Charm School (The Demon's Apprentice Book 4)

by Ben Reeder

  My next class was Enchantment III, and it was just a floor down. A blonde woman in glasses stood almost motionless as we filed in and took our seats. The board behind her read “Professor Kincaid.” Most of the students in the class were older than I was, and there were several hall captains and one Best Girl in the mix. Once again, I was pretty much the youngest person in the room.

  Once the final bell chimed, the teacher stepped to the podium beside her desk and cleared her throat. “Mr. Fortunato,” she started clearly, and I give up any hope of making it through class unnoticed.

  “Yes, Professor Kincaid?”

  “I understand you not only have a great deal of knowledge regarding enchanting foci, but also, several years of experience in making and using them.” Her voice was high and bordered on musical, with a tone that sounded very prim and proper.

  “Yes, ma’am. It was how I learned magick.”

  “Forgive my prying, and know that there is a point to this. To what end was your education limited to enchantment?”

  “To control me,” I said, my face burning. “So I couldn’t cast spells on my own. I needed to prepare my spells ahead of time using a focus, usually something just for that one spell and one person.”

  “And did your…were there advantages to this?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Using a single use focus made it next to impossible to track the spells back to me, or to my boss.”

  “And the…disadvantages?”

  “I was limited in the spells I could cast to what I could prepare ahead of time. I also had a harder time learning to cast a spell without a focus.”

  “Thank you for your candor, Mr. Fortunato. I bring up this case as cautionary example. Enchantment, while it has many advantages, can lead to a dependency upon those same advantages to the detriment of other vital skills. Also, the dependency upon, shall we say, prepared or refined components for charms and tools can leave you rather ill-prepared should you need to enchant an item under less than ideal circumstances. This semester, we will learn to formulate the sigils, runes and glyphs required to enchant a single subject item, and to enchant a working tool. As our class project, we will also use common materials to create working tools, similar to Mr. Fortunato’s Telekinesis Rod.”

  “Professor, why would we need to know how to make tools from junk?” one of my classmates asked, a guy with Hall Captain braids draped down from his collar.

  “An excellent question, Mr. Camdenton. But tell me, are you not in a three level class?” Kincaid asked. “One where each of you are presumed to have mastered the basics?”

  “Of course.”

  “Improvisation is the hallmark of mastery, Mr. Camdenton. The objective of this class is to teach more advanced techniques of enchantment. This includes methods which would seem otherwise unconventional. We will also learn how to enchant otherwise ordinary objects to hold specific spells for discreet use among the cowan. Now, in your texts, you will find on page three-seventy-five a table of basic sigils.” I let a little bit of a smile through. This was a class I was likely to do well in.

  After lunch, my next class was Magickal Defense. This one was an Advanced class, not even required for graduation. The rain had gotten worse, so I was stuck with all the rest of the students taking the breezeways between buildings. Fortunately, it was on the top floor, so the crowd thinned considerably by the time I found myself in the right hallway. As I got closer to the door, though, my mystic senses started to tingle, and Junkyard stopped a few steps from it and let out a low hruff. I looked down at him, and his eyes were fixed on the doorway. I blinked and opened my Third Eye a little, and saw a faint shimmer in the open doorway. After a moment, the illusion faded, and I could see that the door was actually closed. And behind the illusion was something else. A suggestion, not much more than a slight compulsion. Technically, it should have been illegal, but I nodded as I realized that the only way to actually defend against most things was to actually face them. And for an advanced placement class, it made a certain amount of sense to start with an object lesson.

  Challenge accepted, I thought as I brought up my full set of mental defenses. First came the interlocking shields, each one helping to power and bolster the next, standard fare in Dulka’s arsenal. Any spell or defense worked best when powered with emotion, so I had linked my defenses to anger. The more someone tried to attack me, the more pissed off I got. Also standard demon fare. Finally, I brought up my own little bit of clever, a sort of buffer zone that ran a remembered thought pattern like a computer subroutine. It was designed to do two things. One, give Dulka something to “hear” when he tried to read my mind, and give a compulsion spell something to latch onto instead of my real thoughts. It would do its whammy inside the shell version of me, and I would be okay. I hadn’t brought my full set of defenses up for almost a year, even when I ran into the occasional mental assault. Up to now, just clamping my Third Eye shut had been enough to stop almost everything I’d run into, and my basic defenses had done the trick with almost everything else. Pure willpower and contrariness had handled the rest.

  With my defenses firmly in place, I reached out and turned the doorknob. The illusion shimmered and faded, and I felt the second ward go off but it splintered against my defenses like a paintball against glass, which wasn’t far off from the actual intent of the spell. If I hadn’t had my defenses up, it would have “painted” my aura. Dulka had used the exact same spell to designate marks in a crowd for scrying spells later. A third ward flared as I stepped through the door, and it was sucked into the buffer shell. It registered as a compulsion, something to do with color. Even as it hit my defenses, I felt the delay as it shifted between Junkyard and me a few times before it aimed for the shell.

  Inside, the classroom walls were covered in sheets of paper. Each one had an inert warding symbol on it, and a different message written in red.

  Don’t look here.

  Eyes front.

  Smile.

  Listen.

  Call your parents tonight.

  Put your right hand on your desk.

  If you can see the color red, shake my hand.

  Standing at the front of the room was an older man with curly, steel gray hair. He had his hands on his hips, and as I stepped inside, his seamed face broke into a smile. The second thing that stood out about him was that he didn’t wear the standard slacks. Instead, he wore black cargo pants, and I saw the silver ankh of a paramiir dangling from his belt. I stepped forward and offered him my hand, not bothering to hide the frown on my face.

  He chuckled as he took my hand, and I felt a strong buzz across my palm. “Most kids miss that one. What’s your name, son?” he asked, his voice pitched low enough that it barely reached my ears.

  “Chance Fortunato, sir.”

  “Figures,” he said with another chuckle as he put a hand out to Junkyard. “Jacob Buchanan. Take a seat.” I turned to see the room about half full. In the middle of the front row, there was an empty desk with a sign on it in red ink: Don’t sit here! Of course, I sat right there. A couple of minutes later, there was the heavy sound of someone running into a door they didn’t think was there. Two more people caught the first two wards, but fell for the third, which I could see from the inside was set on the wall opposite the door and triggered when someone walked more than a foot into the room. The fourth person through the door after me was Stewart, who opened the door, splattered the marking charm, then promptly went and shook Mr. Buchanan’s hand, before he took the seat right behind me.

  “Did you shake hands with him, too?” he asked softly.

  “Yup,” I said.

  “Kinda figured.”

  “Well, Mr. Hampton makes it a full class,” Buchanan said. He reached behind him and held up a square of red cardboard. “Mr. Fortunato and Mr. Hampton, please sit this question out. What color is the card I’m holding up?”

  “You’re not holding anything in your hand, sir,” someone behind us said. I could hear the smug smile in his voice, and a
split second later, a girl on my left echoed the sentiment.

  “We’re not fooled,” she added.

  “Very well, who sees a card?” I heard the rustle of cloth as hands went up behind me. Two people snickered, and I wondered how well they were going to handle the truth. “What color is it?” The closest anyone got was orange.

  “Is this like that dress thing on the internet?” someone asked.

  “No, Mr. Hogkins, it isn’t,” Buchanan said. “It’s because most of you can’t see the color red right now. Also, about half of you ran into the door because you thought it was open, and a third of you have aura marks. There is a cowan saying that I’ve heard many of you repeat, ‘What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’ Well, this is an object lesson in how that isn’t true. Those of you who didn’t fall down an elevator shaft when they thought they were stepping into an empty elevator would be marked for later scrying or targeted for remote killing spells. And those of you who didn’t accidentally run a red light while driving home would have been open to a myriad of suggestions. Observe!” With a gesture, I felt the slight pressure against my defenses fade, and the whole room gasped as they saw the messages written in red.

  “You can’t do that!”

  “That’s illegal!”

  “My father will be hearing about this!” Of course, someone had to threaten to tell Mummy and Daddy what the big mean teacher was doing.

  “Quiet, people!” Buchanan barked. “Your parents already know about this, they signed a release permitting me to subject you to these kinds of spells. Advanced Level classes are strictly voluntary, but I will remind you, you did sign up for this, and if you don’t like what goes on in this class, you can always opt to drop it and take the failing grade. The spells you faced today are the same kind of spells and wards that you could face in the real world, and out there, you won’t have the option to run home to Mommy to tell her what the bad man did to you. You’ll be too busy trying to please your new master to worry about anything else.”

  “How are we supposed to trust you, then?” the girl on my right asked.

  “You can trust what I teach you, Miss Kingston,” he replied. “And you can trust that no spell or compulsion you encounter will last beyond the confines of this class. Now, back to actual learning. Look around. Each of these signs has a message on it, written in a color most of you couldn’t register. Mr. Hampton, why would I find that useful?”

  “It would let you plant suggestions without having to leave a compulsion spell in place,” Stewart said after a moment. At a gesture from Mr. Buchanan, he went on. “Just because you can’t see a color consciously, your eyes still see it, and your subconscious processes the message. And you still act on it.”

  “That’s all pseudoscientific crap,” someone behind me said.

  “Mr. Fortunato, please hold up the sign that was on your seat. If it didn’t work Mr. Fortunato would be sitting where you are, instead. Remember, bad guys can be subtle. And, like those who still pretend that the Earth is flat, just because you believe a thing doesn’t make it true. Suggestion works. Cowan businesses use it very effectively every day. Now, Mr. Fortunato, how did you know to have your defenses ready when you entered the classroom today?”

  “Junkyard alerted to something, and I felt the magick,” I said.

  Buchanan nodded. “Your familiar…excellent attention to your environment.”

  “Why did his familiar catch it and mine didn’t?” a girl behind me asked. I turned to see her holding a long, brown creature that looked like a ferret, but with a patch of white fur on its upper lip. Like most familiars I’d seen here, it had an ornate collar around its neck.

  “I don’t use a control collar on Junkyard,” I said.

  “All familiars need a control collar,” someone else said with almost as much disdain in their voice as I had in mine.

  “Only when you buy one and enslave it instead of bonding with it,” I said.

  “It’s just a dumb animal,” the girl with the ferret said.

  “No, he isn’t,” I said. “Junkyard is my friend, we’re…to him, I’m his pack, his family. And I will be for as long as he lives. He always has my back, and he can see and smell things I never could. I trust this ‘dumb animal’ more than I trust most people, and if any of those spells had been real threats, this dumb animal would have saved my ass three times over just today. You can’t say the same thing about your ferret.”

  “That’s because it’s a mink,” the girl said with a sniff.

  “Great, another white knight tree hugger,” another boy sneered.

  “Enough,” Buchanan snapped. “Miss Kilcannon, Mr. Hartness, you’ve both earned your house a demerit. And Mr. Fortunato, another outburst like that will earn a demerit for your house. Am I clear?”

  “Why do we get demerits and this charity case gets a pass?” Hartness demanded.

  “Two demerits, for you, Mr. Hartness,” Buchanan corrected him. “First, Fortunato’s remarks were aimed at an exhibited behavior, as opposed to being personal attacks. Secondly, he was right, and a Franklin student should have the presence of mind and self-awareness to recognize that.”

  “How was he right?” Kilcannon asked.

  “Did your mink alert you to the spells waiting for you? No, by your own admission, it didn’t. Also, I’ve seen familiars like Junkyard here, without control collars. I’ve seen them give their own lives to protect their partners. One of them…was my familiar. Your casual disrespect for the person, Mr. Hartness, is what earned you both demerits. Which brings us to the root cause of the very need for this class, ladies and gentlemen. The warlocks casting every spell, hex and curse I will be teaching you to defend yourself against have, at the core of their being, a total disregard for the victim. If you can’t grasp that basic concept, you will fail this class. And if you adopt that same disregard, make no mistake, someday, someone like me will show up on your doorstep to hold you accountable for it.” There was a moment of silence that stretched out to the point where it was getting uncomfortable before Buchanan said anything else.

  “Now that you have a feel for the stakes, we can get started. Get your textbooks out and turn to page thirty-four. We’ll start with mental defenses.”

  As we read, I started to realize just how clunky and crude my mental constructs actually were. Like most things I had figured out or learned under Dulka, my defenses relied on brute strength to keep unwanted influences out of my head. The defense structure in the book was more of an overlapping lattice of separate, supporting defenses. Rearranging the bulked up, overpowered mental wards I used in the more intricate pattern from the book took some work, and my head was pounding by the end of class.

  Fortunately, my last class on Tuesday was Herbalism and Botany with Mr. Whitcomb. Whipcord thin with curly red hair that went everywhere, he lectured in a warbling voice that he pitched just low enough to make sure you had to listen closely. Still, it was partly dirt therapy, though there was also a little bit of mixing and preparation to make the most effective use of the plants.

  After H and B, all I wanted was to change into t-shirt and jeans and chill for a while, but Housemaster Emerson had other ideas. Less than ten minutes after I got back to Jefferson House, I found myself in the common room for my hall, poring over the list of extracurricular activities and listening to the members of the hurligan team extol the virtues of the game. Hurligan was a lot like lacrosse, only with specialized wands instead of sticks. The object was to get the hurligan through the other team’s goal, which was a hoop set sideways about twelve feet high on an angled stone wall. One of the hurligan players was decked out in the heavily padded uniform, which featured an open faced, padded helmet and solid pieces of plastic covering every joint. That was enough to make me decide I didn’t want to play the wizard version of lacrosse and football. I had a bad habit of putting life and limb in danger on a regular basis. The last thing I needed was to go looking to get hurt playing a game that required almost as much padding as football.
I turned my attention back to the longer list of clubs that didn’t require so much armor.

  “Narrowed it down any?” Stewart asked from over my shoulder a few minutes later.

  “Well, it’s a toss-up between the fencing and pistol clubs, but I’m pretty sure I want to do cross country,” I told him.

  “Have you considered the equestrian club?”

  “Not on your life. Most animals freak out if I get too close. Junkyard is the first and pretty much only animal that will get close to me short of using a control collar.”

  “It was a thought. I’m a member of the fencing and pistol club. I’ll introduce you around at the gym tomorrow afternoon. The pistol club meets on Saturdays, and, you’re in luck, the cross country club meets on Wednesday morning before first lab period.” I tried not to be too enthused, but all I managed was to seem unimpressed. Three extracurriculars. What utter joy. How would I ever contain myself? I shook my head and got up. Mr. Emerson immediately showed up to block my escape.

  “Now, Mr. Fortunato, you’ll need to choose at least two clubs to maintain the Jefferson tradition of well rounded interests.”

  “I figured three was rounded enough, Mr. Emerson,” I said. Emerson looked over my shoulder, and I caught Stewart’s head nod.

  “Well done then,” he said, and stepped aside, zeroing in on Hoshi as I left. As I headed down the hallway, I wondered if the Draeden had finally found a way to do what a werewolf, a demonic vampire and even the Sentinels themselves had failed to. Instead of trying to kill me with magick or violence, he was going to let the Franklin Academy kill me through sheer exhaustion.

  On the up side, there would be fewer nightmares that way.

  Chapter 6

  ~ Eternal and infinite, the soul can only be given by its own consent. ~ Faust