by Abbie Lyons
“Now, some of you might already be able to do crappy low-level transmorphs. You might’ve even done it a few times accidentally as a kid, before you even knew you were a demon. It happens. But high-quality transmorphs like the one I just showed you? That’s going to take lots of time and lots of practice. It’ll be a grind, but remember that this is what you were born to do!”
I was half-inclined to yell out a “yes, coach!” but he probably wouldn’t take too kindly to that. Riggs didn’t strike me as a barrel-of-laughs kinda guy.
“Okay, break into pairs!” Riggs ordered. “You’re going to attempt a basic ghost transmorph. There’s a reason ghost stories are so popular, and it’s because there’s no easier illusion to create. Demons who suck at their jobs have been resorting to the whole ghost thing for millennia!”
Morgan and I, of course, chose to work together. One of these days I’d make a stronger attempt about getting to know more of my classmates, but with so much going on, I wasn’t about to have making new friends be one of my top priorities, especially when I had such awesome ones already.
“I’m actually quite decent at these,” Morgan said with pride.
“Really?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you do one.”
“Because I’m not tacky!” She rolled her eyes. “What’s the point of looking all scary for no reason? Especially when I always look so fantastic as myself.”
The girl had a point. Even in our gym clothes, she looked fly as hell. Though I was sensing a little bit of frustration from her—she knew I wasn’t telling her the whole truth about why Collum had pulled me aside the other day. I made up some dumb story about how he was concerned that Raines was acting a little odd recently and wanted to know if I’d noticed too. She only half-bought that lie.
“But you’ll do it now?” I asked. “You’ll do a ghost transmorph?”
“With pleasure,” she said deviously. “Just watch.”
Morgan stared straight at me as her skin slowly but surely began to turn translucent. But it was more than just that. There was a strange, ethereal quality to how she looked, as if she were far, far away or stuck between worlds. She reminded me of one of those old black-and-white photos from the 1800s where the person looks inexplicably sad.
“Boo,” she said plainly.
“You don’t sound like a ghost,” I observed.
“Sound is a whole ‘nother level to the transmorph. It’s a totally different skill, actually.” She placed her translucent hand on mine, and it felt just as if she were touching me in her regular form. “Weird, isn’t it?”
“Weird” was putting it very, very mildly. My brain was having trouble registering the difference between what I was seeing and what I was feeling. It was just...eerie.
No wonder we’ve been so good at scaring the shit out of humans for so long.
“Hell of a transmorph there!” Professor Riggs called out, pointing toward Morgan. “Great form and very spooky! Love the effort!”
“Now it’s your turn,” Morgan said, the color in her skin beginning to return.
I looked around to see how the rest of the class was faring. Nobody else could manage it even half as well as Morgan had. Some just looked a bit paler than before. A girl who was sitting at the other end of the room had somehow transmorphed into what looked like a classic shitty Halloween costume ghost—the whole “white bedsheet with two eye-holes cut into it” getup.
“So do I just, you know, think really hard about looking more like a ghost or something?” I asked.
“Precisely,” Morgan chirped.
Might as well give it the ol’ college try.
At least I was feeling more confident about the fact that I actually did have some powers these days. Sure, most of that power was apparently untapped, but I was gaining confidence in all the little things more and more by the day. I wasn’t about to pull anything off that would throw me way ahead of the class, but I could at least sort of keep up.
So I focused. I tried to think of nothing other than the image of me looking just like Morgan had a minute before. All the channeling that Dean Harlowe had recommended did really help me get much better at clearing my thoughts of all the bullshit. I focused all my energy into looking like a ghost, as silly as that sounds.
I looked down at my arms. They were doing...something. They weren’t quite see-through, but they certainly didn’t look normal—sort of a milky white color.
“Is it working?” I asked.
“Skip the questions, and just keep focusing,” Morgan instructed.
She had a point. I continued to create the image in my head that I was trying to project. Ghost-Me was wearing an old Victorian outfit with unkempt hair, like something out of Wuthering Heights.
“I can see it a bit!” Morgan cheered. “Big time ghost of Catherine Earnshaw vibes!”
She knew exactly what I was going for. “So it’s good?” I asked.
“It’s perfectly fine! A little rough in places, but honestly, it’s a great first try!”
So maybe she was damning me with faint praise, but faint praise was good enough for me.
LEARNING TO DO SCARY demon shit was fascinating, of course, but I still felt like Demonological Hierarchies was going to be the class that really helped me learn more about myself. There was lots of technical language that I was still getting used to, but Morgan’s primer the other day was a huge help.
“So now that we’ve introduced some of the basic tiers, it’s time to add a few more layers of complexity to the system,” Professor Mantel explained to the class, only to be met with groans. “I know, I know. It’s all a bit overly complex, but that’s the beauty of our society, isn’t it? Thousands upon thousands of moving parts, each working together to create one well-oiled machine.”
Professor Mantel definitely knew her stuff, but she wasn’t doing a great job inspiring confidence that I’d ever have a firm grasp on the material. The dudes drooling over her, however, didn’t seem to be all that worried about their tenuous grasp of what we were learning.
“At this point we should have a simple understanding of higher demon titles and sigils,” Mantel continued. “We’ll get to the subtle—yet very important—differences between kings, dukes, presidents, and all those other endless ranks later in the semester. What we must move on to now are the inverses. For each demon with a king ranking, there is another demon with a king ranking who corresponds exactly to them, for example. It’s a form of balance even within a tiered system.”
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the room who was beginning to feel like this was much too complicated. A system where one is born into a position of power already didn’t sit well with me, so the more layers that were thrown on top of that just made me even more ill at ease. And what the fuck was the difference between a title and its inverse?
“We have to be very careful to not just assume that an inverse is something like an evil version of its corollary,” Mantel explained. “The inverse of a king isn’t an evil king—it’s a king’s opposite in intricate ways that, yes, can be malevolent, but not necessarily so. Do you follow?”
She was met with silence and a few half-hearted nods that seemed to say, “I don’t follow at all, but I’m self-conscious enough to pretend that I do.”
“Like tarot cards,” Morgan piped up. “Right? You can get a card that’s reversed, but that doesn’t mean the literal opposite of what the card represents.”
Professor Mantel looked surprised, then pleased. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. That’s just the same.”
Death. I could still see the card on the floor of our bedroom. Maybe Morgan had forgotten all about my extremely bad luck of the draw during our pre-semester drinking game, but I hadn’t.
I forced my attention back to class, ignoring the shivers down my spine. I sort of understood the broad gist of what she was saying...maybe. What I got so far is that certain higher tier demons had silly titles. And for every demon with that title, there was another demon that was an inverse. A
nd even though Professor Mantel made it very clear that the inverses weren’t necessarily bad dudes or dudettes—it was way more complicated than that, because of course it was—I had a feeling that I could safely assume that they weren’t one-hundred percent on the up-and-up. Why did the system have to be this convoluted? That was a question I didn’t think I was gonna get answered anytime soon.
“And there’s one last wrinkle to introduce,” Professor Mantel added, this time receiving nervous chuckles. “I know this is a lot, and I don’t expect you to remember all of this right away, so thank you for bearing with me. I promise this last bit is interesting! The thing about inverses is...a demon will almost never know who theirs is. There are just too many demons within a similar rank to ever truly know. It’s something that higher order demons are left to grapple with. The tradeoff they make for greater power and higher social status is that they can never truly know the answers to questions that they crave.”
Those final words shook me to my core. If I really was a higher demon, as Wilder implied with the whole outlaw’s crossing thing, then it meant that even if I eventually got answers about my mother and where I came from, that I’d still be left questioning other things forever.
Chapter Nine
If I might not ever be able to figure out who I am, then how am I supposed to figure out who Wilder is?
That’s the thought that plagued me heading into my next exetasis.
My demon intuition, as I was now calling it, told me that there was definitely something different about Wilder. And, of course, I also felt that he knew more than he was letting on about my lineage. I was determined to use my exetasis to get more information out of him, but how? More importantly, I needed to do it in a subtle enough way that didn’t put my place here at Hades Academy in danger.
Actually, most importantly, I could not let him sense anything about me and his half-brother. If nothing else, that had to remain a total secret.
I gulped as I knocked on the door to Wilder’s office and heard him calling out for me to “come right in.” It was hard to know what I was more nervous about: the exetasis itself and what it would reveal about me or being alone with him and having him figure everything out.
“Nova!” he said, of course flashing that same smile as always. “I know I apologize for the state of my office every time you’re here, but please allow me to say sorry one more time. Beginning of a new semester, you know? Hard to get organized.”
“It’s okay,” I said meekly. Things were different between us now. No longer was there that unidentifiable electric energy between us.
Probably for the best that I’m not flirting hard with my professor anymore, I figured.
“This should actually be a pretty fun, low-pressure session,” he assured me. “Nothing to be afraid of. But first, how are you? Everything’s going well so far this semester?”
So I guess this is how he was going to keep playing it, I thought to myself. Which honestly seemed extremely dumb on his part. How could he possibly think a girl who went through that whole Chaos experience with him would be just fine? He was either evil, dumb, or socially inept. Maybe even all three.
Still, if I was going to get anything out of him, I’d have to keep up a facade.
Which was easier said than done, because as soon as Wilder entered my field of vision, a riot of sensations set off inside my body. More emotional than physical, thank God—it would've been pretty obvious I was up to something if I straight-up barfed on top of all his papers—but still. I'd see Wilder, have a natural response in my own head, and instantly Raines's feelings would ricochet off of mine, like a terrible, annoying echo. It hadn't even occurred to me: would being soul bound fuck up the results of our exetases? I wasn't especially worried about Raines, considering the stakes for him didn't seem as life and death. I swallowed.
“Great,” I said. “It’s all pretty great so far.”
"Classes going well?" Wilder set a polished black case, almost like an ordinary briefcase, on top of his desk. Right. Small talk. Act normal.
"Fine," I said. "Demonological Hierarchies is really interesting."
Way to just lay out all your cards, Nova, I chided myself. Wilder, to his credit, kept a pretty smooth response, only raising an eyebrow, but mostly fiddling with the fastenings on his case.
"Oh? Do tell."
"Well, I was pretty surprised to learn that demons have presidents," I said, keeping my voice light.
"It's not president the way you'd think of it," Wilder said. "It's just someone who—"
"Who presides," I said. "Yeah, I've gotten that. Still just weird to see the word in that context. And then there's the whole ranking thing.."
I'd been baiting him without even realizing it. Did I really think that just the mere mention of hierarchies would make him spill his guts? There was probably a reason I'd never considered becoming a cop.
"Ah, yes." The case sprung open at last, but with the hinges facing me, I couldn't see anything. "Certainly a nuanced concept to get your head around. But as with all things in our world, it's about—"
"Balance," I finished for him a second time. "It makes sense. It's more about figuring out where I fit into it, I guess."
"Well, I have good news." He looked up, his eyes boring straight into mine. "That's why you're here."
I swallowed again. "Right."
"Now, we've been through a few of these sessions, and your results have been...intriguing," Wilder said. "And I should admit that I have probably overstepped my boundaries. We're not supposed to reveal any kind of results to the students until the exetases are fully complete. There's so much that can change from one session to the next. We don't want to poison the well, as it were."
"Sure." I clenched my hands, fighting back a surge of overwhelming heat in my chest.
"Tonight is about your external abilities." Wilder spun the case around to face me. Inside, it was lined with velvet, and a bunch of what looked like tools lay in perfectly-shaped compartments. I stared: one was what looked like a curved knife, like the kind a miniature Grim Reaper might carry, one was an angular crystal in a deep purple, and one was basically a stick with a handle.
"Oh my God," I said. "Is that—"
"You might call it a magic wand," Wilder said, with another flash of his grin. "The technical name is a rhabdos. But yes, it's very similar to what you'd assume from your human legends, tales, films—"
"Harry Potter," I interjected. Wilder looked blank. "Seriously?" I muttered. "Read a book once in a while."
If he heard me, he ignored it. "Anyway, as I told you at the outset, the way this part of the exetasis process works is to measure your abilities with physical objects. See what parts of your power ignite and unlock the power inherent in these objects. This one"—he gestured to the crystal—"is amethyst, a crystal known to magnify powers and clarify spiritual state. And this is a pure silver sickle, which has its own resonant powers when forged under the correct conditions."
A cold trickle of dread flowed down my spine. "Are these like...the relics?"
Wilder straightened. "Not at all. For one thing, we'd never let students handle anything that powerful—as you've seen, the consequences are truly unfathomable. Secondly, the relics are charged with unique signatures, irreplaceable and unable to be duplicated. These are more rudimentary tools, typical signatures that could be used by anyone, and not dangerous in the same way. In fact, you can pick some of them up in Westrock, if you ever want your own set."
I had to admit, it'd be pretty badass to get a magic wand, if I could ever get over how ridiculous it would feel to use it.
"Okay," I said. "So...how does it work?"
"We'll start simply," Wilder said. "Take this." He handed me the crystal, which I took. It was ice-cold in my hand, so much so that I almost jumped.
"It's cold," I said, to Wilder's bemused expression.
"Interesting," he said, and made a note on his sheet.
"Is that bad?" I said. I clutched it a lit
tle tighter, hoping it would warm up, or sparkle, or do something.
"There are no wrong answers in the exetasis," Wilder said. "Let's give it a few more minutes."
So we did—me standing there, holding the crystal in my hand, waiting for something to happen that never did, and Wilder just...staring at me. Which I get was probably part of his responsibilities. But at the same time, I knew—through my demon intuition, through Raines's emotions ping-ponging off my own, or some strange cocktail of the two—that Wilder was looking at me for more than just exetasis evaluation. He was sizing me up.
I gripped the crystal tighter. Don’t sense the soul binding, I willed him. Don’t sense it.
Then I realized Raines could probably sense me sending those thoughts, even if he couldn’t read their exact wording. So I knocked it off.
"All right," Wilder said at last. "That's enough."
We swapped out for the sickle, which I held equally awkwardly. Wilder held out a brick of something black and shining.
"Obsidian," he explained. "Theoretically, if you manifest a...certain type of power, let’s say, you'll be able to slice right through it when wielding a sickle of pure silver."
"Got it," I said. I gave a little swing, which was unwieldy, because who the hell knows how to use a sickle? The blade glanced off of the rock, and besides a few chips of flaky black, didn't really slice at all.
"Interesting," Wilder said, and made another note. It was infuriating, the way he said that word, but what was I supposed to do? "All right, final test."
He held out the wand, and I reached for the handle end, but then he pulled it back. Instantly, panic fizzed in my core.
"Sorry. Should I..." I gestured to take the wand from him, but he retracted it even further.
"Nova, I'm the one who should be sorry. But I have to ask you a question before we proceed. If there's something that's interfering with this testing, I'm afraid I do have to know. No matter how personal it may be."
Oh my God. He knew. He knew about the soul binding. Was there some kind of, what was it, energy signature that revealed it to him? Or maybe I just had the world's shittiest poker face. Either was a possibility, frankly.
