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

by Ben Reeder

  Shade wasn’t at the table I shared with Wanda & Lucas, so I made my way over to my only other allies and friends at school: the Pack. Mark Tyler, Shade’s beta, looked up at me and offered his hand as the other six gave me head nods or raised hands and quiet greetings.

  “Hey, Tyler. You seen Alexis?” I asked. At school, they didn’t use pack names, so I hadn’t called Tyler by his.

  “Yeah, she said she was going to the library.” I nodded and headed for her favorite hiding place.

  The library at Kennedy High School was the biggest of any of the high schools in the area. It took up two stories and had its own stairwells at the front and back. It also had one in the back corner that almost no one knew about. It didn’t really come out near anything, and most students didn’t make it very far from the computer stations near the front, anyway. I found Shade in her favorite spot, on the bottom steps at the first landing. Her hair draped down on either side of her face and cast her eyes in shadow. Even in the dim light of the stairwell, she looked incredible to me. She didn’t slide away from me when I sat down next to her, and I took that as a good sign.

  “I’m sorry about what I said this morning,” I said. “That wasn’t cool.”

  “I know Wanda told you to apologize,” she said back. All I could do was shrug. “But . . . you were right. I do feel like I did when I was with Brad. Like I’m just a trophy girlfriend or something . . . an accessory.” I winced at that. I’d called her those things when we first met.

  “Shade . . . I’m really sorry I ever said that stuff. I’ll apologize to you every day for the rest of my life if you want. I hate it when I say stupid shit and hurt you.”

  “Why did you ask me if I spent the whole weekend with Deek?”

  “Because I was busy being an idiot.”

  “No, Chance, please, don’t do that. Tell me why. Please? I need to know.” She looked at me with those gray eyes, and my heart just flipped over. All the things I had wanted to say all day vanished in a wave of jumbled feelings, and I found my heart right back where it had been this morning.

  “Because when I thought about you being . . . with him, you know? It just made me all crazy inside. All I could think of was that I wanted to be the one with you all weekend. I wanted to be the guy you wanted to kiss. I wanted to be the guy you were dancing with. I wanted to feel you in my arms, wished you wanted me . . . wished you looked at me like I imagined you looking at him. And it hurt to think of you with anyone else, because of the way I feel about you. Every time I see you any more, I feel it, right here,” I touched my chest. “I just wish you wanted to be with me as much as I want to be with you.” The thoughts came tumbling out, and it felt like I’d just laid my own heart down on the concrete between us.

  She ducked her head for a moment, then she leaned in and wrapped her arm around me, and mine went around her shoulders automatically. Her head nestled into the hollow of my shoulder, and the smell of cinnamon filled my nostrils.

  “You know I was a trophy for Brad . . . and worse for King. And Deek . . . when he looks at me, it’s like Brad all over again. Like I’m just property. I don’t want to be any man’s whore ever again, Chance, but that was what I felt like all weekend. But this morning . . . I wanted to believe that you just wanted me because . . . well, I’m not sure why I wanted you to want me. But ever since you didn’t let me . . . you know . . .” She stopped, and I turned and kissed the top of her head.

  She’d tried to thank me for killing Dominic King and setting her and the rest of the pack free the only way she knew how: by offering to sleep with me. Telling her no was the second hardest thing I ever did, after escaping from a demon count. Monkey brain reminded me daily how stupid it thought I’d been to turn her down, and there were days I agreed with it. Okay, most days I agreed with monkey brain. But not right now. Not when she was too embarrassed to even say it.

  “Yeah,” I whispered softly to her, “I know.”

  We held each other in silence for a few more seconds before she said anything else.

  “It’s like you’re the one guy who isn’t trying to date me to get into my pants, and half the time, I can’t figure out if I want to sleep with you because I know you’ll let me say no, or if I like this whole ‘I don’t do casual sex’ thing you’ve got going on too much. But this weekend . . .” her voice trailed off.

  “What about this weekend?” I asked.

  “Friday night, I wanted you. All weekend long, I wished it was you I was with. This morning, all I could think about was seeing you.”

  The next thing I knew, she had twisted so her weight was across my legs. Her arms went up over her head, and she tilted her head back. The move pulled her t-shirt up to expose her belly button, and I laid my right hand on the bare expanse of skin. She trembled and let out a soft sound somewhere between a sigh and a whimper, then she lifted her head and gave me a coy look with gold eyes. Her skin was warm and smooth under my hand, and I wanted to feel more of it. I put my left arm behind her head and pulled her up to me. I meant to just pull her close, but her arms came up and she turned it into a slow kiss.

  Her lips came away from mine a few moments later, and I opened my eyes. Hers were half closed, and her lips parted just a little. All I could think about was kissing her again, and my gaze went back to her eyes. They were green now, as her wolf faded back into the background. Even as I watched, the color faded to her normal gray. Her mouth lifted into a smile, and we kissed again: slow, probing, our tongues touching gently, lips moving against each other as we explored the kiss together. She caught my lower lip between her teeth and pulled back a little before she let go. Then she leaned in and rubbed her lower lip against my top lip for a moment as a prelude to another kiss.

  Finally, she pulled away, and I forced myself to focus again as she straddled my legs and looked down at me with her own hands on her thighs. I laid mine on top of them to keep them out of forbidden places as she hunched her shoulders up and cocked her head. For a few seconds, she looked away from me. Then, she turned her eyes on me, her lower lip between her teeth and her hips moving as she squirmed a little on top of me.

  “I do want to be with you, Chance,” she finally said. “I want it as much as you do. I need you to be my alpha.”

  “Your alpha?” I asked. “You mean, you want me to . . . you know, be a werewolf?”

  Her shoulders slumped as she sighed. “No, I mean be alpha male to my wolf. Treat me like . . . I’m yours. Be a little aggressive with me. Let me know you’re the one in charge sometimes; that I don’t have to be the strongest person in the room all the time. And I wouldn’t mind if you were a little . . . possessive.”

  She reached up with her right hand and pulled her hair away from the left side of her neck as she tilted her head to the right. My eyes went to the exposed stretch of pale skin. Slowly, she leaned toward me until I felt her breasts press against my chest and her hair on the right side of my face and neck.

  “Bite me,” she said softly. I looked up at her in confusion for a moment.

  “I don’t . . .” I stammered.

  “Please, trust me . . . please . . . I need you to do this. I have this wolf in me, Chance. She needs this as much as I do.”

  Her words were like fire in my head, and I put my teeth to her neck. Her stomach clenched against mine as I closed my mouth on her skin.

  “Harder!” she hissed through clenched teeth.

  I clamped down a little, and almost pulled back at how difficult it was to keep from biting as hard as I could.

  “Harder!” she said again, and I let myself do it. She hissed and trembled as my teeth dug into her skin, then slumped against me.

  I let go and put my arms around her as a whirlwind of feelings tumbled inside of me. I looked down at the purpling marks of my own teeth on her neck and felt a surge of pleasure at the sight. Immediately, I slapped the feeling down. What kind of guy was I if I enjoyed hurting her? The part of me that liked the sight seemed to draw back, and I felt it slide into its
hidden place again. As it slithered into the dark shadows of my thoughts, I felt a fierce exultation. Mine, I felt more as a possessive urge than as a coherent thought.

  “Shade, your neck,” I said as I reached up and touched the bite mark. Her hand covered mine gently, and she smiled at me with her eyes blazing gold. There was a hunger in her look that made me wish we were anywhere else but here.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. The kiss almost made me forget what I’d done, but not quite.

  “You better cover that up,” I tried to tell her, but she just smiled and shook her head.

  She stood and pulled me to my feet. “Werewolf, silly,” she giggled. “It’ll fade in a few minutes. Come on, we need to get out of here before we end up naked or something.”

  I did a mental facepalm. I pulled my shirt straight while she ran her fingers through her hair. Mine just took a good shake to get back to normal, then we slipped through the library and made for the cafeteria.

  I was halfway through French when the whisper of magick against my senses snapped me out of the semi-doze I’d slipped into. As I tried to focus my senses on it, it felt like it slipped away, and I suppressed the urge to utter a few choice Infernal curse words as I realized that I was hitting some sort of concealment spell. Something was lurking in my school and, after Sunday, I wasn’t feeling particularly happy about having the bad guys screw up one of the few normal things in my life, even if it sucked half the time. Besides, the last time, they’d caught me by surprise. I was looking forward to a little payback.

  I pulled a green stick of chalk, a wood handled dip pen, and a vial of dragon’s blood ink out of the spell supplies in my backpack and quietly set them out on my desk, then drew out a blank sheet of paper. As everyone around me worked on conjugating verbs, I dipped the pen in the vial and carefully drew out an Eye of Horus and enclosed it in two concentric circles. Between the inner and outer circle, I wrote out the phrase Demonstra, quae abscondita est. As the ink dried, I slipped my balisong out and shaved some chalk dust off the thick piece of chalk under the desk, catching it in my hand. Once I had enough, I dropped it on the symbol, then put my tools away.

  The next part was the hardest. Under my former master, Dulka, I had learned how to cast a spell using an object as a focus for the energy. I’d needed pretty durable things to store the energy, and I always had to use the right tools and inscribe the correct symbols at the right time, in a circle, and so on. It made for potent spells, if I had the time and the supplies. He’d taught me that way to keep me crippled as a spellcaster. But Dr. C had been teaching me all kinds of new tricks over the past six months. Including how to imprint a spell on something that wasn’t so sturdy, like paper, and release it a few minutes to an hour later. The trick to written spells was in the symbols and in how the magick was stored in them.

  I took one corner of the page and whispered the Latin phrase I’d written in the circle as I folded it over. The tingle of magick spread from the center of my chest, down my arm, and into the page. Then I repeated the process with the other three corners. The trick wasn’t in the words; it was in the complex spell matrix I had to hold in my head as I spoke the words. The symbol acted as a battery to store the energy, and each fold acted as a sort of barrier to the magick to hold it in until I said the release word.

  “Ligare,” I whispered after I made the fourth fold.

  My hair fluttered in the wash of excess energy that drained off of it and I could feel the hum of magick in it as it strained to contain the spell. It was far from my best work. Dr. C would have made me redo the whole damn thing if he ever saw it. I slipped it into my pocket and made sure I had my TK wand in my hand before I asked Mrs. Molierre if I could have the bathroom pass.

  The halls were empty as I stepped out of the room. For a moment, I considered how stupid I was being. Here I was, facing the Powers knew what on my own, with nothing but attitude, a half-assed revealing spell that might blow up in my face, and my tried-and-true TK wand. Of course, I’d faced an alpha werewolf with about as much, and my old demon master with less, but both times, I’d had more time to prepare. I wasted a few seconds wishing I’d been able to figure out a way to sneak my paintball gun out of the class with me, but gave it up after a few steps. I didn’t want to be distracted if whatever was hiding in the hallways decided to jump me.

  I stretched my mystic senses as I went, but I couldn’t feel anything over the hum of hundreds of people on the other side of the wall to my right. Even I could cast a decent enough concealment spell to stay invisible under those conditions. It would be like trying to not be heard in the mall: too damn easy. What I needed was a moment to concentrate, and feel for the difference in the energy, the bubble of ‘not’ that I couldn’t see so I could find the target for my spell. As I headed down the hall, I saw the curved fish-eye mirror near the corner, and got a smile on my face as a flash of inspiration hit. Maybe I didn’t need to hit whoever it was, if I could catch them in the mirror. It was a small surface, but it let me see a huge area.

  As soon as I got to the corner, I ducked around it and pulled out the folded spell. I sensed the slight distortion as something came into the mirror’s field of view as I held the vibrating piece of paper up toward the mirror and uttered the release phrase, “At vero!”

  The paper disintegrated in a sparkling flash as the energy consumed it, and the chalk dust flew at the mirror. A distortion wave spread out in a circle with a warbling sound, then reality settled down. In the mirror, I could see the chalk slowly coalescing into a human form, then it fell away from the mirror to reveal a woman in a black shirt with an oversized ankh necklace around her neck. A Sentinel. What the hell was a wizard cop doing in my school?

  The woman stopped in her tracks. For a moment, she looked down at herself, then her head turned to face the mirror. Dark eyes bored into me like a pair of black holes, sucking any emotion into them.

  “What the hell?” she said. I was just as surprised. Sentinels were some of the best mages out there. They had to be, given what they did. But somehow, I’d managed to penetrate her concealment spell.

  “How did you do that, warlock?” she scowled.

  I gave my best nonchalant shrug.

  “By accident?”

  “Why did you assault me?” she demanded.

  I realized I was hearing her voice in my head and that bugged me. But I had a bigger problem to deal with. Attacking a Sentinel was pretty much an instant death sentence from the Conclave.

  “Because I didn’t know you were running around invisible at my school!” I told her. “And aren’t you supposed to not do that? This is neutral ground, or did you miss the big flag flying out front?”

  Neutral ground was pretty serious stuff, since the flag in front of it essentially claimed the school as a public place, off limits for anyone to claim as their turf. The best the Conclave could do was operate undercover, like Dr. C did. Overt agents like Sentinels were completely forbidden, or so I thought.

  I took a few steps closer to the mirror so I could see her better. She was pretty ordinary looking, brown hair, dark eyes, and a plain, round face that was easy to forget.

  “You’re still a fugitive from the High Council’s justice,” she said. “Even with the Council’s indulgence to pursue your Ordeal, anywhere you go, I have leave to follow.”

  “Let me guess . . . you can’t do squat to help though, can you?”

  “No, I can’t. My orders are only to follow and observe, unless you do something that goes against the Laws.”

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s not like it’d be hard for you to find me now.”

  Her face went blank at my question. I’d done my share of poker face moments to know she was trying not to give something away.

  “Who told you to follow me?” I demanded. Her eyes narrowed, like maybe she was considering her options before she answered.

  “I . . . can’t tell you which Council member ordered me to follow you. Or why.”

  Something in her eyes
told me she wasn’t lying, but there seemed to be more to what she was saying. Something I wasn’t getting. I took another step closer, so I could see her for real, but when I came around the corner, I didn’t see her. She was still visible in the mirror, though. In the mirror, I could see her eyes tracking back to the reflection, and a knowing smile spread across her bland face.

  “Would you mind getting out of my head?” I asked.

  “That isn’t my doing. It’s your spell. I hid myself from sight and hearing, but I didn’t consider a reflection. You didn’t break my concealment; you just stumbled around it. You’re hearing me through the mirror. It seems we both learned something today.”

  “Yeah,” I grumbled. A wave of my hand dispelled the casting. “Not sure I’m real happy about it, though.”

  When I told Dr. C about it during sixth period, he reacted about like I figured he would.

  “Those pompous, back-stabbing pricks!” he hissed. “My bet is that Polter is behind this. He’d love nothing more than to catch you breaking one of the Laws. And sending in someone else to do all the work is just his style. Round face, brown hair, kind of young, I’d bet?” he recited my description of the Sentinel.

  “Yeah, pissed off look. You know her?”