by Dante King
“Mr. Mauler,” came the sultry, husky voice from behind me as I followed Janet and Alura to the door, “would you stay behind for just a moment, please?”
Not knowing what this might be about, I made my way back through the last of the students filing down the aisle to the door and perched myself on the corner of Madame Scaleblade’s desk.
“What’s up, Odette?” I asked.
“That staff you carry,” she said, cutting straight to the meat of the issue, “it is Zenidor’s, is it not?”
I’m not sure what I had been expecting, but her launching my father’s name at me had not been it. I had gotten used to the fact that most of the magical world of Avalonia had had the names of my mother and father expunged from their memories by the Arcane Council. To have Madame Scaleblade talk about my father made him feel just that little bit more real somehow. More than just a name, but someone who had lived and breathed and had a profound impact on this world.
I countered with a question of my own. “How do you know this? Are you another faculty member who seems to know more about my parents than they should? Another faculty member who knows more about my parents than I do?”
Odette Scaleblade let go one of those lovely throaty chuckles of hers, her strangely colored eyes flicking across my face, as if she was trying to read something in it.
“I was deeply involved in my studies during the Void Wars,” she said. “And I did not even pick a side. I know little about the intricacies or the politics of that war. What I do know ‘owever, is that if you wish to know more about your parents, all you need to do is ask your staff.”
I looked at her blankly for a moment or two. Then I said, “The staff? You want me to ask the staff?”
“Yes,” Odette Scaleblade said.
“Right.”
“Afterall, the staff is your father,” Odette said.
I wrinkled my brow. “The staff is my father? Don’t you mean it was my father’s?”
Odette shook her head, sending her necklaces to rattling softly. “No, the soul inside it is your father, Justin. The identity of the other soul I’m unable to determine, but—”
“Hold up!” I interrupted. “Hold on. Let’s just rewind here for a sec. You’re telling me that the soul inside this staff is my father? I thought this was the staff he wielded in battle. The Prophet King of the Gemstone Elementals, he said. . .”
Odette raised her eyebrows. She looked vaguely amused. “He said what?”
“He just said it was my old man’s weapon of choice, you know? Do you think that he suspected that my father’s actual soul was in here?”
Odette shrugged. The gesture was very French.
A sudden thought crossed my buzzing mind. I recalled all the crazy shit that I had pulled since being given the staff. All the dirty, naughty things I had got up to with Janet, Alura, Cecilia, and Enwyn…
“Holy crap,” I said, “he doesn't have, like, eyes or anything does he?”
Odette gave me a knowing grin. “Why? What is it you are worried ‘e might ‘ave seen?”
“Uh, you know, just stuff,” I said evasively. “Things that he can’t, sort of unsee.” I waved my hands. “That’s not the point. The point is how do I speak to him if he’s trapped within a solid piece of crystal? And who the hell is the other soul?”
Odette Scaleblade shrugged once more and tossed her head of dark curls. I caught a whiff of patchouli and incense. “I can’t answer either of those questions. ‘owever, I do believe I can ‘elp you. I understand you ‘ave a lot on your plate right now—what with qualifying for the Mage Games and juggling your rather difficult study load…”
I looked at her, not quite grasping what she was talking about, what with my head being full of the fact that my biological father could have been trapped in a staff I’d been carrying around for almost six weeks.
“I understand that Creation Mages lead quite, ah, vigorous social lives, no?” Madame Scaleblade said. “When you ‘ave some free time though, I can ‘elp you learn ’ow to communicate with your vector and make contact with your father. Perhaps together we can also discover ‘ow to communicate with the other soul that resides within that crystal staff of yours.”
At that moment, my spellbook started chiming annoyingly, with the same sort of persistent, soft ding-ding-ding-ding cars make to tell you that you haven’t got your seatbelt on. I flipped the book open to the page that held my timetable. I had a potions class that I would be late for if I didn’t leave right away.
Potions… With the delightful and inappropriately flirtatious, Madame Xel…
Briefly, I wondered what outrageously sexy outfit Madame Xel would be wearing today. There was only one way to find out.
“Odette, you’ve certainly given me a lot to think about,” I said truthfully, “but if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to run.”
And, with that, I turned on my heel and took off at a moderate jog toward Frosthall.
Chapter Eight
When I rolled into the potions class, I found that Alura had saved me a spot by her cauldron. It seemed that we were dividing up into pairs to whip up some sort of elixir or other, the ingredients of which were up on the board.
“What was that about?” Alura asked in a low voice. “What did Odette Scaleblade want with you?”
I was still mulling that over myself. Not so much what the conversation had been about—just your typical bog-standard chat about your dead father’s soul inhabiting a seemingly inanimate length of shiny black rock—but what it meant. What it meant for me. What the potential fallout of it might be.
“Justin?” Alura said, touching me gently on the arm.
“Mm?” I said, looking up and realizing that I had been staring at the cauldron in front of me. “Oh, ah, you know what, it’s the sort of thing that you want to discuss over something tall, cold, and slightly frosted, if you know what I mean? I’ll tell you when we’re not in a classroom.”
Alura smiled and nodded.
Madame Xel walked into the room, instantly silencing the smattering of male students in the room. Madame Xel had that effect on people of the male persuasion. She possessed a commanding and captivating presence certainly, exacerbated by her wearing five-inch stiletto heels, thigh-high bubblegum pink tights, and something that might have either been a very short skirt or a rather thick belt.
The way she captured the attention of every male in the room was unsurprising. She was, after all, a member of the most infamous race of seductresses of all time: the succubi.
“Goodness, but she has some style, doesn’t she?” Alura said under her breath. “And some rather enviable sex-appeal.”
I couldn’t argue with that. She certainly had style and she had sex-appeal enough for a truckload of women. With her mauve hair, purple eyes, silver horns, pole-dancer’s body, and leathery bat-like wings, Madame Xel had sex-appeal in the same way that Santa Claus had merriment. It was inbuilt, intrinsic as the blood running through her veins.
She smacked something against the blackboard, which I initially thought was a pointer of some kind. In true Madame Xel style, it was a horse whip. Every guy in the room sat up a little straighter. More than a couple of Adam’s apples bobbed up and down as throats went suddenly dry at the sight of our potion’s tutor.
“Well, good morning,” Madame Xel said in her playfully soft and inviting voice, “how lovely it is to see you all again.” She ran a black nailed hand through her mauve hair and a pink tongue over her cherry red lips. “Now, bone up on these potion ingredients and the method of preparation if you’d be so good, but do not begin until I give you the word.” She whacked the blackboard once more with the horse whip to emphasize her point. Then, as everyone in the class leaned forward and started to study the board in earnest, Madame Xel walked up the aisle that separated the two halves of the classroom and headed in my direction.
I watched her approach with eyes that were a touch on the glassy side. There was something so hypnotic about the woman; the way she walked, the way she smiled
slowly, the way her gaze bored into mine as she advanced toward me. It was like being in one of those nonsensical perfume advertisements, where the ridiculously dressed actress or model struts toward the camera.
I wonder if she even remembers that she offered to be my agent? I thought.
Madame Xel stopped in front of the rainbow cauldron that sat in front of me. She gave Alura a warm smile and a little nod, then turned to me and said quietly, so that her voice would be lost in the general murmuring and shuffling of people settling down to work, “Mr. Mauler, I think that it would behoove us to sit down and have a little face-to-face regarding the upcoming Games.”
“Ah, so you did remember your offer?” I said.
“Of course. I wouldn’t extend an offer in your direction if I did not want you to grab onto it with both hands.”
“I’m glad,” I said, meaning it. The proximity of this woman had banished the thoughts of my father and my staff and Madame Scaleblade into a distant corner of my mind. I wondered if that was some sort of succubus enchantment at work. I didn’t really care if it was or not—and I wondered if that too was succubus magic.
“That’s gratifying to hear, Mr. Mauler,” Madame Xel replied.
“Yeah, I could use a bit of a firm hand when it comes to being steered toward what’s helpful and good for me,” I said.
Madame Xel flexed the horse whip in her hands. “Then, I think you’ll find that I’m exactly the agent you’ve been looking for.”
I looked at the horse whip and up at Madame Xel’s gleaming, purple, almond-shaped eyes. Was this minx flirting with me in class? It certainly seemed so.
“When and where do you want me—to meet me, I should say?” I asked.
“Hang around after class,” Madame Xel said. She turned slowly on one long, pointed heel. The miniskirt that she was wearing just covered the bottom of her asscheeks, with an almost scientific degree of precision.
A slight little cough drew my gaze upward. Madame Xel was watching me through eyes that were filled with mirth.
“They’re a lesson in themselves, you know,” she said quietly.
“What are?” I asked, grinning guiltily.
“Short skirts. They teach us that, in life, it isn’t a revelation that holds the most interest and intrigue, but the potential of a revelation. That was taught to me when I was a younger woman and can be applied to many aspects of life, not just the facets that are,” and here the succubus smoothed her skirt so that I caught a glimpse of the smooth, curving underside of one pale buttock, “in front of your face.”
“That’s, um, worth thinking about,” I said.
Madame Xel smiled languidly before she walked off to the front of the room. “Class,” she said in a carrying voice, “let’s have a potion brewed from everyone before the lesson ends!”
With the succubus out of my personal sphere, I felt as if I had just surfaced out of a warm bath. I had never had her affect me like that before. I figured it was because I had come into the room in such a distracted frame of mind, with my head a million miles away.
“Gods, she is the very epitome of female sexuality,” Alura said again, a definite note of admiration in her voice.
“Yeah, yeah, she’s something all right,” I said.
I blinked and looked around. My own fraternity brothers were on the other side of the room. Nigel was paired with Rick while Damien and Bradley were together. All four of the boys had their heads together and looked to be having a fairly intense discussion that I doubted had anything to do with potions.
I switched my gaze to another collection of familiar faces—though not familiar in any way that was good. The Frat Douche entourage—Qildro, Ike, and Dhor—were sitting near the front of the class and mostly keeping to themselves. However, Arun Lightson, their unofficial leader and official chief dickhead, did not seem to be with them.
Where’s that a-hole, then? I wondered. Maybe he found himself a pig that loved him back just a little too hard.
I glanced about and, to my surprise, I spotted Arun in the row behind Alura and myself. He was on his own, standing at a cauldron and staring moodily at his spellbook. His eyes weren’t moving though, and he looked like he was lost in thought.
I bent down to the wood pile at the base of my cauldron and ignited it with a prod of my black crystal staff. I had found that out about magic; the little spells, like conjuring flames out of nothing, levitating small objects or whisking your beer toward you from across the room were all quite intuitive. On occasions like that, I had found that my vector more or less interpreted what I wanted to do and helped me perform it. It had been a relief to realize that my life wasn’t going to be all about memorizing a word to do this and a gesture to do that. Yeah, there was a bit of that sort of thing when it came to combat, but one might almost expect being able to blow someone up or propel a giant icicle through their head to be a little trickier than summoning Auntie Akkerman’s Ring-Sting BBQ Sauce from the other side of the dinner table. Of course, I could only do things like this because I had acquired the Fireball and Telekinesis spells from Enwyn and Janet respectively.
Arun Lightson all on his lonesome at the back of the class though, that was an interesting development. Had the Holy Mage been shafted by his cronies? It certainly looked like it. I wondered if it had been something to do with the whole pig-fucking prank that my frat and I had put into action against Frat Douche.
There are probably few things more likely to cause a rift amongst buddies than boinking farm animals, I thought vaguely, unable to suppress my grin at the memory.
I straightened up when I was sure that the fire was going nicely and began to help Alura sieve the thunder vines from the brine in which they were stored.
“What’s the go with the Lord of the Douche?” I asked her under my breath as we placed the sporadically sparking vines on the cutting board and got to slicing them into rough chunks.
“Who’s that?” Alura asked.
I jerked my head behind us, and Alura let out a little exclamation of comprehension.
“Oh, your bestie, Arun,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea as to why he seems to have been cast out by his pack of—for lack of a better word—friends.” The Gemstone Princess flashed me a grin. “I’m happy and proud to say that my life offers me distractions enough that I don’t have to expend a single thought about Arun Lightson. Why don’t you ask him?”
I grimaced. “That would mean I have to talk to him though.”
Alura bumped me with her elbow and smiled. “Rubbing shoulders with those you despise. Welcome to the life of a diplomat, Mr. Mauler.”
“It’s all right for you,” I said, “that’s your bread and butter. For one with my limited palate, Lightson is more of a dog shit sandwich.”
Alura choked with laughter. One of her cut thunder vines skittered across the desk in front of her, and she flung out a hand to grab it before it would have hit the ground and detonated.
The thought of conversing with Arun Lightson was repugnant, but my curiosity eventually got the better of me.
“Lightson,” I greeted him, putting on a laissez faire, light-hearted voice, “why are you all on your lonesome at the back here? Did you decide to ditch the asshole parade and branch out on your own as a lone wolf?”
Arun looked up from where he had been so intensely studying the desk and fixed me with a cold gaze. He regarded me from under his haughty high brow and swept a lock of bright orange hair out of his face. I thought he was going to bite my head off in reply, but when he did speak, his voice was flat and slightly resigned. It was the voice of a man who’d accepted his fate and who’d had the fight knocked out of him..
“If you must know, Mauler,” he said, in the crisp and officious accent of the upper crust of Avalonian society, “my family was ostracized quite decisively after the Mage Games Exhibitions.”
My eyebrows raised of their own volition. “Ostracized?” I repeated.
Arun rolled his eyes. “It means—” he
started to say in a supercilious voice.
“I know what it means, Lightson,” I said. “And usually I’d tell you that rolling your eyes doesn’t become you, but in your case I’ll say fucking go at it! You never know, you might find a brain back there.”
Arun’s eyes narrowed. “You asked why I was back here, Mauler.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t ask for your condescension, did I?”
Arun’s hand twitched by his side, as if he longed to summon his vector and blast me through the blackboard. The feeling was mutual. I took a breath and let it out. Sometimes you just had to be the bigger man.
“Look, I apologize for my outburst,” I said, the words coming hard. “But, I’m interested, why the hell did your whole family get given the cold-shoulder? Are they as big a bunch of assholes as you’ve been acting?”
“I won’t stand here and be insulted by the likes of you, Earthling,” growled Arun.
“I’m not insulting you, man, just describing you,” I said evenly. “Look, I tell you what, why don’t you come over here and join our table and tell me about it?”
Arun looked wary, as if he was waiting for the punchline. I didn’t blame him for being a little circumspect. The last time that I had come to him, apparently offering the olive branch grasped in the hand of friendship, he and his ex-cronies had ended up getting down and dirty with four beautiful pigs. Oddly enough, when I had heard the story about what had happened, I’d felt more sorry for the hogs.
Arun looked thoughtfully at the table. While he was doing this, I shot a quick glance at Alura. The Gemstone Princess was looking at me strangely. She wore a mingled expression of surprise and respect.
I looked back at Arun and gave him a short, encouraging nod. “Come on, man,” I said, “we can either hate each other or not. I’m willing to give cordiality a crack if you are.”
Arun grunted and grabbed his bag. He moved around his unlit fire and the cauldron sitting on it, then he came and dumped his stuff by our table. He still looked as if he expected me to kick him in the nuts or something—which was what he had actually received as payment for his behavior the first time that we had met. In a neat example of how the world works in cycles, Alura had been with me on that day too.
