Charm School (The Demon's Apprentice Book 4)

by Ben Reeder

  “I see,” he said. “I’m sorry, Chance.”

  “For what?”

  “That you never got to be a kid, I guess,” he said. “For what it’s worth, you’d make a good Sentinel.”

  “No I wouldn’t,” I said. “I don’t take orders very well.”

  “Not all of us do.”

  Hoshi, Junkyard and Ren were waiting for me when I got back to the room, along with a huge mess. Hoshi and Ren looked worried, but Junkyard just looked sleepy. He’d curled up on my clothes on the bed, with Ren perched behind him, his tiny hand stroking his fur. Hoshi came up out of his desk chair as soon as I opened the door.

  “Dude, what’s going on?” he asked. “They said you got arrested, and that you killed another student and summoned a demon or some shit like that!”

  “Slow down,” I said as I looked at the aftermath of having my room searched. Junkyard got up, stretched and hopped off the bed, then came over to me and reared up so he could put his paws on my chest. Once I’d rubbed his head a little, he dropped down and went to his food bowl, then looked back at me. “Yeah, I can see why you missed me today.” I poured some food into his bowl and went to my desk to sort through the books and papers that had been dumped out onto it.

  “So? What happened?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but I’m going to find out. Whatever it is, they were pretty sure I did it at first. Hell, I’m still a suspect. Now what?” My cheap phone chirped in my pocket. I pulled it out and flipped it open to see Dr. C’s name in the little ID box.

  “Chance!” he said as soon as I hit the little green answer button. “I just now heard. Are you okay? What did they do?”

  “I’m fine, sir,” I said. “They just asked me some questions and sprayed magic water on me to make sure I wasn’t there. My room might never recover, though.”

  “Let me guess, you were their first and only suspect.”

  “Pretty much. It’s like you know me or something.”

  “That’s it,” he said. “Draeden can do whatever he wants to me, but you’re coming home. I’m not going to let them railroad you-”

  “No, sir,” I cut him off. “I’m staying.”

  “You’re just asking them to pin this on you.”

  “They already want to pin it on me! If I go now, I’m as good as confessing to this. Even if they found out who was doing this for real, they’d still figure I was a part of it somehow. But that’s not why I have to stay.”

  There was a short pause before he said anything. “You think you can stop them.”

  “I have to stop them,” I corrected him. “I can’t just run from this. I made a promise. I have to make this right.”

  “Chance, you don’t have to-” I hung up on him.

  “Okay, that was dramatic,” Hoshi said. “So, why the white knight routine?”

  “What do you mean, white knight?” I said with a glare for emphasis. I’d heard or rather read the term directed at Lucas online, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

  “I have to stop them,” he shot back, making his voice deeper and rougher.

  “That whole conversation, and that’s the only part you heard? That’s the only thing you decided was important?” I asked as I crossed the few feet between us.

  “Dude, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Hoshi said, stepping back. “I mean, it’s not like you’re gonna get laid or anything for doing this.”

  I gave him a level stare for a moment. “I don’t think with my dick, Hoshi. Not about things like this.” I turned away from him and started back toward my side of the room. The bed looked like a good place to start, so I grabbed one of my shirts and a hanger.

  “Whatever, man. You take this shit way too seriously.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to keep my mouth shut, but that didn’t work worth a damn. My feet pivoted so that I turned in place and I looked across my shoulder at him.

  “Fifty-seven,” I said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “I helped send fifty-seven people to Hell. And I made a promise to make that shit right. So, yeah, I take this very seriously.”

  “Oh.” He sat down on his bed and looked across the room at me with blank eyes.

  “Ren, I’m going to need your help,” I said after I took a moment to hang up the shirt I’d grabbed and calmed down a little

  The little sprite launched himself into the air with a buzz of wings and landed on the only unoccupied corner of my desk. “What can I do?”

  “I need to know where they found Sterling Lodge, to start with, so I can go take a look at the scene. I also need to find out where they’re keeping him so I can try to get a look at his aura.”

  “I can do that,” Ren said, his face alight. “Can I come? I can scout for you, and be a lookout if you need one.” He floated off the desk until he was at eye level.

  “Ren, I don’t want you to get in any trouble.”

  His smile got bigger as he floated closer. “If you don’t get caught, I won’t get in trouble.”

  So help me, the little shit sounded like me. “Okay. You can come along.”

  The sound the little sprite made barely registered in my hearing, but Junkyard whined for a few seconds after he was gone. I sat down and felt my shoulders slump, finally able to relax. I looked out the window, but my mind and my gaze always came back to the school and the forest around it. The hunt was on.

  Chapter 7

  ~ Action, even fruitless striving, is better than passive acceptance of the status quo. ~ Caleb Renault, protagonist in the Blood and Honor series by Nick Vincente

  “It was pure luck that one of my clan even found this place,” Ren whispered from his perch on my backpack. “She’d just chased a bogill off the grounds, and she ran across this place coming back. It’s probably what attracted the damn thing in the first place.” The clearing in front of us was about fifty feet wide, with a dark ring in the middle. The grass was stomped pretty much flat both inside and outside the ring, which meant there was no way I was going to be able to follow anyone who been here while it was in use. Too many tracks, too many energy patterns. I was beginning to understand Detective Collins’ frustration with having a bunch of civilians on a crime scene before he could take a look at it. Junkyard pressed against my leg, his own senses probably showing him things I was glad I couldn’t see.

  “It’s like a herd of elephants went through here,” I said as I stepped into the clearing. The only two places that didn’t look like the flood of feet hadn’t touched were the central section of the circle, and the ring itself. The ring got my attention first, simply because it was closer, and I’d have to cross it to get to the center. I walked a slow circuit around it with the cellphone Shade had given me out and recording video. Looking at it through the screen, I didn’t recognize the pattern, though the runes were familiar. The grass was dead along the circle’s perimeter and in a foot wide swath on either side of the runes. As I went, Ren flitted off my back and flew along inside the circle with me. He dipped low as I completed the circuit, then came back up to eye level with me.

  “The grass was just starting to grow back,” he said, pointing to the dead vegetation in between us.

  “Grow back?” I asked. “Then…this wasn’t the first time they used this circle,” I said. I glanced up at the moon and moved to the east side of the circle, then stepped across it. There was a slight tingle of energy across my aura as I breached the threshold, then it was past, and I was practically on top of the central point of the whole set-up. Now came the hard part.

  I took a deep breath and opened my Third Eye. The cold gray of necromancy lingered in a vaguely human shaped form on the ground in front of me, large enough to show more than one set of limbs. They had used this place more than once, and if I was right, they’d claimed three victims here. It was time to test that theory.

  “Ren, I need some of the grass at the edge of the circle.” As he flittered to do that, I pulled my backpack off and took the tea ca
ndle out of the emergency tin. The withered grass was fed to the candle’s flame, and acrid smoke filled the clearing. A quick poke with my pocket knife got me three drops of blood to anoint the candle and added a little life essence to the whole thing.

  “Pnévma tou prósfata anachórise , sas kaló na to méros tou thanátou sas,” I intoned softly in Greek. Roughly translated, it meant ‘Spirit of the recently departed, I call you to the place of your death.” In this case, the true meaning of the words was important, since I was making a specific call to an entity, so I used a language I spoke occasionally. After I’d repeated the phrase five or six times, the flame from the candle went pale green as it hit the blood, and the energy in the clearing changed. With that change came visitors.

  Junkyard growled and turned his head to the right as another shape shimmered into existence right in front of me. I brought the cellphone up and snapped a quick shot, then turned and tried to see what Junkyard was growling at. Another figure had appeared outside the circle. I hit the shutter in the split second before the figure disappeared. I turned back to the first figure to see it still shimmering in place. I got the phone up and snapped another picture as it reached out a hand before it too faded.

  “Time to go,” I said as I reached out and pinched out the flame on the candle. In seconds, I had everything stowed and we were headed out of the clearing. Ren flew ahead of me and Junkyard ran beside me as I made my way through the dimly lit woods. The thin crescent of the moon barely gave me enough light to see by, but between that and Junkyard, I managed to keep a decent pace. Once we reached the edge of the woods, I dropped into a crouch, and Ren lowered himself onto my backpack again. Junkyard laid down beside me, his tongue lolling out. Ahead of me, I could see the silvery sheen of dew on the grass, and the lights by the doors of the Academy.

  “Are we still on mission?” Ren asked softly. I had to smile at the eagerness in his voice, especially since I was fighting the urge to grin ear to ear myself.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I still need to get a look at Lodge. If I can, I also want to take a look at the records of the two kids who disappeared last year.”

  “Oh, I can get you the records for a little while,” Ren said. “But I’d need to take them back, and I couldn’t get them for you until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s good. Let’s focus on Lodge, then.”

  “Right! Okay, follow me.” Ren launched himself into the air and headed off to the right. I followed him for several hundred yards, until we came to a place where the ground dipped. Ren stopped in a small stand of trees, and I crouched beside his vantage point. About fifty yards ahead I could see two sprites lounging on a pair of boulders that sat on either side of a wooden door.

  “Okay, that complicates things a little,” I said softly.

  “Don’t worry,” Ren said. “I’ve got this. I’ll need Junkyard’s help, though.”

  I looked down at Junkyard, who had come to his feet. “You got this big guy?” I asked him, certain he understood me on some level. He took a step toward Ren, then looked back over his shoulder at me. “Yeah, you got this,” I said, and he turned in place and looked to Ren.

  “I’ll draw them away from the door. Once you’re in, go to the first junction, then turn left and go three openings down, that’ll bring you out in the basement for the infirmary. The entrances inside the school aren’t guarded. We’ll meet you there.” He flew over to Junkyard and dropped down onto his back, then grabbed the fur on his neck and made a clicking sound with his tongue. Junkyard bounded out of the trees, carrying Ren toward the door. The two sprites flitted into the air, drawing out bows as big as they were from behind the rocks. When they saw it was Ren, they laughed and called out to him in Fae. I’d heard it spoken plenty of times, but I’d never been able to pick up even the most basic terms, because more than half of it was beyond the human range of hearing. The sprite dialects were also inflected by antenna movements, so no human or other race could speak fluent sprite, either. After a few comments, they laughed along with him, then he flew up and gestured to Junkyard. One of them set his bow down, and his companion followed suit, dropping hers behind the rock she’d originally pulled it from. The first one settled on Junkyard’s back, and he took off toward the woods. Ren laughed and took off after him, and the other sprite followed. Seeing my opening, I darted from the trees and headed for the door, careful to stay low and as quiet as I could manage. The Dutch style door was a dark wood with heavy iron hinges and lower latch. The upper latch was a shiny brass lever. Wards flared briefly but didn’t go off as I grabbed the iron latch and let myself inside. Once in, I waited for a few seconds after the door clicked shut to make sure no one was going to follow, then turned around and pulled the small angle head flashlight out of my pack. It was a military surplus model that still had the colored lenses with it. I’d put the red lens in, and down here, I figured I could risk the extra light.

  The tunnel was lined with rough, brown stone, with a dirt floor. There were lightbulbs every few yards, connected by metal conduit pipes. There was a switch by the door, but I left it alone. I didn’t want to go and advertise that I was down here any more than I had to. My footsteps were muffled by the dirt so I let my pace pick up a little as I went along. Once I hit the first juncture, I found myself in a much larger, much warmer concrete tunnel. Pipes lines one wall, and the caged lights were actually on in here. I clipped the flashlight to my belt as I took the left turn and headed down, counting junctions until I got to the third one. The door opened smoothly, and I found myself in a dark basement as the two latches clicked shut behind me. The red beam of the flashlight revealed that I was in a store room for errant tables and broken chairs. True to his word, Ren showed up a few minutes later, coming in through the upper door. He gestured for me to follow him, and led me through the hallways until I found myself crouched at the edge of a doorway, staring down at the ward hall. A pair of Sentinels stood guard over Lodge’s bed, and a nurse sat at a station at the end of the hall, her attention on her computer.

  An up close look at Lodge was out of the question. All I really needed was a quick look at his aura, though. I slowly stuck my head around the corner again and took a peek, opening my mystic senses again as I did.

  After a few seconds, I pulled back, fighting the urge to gasp. Slowly, I took a deep, ragged breath and let it out. The Sentinel’s auras had been bright and clear, both bright blue with duty, mixed with various muted red blotches of anger and streaks of purple that spoke of mild grief or sadness to me. Where Lodge’s aura should have been was what I could only describe as a sucking wound. It was literally an empty maw of gray that felt like it would pull me in if I looked at it for too long. He was still alive, but everything that was Sterling Lodge was gone. I turned and headed for the basement.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” I said once I was safe in the tunnel.

  “He just feels like a blank spot to me,” Ren said.

  “People without a soul still have an aura, it’s just…faded, or washed out. This…this was something else completely. Okay, I need to get back to my room. Do these tunnels connect all the buildings?”

  Ren nodded. “Yeah, we’re not very far from your hall. I’ll take you.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was safe in my room. Well, as safe as I was going to get where someone was going around ripping people’s souls out. Ren had gone to bring Junkyard back, and Hoshi was sitting on his bed practicing his frown.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I sat down and booted up my computer, then sent Lucas a text warning him I was about to call. “If I had, whoever did this to Lodge would be in custody. Or in the morgue.”

  “Do you kill everything you go up against?”

  “Not everything.” The computer screen changed, and the program Lucas had given me came up with an incoming call. I hit the green button with the cursor, and Lucas’s face appeared on the screen.

  “Good…morning,” he sa
id, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “What’s up?”

  “I need you to get some files to Dr. C. so he can check them against the special collection. Tell him there are two confirmed deaths linked to this thing. I got pictures of two ghosts, one for sure is a full body apparition, the other is at least upper torso. Once you get them, I need you to play it and make sure nothing is corrupted. Once I know you have it, I’m going to have to delete the files from my phone.” I pulled up the video and the pictures, then texted the files to him.

  “Okay, I’m transferring them to my laptop now. So, while they’re playing, what is going on?”

  “It’s hard to describe. Someone is ripping people’s souls out. They’re not even leaving an aura behind.”

  “What about the one thing you told me about? Some kind of mark on their aura? Or was it on their skin?”

  “Yeah, demon’s like branding their humans, kinda like cattle. They always leave a demon mark. It takes time to show up in the aura, unless they have your soul, then it’s pretty much automatic. I don’t know if the victims are marked or not. If they are…”

  “Then we use the Big Book O’ Demons you and Dr. C were working on.”

  “Liber de Magna Daemonia,” I said, translating the title to Latin. “Dr. C wants to go with Codex Abyssus. Anyway, I’m going to get a peek at the victims’ files tomorrow, and I’ll look to see if they had any marks on them.”

  “Okay. Got the files, so you can delete the originals. I’ll get these to Dr. C in the morning.”

  “Good. Just make sure he knows not to go to the Council or anyone with this. I’m not exactly legit here.”