverax, Murdoh Exilor. You haven’t put down your names, do I assume you have no preference?” Vrosis looked over his shoulder at the list.

  “No, Elder,” Ryon mumbled, and I sighed slightly in sympathy. Ryon might not be my lover anymore, but I knew he hated writing with a passion. This essay seemed especially harsh on him, considering he also had his final year exams approaching.

  Vrosis wrote their names in the remaining boxes and returned to his seat. “Good. I didn’t really want to have to wait all week for you to write your names down.” He sighed again. “I want plans or drafts ready for me to read next week. First one-to-one tutorial will be Babette Ajax on Monday, followed by Lilith Carazor on Tuesday. On Wednesday I’ll see whoever wants the group tutorial.” He poured another whiskey. “You best get working, from now on this session is purely focused on writing this essay, and there will be no missing sessions for any reason.”

  He paused sipping at his drink, regarding us slowly. “The deadline will be the thirty-first of May. I need time to mark them, and Professor Saxon would also like to read the best from each caste. I believe she intends to award prizes for the best dissertations at the solstice ball.”

  I groaned, seriously hating my surname since it meant I had so little time to get something together for this subject. I didn’t bother even thinking about the prize, though a few people were tittering about it. At this rate, I’d be lucky to hand in ten thousand words of gobbledegook in May.

  “I did not need this right now,” Nelly grumbled, echoing my thoughts. “This book is thicker than my head. It’ll take all year for me to finish it.”

  “It’s not for another four months,” Triston pointed out. “We don’t need to rush to do anything.”

  Babette frowned at him. “How can you think that?” she muttered. “I know it’s our last year, but you wanted to get into one of the other colleges as a professor, right? Well, you can’t get into academia at all if you fail! And four months is nothing. It’s four tutorials each at the most.”

  Triston held his hands up. “Okay, okay. No need to get your knickers in a twist.”

  The rest of the group continued discussing their topics animatedly, Ryon having been assigned one titled ‘Discuss the global political structure of Lust Caste and its limitations in comparison to those of other castes’ which he didn’t seem to grasp at all. But whilst they exchanged their ideas, I was opening the folder that Vrosis had handed me.

  I flicked through pages and pages of reports, charts and even receipts for purchases. Vrosis had been busy, and I caught his nervous gaze watching me as I poured through the papers. After I’d examined it all, not fully understanding anything, I looked up and gave him a small nod.

  He slumped slightly in relief, and I marvelled that I’d managed to do such a good job at scaring an elder.

  “He won’t forget what you did,” Aeron muttered, leaning over the back of my chair.

  “He sees it every day in the mirror,” I mumbled, tucking the papers away and into my bag. “Thanks for pointing out that title.”

  “Not a problem, Baby Girl.” He kissed the top of my head, lingering just enough to let me know that we were okay.

  Chapter 31

  The rest of winter and
most of spring passed in a blur of low-level anxiety. I passed the mocks with average marks in all subjects except for etiquette. Pruitt sprung her mock on an unsuspecting class, and then failed me for not being present, even though she was the one who had refused to teach me. After an embarrassing meeting with Maddox, during which Alicia burst into his office to defend me, the mock result was removed from my record, but with a severe warning about attending the actual etiquette exam in early June.

  I rarely saw my mates, except at meal times when they did their best to top me up with what little time they had. Kain was kept busy by the start of the rugby season, whilst Jin spent most of our time together asleep, snuggling me whilst I studied in the library. Daron was religious in making Rina and me practice for the practical exam, finding spare moments we didn’t even know we had and drilling us in moves he’d found. Blaze still walked me to and from the tower in the evenings, but he was quieter. Perhaps I was just too exhausted to be an enjoyable conversationalist.