by Abbie Lyons
“Just looking at them makes me lose my appetite,” Morgan remarked as she picked absent-mindedly at her plate. “I still can’t believe I fell for Vivian’s bullshit. Gods.”
The Core Four (“we are not calling ourselves that!”) of Morgan, Teddy, me, and newest squad member Karolina were having breakfast at the refectory on the first morning of classes. But Morgan was spending more time glaring over at Camilla and Vivian than eating.
“Can’t you just ignore them?” Teddy suggested. “They’re not even doing anything right now.”
“They’re existing,” Morgan snapped. “That’s enough. And may I remind you, Teddy, that your opinion on this subject is less valid given who you’re canoodling with. Zelda may be the best of that stupid little gang, but that’s like being...I don’t know, employee of the month at a hot dog stand. A distinction with no honor.”
“Okay,” Teddy said as he gulped down a hash brown, continuing to be a true champion at knowing when to stop talking.
“Are you two excited for your architectural engineering class or whatever it’s called?” I asked Teddy and Karolina as Morgan continued her death stare.
“I couldn’t even sleep last night!” Teddy said. “This is the class I’ve really been waiting for my whole time here. I’ve always been curious about the intersection between magic and practical feats of engineering, and I think this is really going to scratch that itch.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Karolina said in a whisper.
Okay, so even though she was kind of a part of our group and was definitely a rock solid person, Karolina still remained a woman of very, very few words.
“What do we do about this?” Morgan asked.
“About what?” I asked, although I knew she was still focused on the same thing.
“About them. I’m sick of them being the hottest shit in school. Camilla was already the worst, but now that Vivian used me like that...maybe she’s actually the worst. And the fact that the other two choose to associate themselves with such people! It’s just too much. Something must be done.”
“Have your eye on any boys?” I blurted out to Karolina. The best way to get Morgan’s mind off one thing was to start doing the one thing she couldn’t possibly ignore—gossip.
“Ohh, yes!” Morgan cheered. “Spill it, Karolina! Any crushes? Or are there any boys you suspect have a crush on you?”
That was almost too easy.
“Well,” Karolina started, still hardly speaking at a perceptible level. “There is this one boy in band. He plays the voomphonium. Every once in a while I see him looking over at me.”
“And?”
“Sometimes I think I like it when he looks at me.”
“Yes! We have a project! Karolina, you and this boy have to spend some time together outside of band. Perhaps a trip to Westrock is in order? Or invite him over to your room to listen to some music? Although of course by ‘listen to some music’ I don’t mean you’d actually listen to music. You’d kiss!”
Karolina recoiled at even just the thought of physical contact. “But I don’t even know him!” she protested.
“That’s the best part,” Morgan explained. “Kissing somebody you hardly know is much more exciting than just making out with the same person night after night.” She looked right at Teddy and me. “Isn’t that right, you two?”
“I, uh...” Teddy stammered. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to kiss anybody you don’t want to,” I assured Karolina. I was feeling a little guilty that the conversation I’d started was clearly making her uncomfortable. “But if you really do like him, maybe you can find a chance to strike up a conversation sometime. Like after class or something.”
Karolina shook her head. “But I’d feel so nervous.”
“Perhaps you’d feel less nervous if you talked to him in a more casual situation,” Morgan suggested. “You know, like at a party.”
“I’ve never been invited to a party.”
“That’s it!” Morgan shouted so suddenly that Teddy nearly jumped out of his seat. “Throwing the best welcome back party ever is the perfect solution! That’ll show those bitches who’s boss!”
“Wait,” I said. “Wouldn’t a welcome back party have to be really soon? Is there even enough time to plan?”
Morgan rolled her eyes. “Do you doubt my party planning abilities? I’ll be able to figure something out for the end of the week. As long as I have a little help from my squad.”
“I don’t know the first thing about planning a party,” Teddy protested. “I’m not going to be any help.”
“Plus, nobody here even has parties,” I noted.
“Nova. Of course they do,” Morgan said pityingly. “We’re just never invited. And it’s not that we’re uncool, because that’s most certainly not the case. But they’re always hosted by Camilla-types who would never invite us in a million years. Here’s the thing though—when we host a party, we’re going to invite all the other people who never get to go to parties. They’ll love us! We’ll be the toast of the school!”
I was of two minds about this whole thing. If we were going to host a party, I wanted it to be for the pure purpose of fun, not for something so petty as showing up Camilla and Vivian. After all, wasn’t that what parties were supposed to be for? On the other hand, I loved the pettiness. Throwing a party so good that Camilla would be embarrassed about her own parties? That kind of revenge was just delicious.
“I’m in,” I decided. “Just let me know whatever I can do to help.”
“You know I will! Teddy, Karolina...what do you say?”
Karolina nodded gently, but Teddy still seemed unsure. “One question,” he said. “Can...can we invite Zelda?”
Morgan scooped a handful of scrambled eggs into her mouth—all this party talk had evidently restored her appetite—and considered it for a moment. “I’ll allow it,” she finally decided. “But only on the condition that she goes back and tells Camilla how great it was.”
Chapter Four
Finally, it was time for class. I was looking forward to the relative normalcy of it—as was becoming a pattern for me. It was always comforting to know that no matter what else was whirling around in my life, I was technically here to learn. To study, hone my mind, and eventually become the empowered demon I was destined to be.
“Bon,” said Professor Lamoureux. “Now we go in for the kill.”
Or...that.
My first class of the day was Advanced Seduction Skills for Incubi and Succubi—Sex Class Part II, never forget—and Professor Lamoureux was just as sensual and French as ever. Her classroom was still outfitted like a boudoir, although with the frost crisscrossing the windowpanes and the addition of some ice-blue accents like throw pillows and fringed lampshades, she’d clearly been to demon Pottery Barn to upgrade for the winter.
Teddy, sitting just to my left, went pale.
“Not a literal kill, my friends.” Lamoureux smiled her wicked flame-red smile. I found myself wondering how old she was. She really could’ve been anywhere from early thirties to a well-preserved, like, sixty. “The other side of the coin, as they say. Once we have seduced, we must turn to terror.”
Teddy didn’t un-pale. On my other side, Aleks—who was kind of always pale—took notes on a sheaf of parchment. I elbowed him.
“Seriously? She hasn’t said anything noteworthy yet.”
“I am diligent,” he said. But he put his pen down.
“There is a reason we in France call the, how do you say, height of pleasure? Le petit mort. The little death. There is a point of no return for humans that we drive them towards, surrender. Vulnerability. Weakness. And that is a point we must not allow ourselves to indulge in. For reasons that are obvious. For any creature, it is...the point of no return.”
She cleared her throat. “We know how to, well, turn them on”—she smiled to herself—”but now we must proceed to the common duty of all demons. Terror.”
The way she said it
sent a chill down my spine in spite of myself. As uncomfortable as I was being a succubus, I was even more uncomfortable with the idea of flipping into genuine terror mode. It felt...well, it felt an awful lot like what my mom used to do. Maybe still did.
Maybe that chill was her.
“Bon,” Lamoureux said again, and clapped her black-manicured hands. “Gerard, s’il te plait.”
She gestured behind her, and the class shared a collective look. Zelda—who I was really trying hard not to dislike—mouthed holy shit. Our professor had changed boy toys. Or not changed so much as seriously upgraded: Gerard, wherever she’d found him, was six-foot-three of pure maleness. My imagination briefly ran away with me—although not to Gerard so much as to Raines. If Collum hadn’t shown up, and we hadn’t gone down that weird conversation path about elective classes...
I chewed my lip. I’d have to hunt him down later. Less talking, less clothes.
Nova! I yelled in my head. Focus. One hot guy at a time.
“I thought you were taken,” Aleks murmured to me as Professor Lamoureux gave us a quick refresher on all the human male erogenous zones, to Gerard’s evident delight.
“No one takes me,” I shot back. Except that yeah, I wouldn’t mind getting taken. This class was giving me way too many ideas. “I’d totally swipe right on that guy.”
Aleks cocked an eyebrow. I sighed.
“Never mind.”
My next class was Higher Order Demon Protocols and Responsibilities, which I was definitely psyched about. If I was a Duchess, I wanted to get deep into...Duchessing. After a lifetime of being at the bottom of the social ladder, I was 100% ready to get my aristocrat on.
Problem was, I wasn’t sure where this classroom was—it was one I’d never been in before, and after a few false starts down some of Hades’s interminable corridors, I realized I was running at least five minutes late. I picked up the pace a little, sweating under my uniform blazer and wishing seduction hadn’t gotten my body temperature up so much. The torches flickered across the flagstones as my Docs clomped across the hallway, towards one of the giant arched windows that let in a little weak winter light. Was that the same window I’d run past two minutes ago? They all looked the fucking same. But no—this one had a staircase to the left, and if I was on the third floor now...
I jumped down the steps two at a time, landed on the second floor, skirted around a corner at lightning speed, and found myself in...a ballroom. Complete with a black marble floor, chandelier glimmering green, and gold-leaf half-pillars surrounding wall panels painted with scenes of elegant demons of years past in giant skirts and tricorner hats.
Now it was my turn to whisper holy shit.
Except I didn’t whisper it.
A circle of tufted chairs housed a handful of my fellow higher-level demons, sitting straight-backed and at attention. Three of them to be exact—they each looked vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know any of them by name.
And everyone turned to look at me.
Including—fucking hell—Camilla.
“You must be Duchess Donovan,” said a male voice. I gulped.
“Uh,” I said. “I mean, yeah. Yes.”
Because this guy seemed like the sort of person who’d appreciate (or require) proper diction. His face was creased with the hard lines of a guy who’d lived years of not tolerating other people’s bullshit, and his thin lips were pursed almost prissily. His ginger-gray hair was swept into a little ponytail—kind of like the old-timey guys on the wall—and a pair of round spectacles that flickered with tiny pinpricks of iridescence perched on his nose. Eat your heart out, Warby Parker. He was dressed in a suit that was made of some kind of animal skin—maybe snake, or alligator. And did I mention he looked pissed?
I had a feeling I was not going to be the star pupil here.
“Sit,” he said, almost like addressing a dog, and gestured at one of the tufted chairs. “And thank you.”
I sat. “You’re...welcome?” I frowned, still breathing a little hard from all my sprinting to get her relatively on time. “What are you thanking me for?”
“For providing an example for our first lesson,” he said. His voice was high and flutey, but spoken with an upper-crusty precision. “A higher-level demon is never late. It’s not only rude, but in the case of crucial timing for any kind of spell, casting, channeling, or alignment, it can entirely destroy the chances of success. The position of the stars waits for no one.” He raised a brow. “Not even a Duchess.”
“Sorry,” I muttered again. I stared at Camilla. What was she doing here? As far as I knew, she wasn’t a higher-level demon at all.
The class went downhill from there. Turned out that this guy—Professor Rouse, Marquis of Ducay—was running more of a finishing-school class than anything else, with a syllabus that covered shit as boring as which utensils to use at demon state dinners to the proper forms of address for each and every tier of higher-level demon.
“And you’ll be required to attend special sessions at prescribed hours of the night as well,” Professor Rouse finished. “Again, timeliness will be of the essence, so do not shirk your responsibilities to attend our night sessions.”
I wanted to groan. By the time I was done, I felt like I was going to be subjected to a netherworld version of The Princess Diaries.
After a quick lunch break—for someone obsessed with timeliness, Professor Rouse actually held us a good ten minutes over—it was time for a class with a professor I at least knew I liked: Necromancy, with Professor Mantel.
Mantel’s classroom continued to be the chicest in the entire school. The same abstract paintings as always—plus a few new ones—still hung on the stylish peach-colored walls. The whole aesthetic was like something out of a catalog for some super-hip furniture store. And, of course, Mantel was pretty damn cool herself and always wearing something hella stylish. Today’s look: sheath dress with dramatic diagonal stripes and heeled combat boots.
“So just to get the question I’m always asked out of the way,” Mantel began her lecture, “yes, it is possible to talk with the dead. It’s very difficult, and the results aren’t often successful, but communicating with those who have shuffled off this mortal coil is totally possible.”
A hand shot up.
“I already know your question,” Mantel said. “You were going to say something like ‘then why don’t we talk to dead people all the time?’ right?”
The student—a guy named Orlando who I’d only ever seen napping on various couches around the common room—nodded.
“It’s a great question,” Mantel continued. “If we can talk with the dead, then how permanent is death, really? Why aren’t we summoning our long-gone grandmothers and grandfathers on every solstice and asking them how things in the afterlife are going? Well, it’s because necromancy is a whole lot more complicated than just picking up some magical phone and contacting anybody who’s ever died. And before we get into the basics of how to perform necromancy, first we’re going to have to talk about some of the rules that make it so complicated.”
Mantel absolutely loved complex stuff like this. After all, she was the one who also taught Introduction to Demonological Hierarchies, by far the most confusing—yet still fascinating—class that I’d taken here at Hades Academy.
“First off,” Mantel continued, “necromancy is imprecise. Achieving the result you want is difficult for even the most skilled of necromancers. Say you’re trying to connect with Abraham Lincoln? You might end up connecting with some other guy named Abraham. Perhaps the biblical figure. Or maybe you want to talk to your beloved yet grumpy old uncle who’s passed on? You might find yourself talking with some other crotchety old dude. In fact, this’ll happen most of the time. This stuff’s not easy.
“But let’s say you do get in touch with Abraham Lincoln. Great job! Making a successful connection is half the struggle. Except now that you’ve established a link, everything he says sounds like a garbled mess. You’re probably not hearing anythin
g at all interesting, useful, or meaningful. On the contrary, the nonsense noises you might hear during necromancy are actually quite disturbing. Like nails on a chalkboard times a million. It’s a sound that can actually induce fear—fear so strong that, in rare cases, it’s been known to give some necromancers intense panic attacks.
“Which brings us to the next reason why necromancy isn’t used often. It’s dangerous for both the performer and the one being summoned. For the performer, those fear-induced attacks can be fatal. But the one being summoned is at risk of being pulled into a state of limbo between the world of the living and the afterlife. They could remain stuck in that limbo for eternity—truly a fate worse than death. Necromancers must be extremely careful not to let this happen.
“In the rarest of possible outcomes, the one being summoned can be inadvertently pulled back entirely into the world of the living. But lest you think this sort of accidental resurrection is a happy thing—the dead are never happy to return, and the one doing the summoning will be met with great anger. Not to mention, this kind of inversion of the natural order is an invitation for Chaos of all sorts.”
Chaos...hadn’t heard much about that in a while. It’s the reason we were all here at Hades Academy in the first place—creating fear in the name of balance in order to keep Chaos at bay.
“These risks alone,” Mantel concluded solemnly, “mean that attempting to make any connection with the dead is often much too risky to even try.”
Orlando the Napper raised his hand again.
Mantel laughed. “And I’m sure I know your next question, too,” she said. “You’re wondering what good necromancy is given all these limitations. The truth is, it can be an extremely powerful tool for uncovering insights into both the past and the future. Sometimes the dead have more to say about the world of the living than...well, people who are actually still alive. But, yes, given the dangers involved, we’re going to be taking it very slow here in class. Learning proper necromancy techniques is, in some ways, no different than learning to wield a super-powerful, dangerous weapon. Safety is key!”
