Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1)

by Rasmussen, Jen

  “Get off me, demon!” he shouted, too late. The fury had already picked him up.

  The fury spread his wings and flew off without a word. He hadn’t so much as glanced at Thea. As she stared after them, she was startled by a voice at her side.

  “Like it’s not bad enough to have to work on a Saturday, right? I have to deal with Mr. Fanatic.”

  It was a female fury, dressed in pants and a silk blouse with her hair in a tight bun. Her breath smelled of coffee. She must have come outside with the security guard, but Thea, distracted by the spectacle, hadn’t noticed her until she spoke.

  “Who is he?” Thea asked.

  “Nobody knows. He’s been coming around once in a while the last few months, screaming about demons and evil. Seems like he wants something, but we don’t know what.”

  “How is that possible?” Thea remembered what Graves had told her when he brought her onto campus the day before. “He shouldn’t be able to get in here. And even if he found a way, it’s just supposed to look ruined to him, right?”

  The fury looked at Thea, as if taking her in for the first time. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Thea.” She held out a hand that she hoped wouldn’t be noticeably damp. “I’m a new hire.”

  “The human transformation! I heard about you.”

  Did you hear I’m a harlot?

  “I’m Mirabella,” the fury went on. She shook hands and smiled, then gestured in the direction the security guard had flown off in. “To answer your question, that only works if they’ve never been here before. Once they see it on an authorized visit, they can always see it. Facilities has been looking for a weak spot in the fence, but so far they haven’t figured out how he’s getting in.”

  “So he was authorized to be here once?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? We haven’t tracked down any files on him. We don’t even know his name. Hence Mr. Fanatic. What are you doing here, by the way?”

  At first Thea thought she meant at Hexing House in general, and for one sickening moment thought Mirabella had seen her sins (harlot), and knew she was there under false pretenses.

  “Did you need to see someone specific? Because I’m the only one in today,” Mirabella said.

  Thea realized she just meant the building. “This isn’t FR?”

  “No, this is HRI. Human Relations and Investigation. FR is the building behind this one.” She gestured for Thea to follow her to the walkway, and pointed to the building in question, which looked exactly like the building in front of them. Thea wondered if she could ask somebody for a map.

  With a quick thanks to Mirabella, she hurried off. The last thing she needed was to be late for her first day of training. She was already in enough trouble around this place, and her second day here wasn’t exactly starting well.

  Serving the demons, are you?

  No, sir, not anymore. The demon paid me twenty-seven million dollars and let me out of my contract.

  Things didn’t get better when she reported to a training room in FR to find that Philip, the hostile fury she’d met at dinner the night before, and two of his friends were the other new hires. A quick glance told her that one of the others was male, the other female, before Thea shifted her eyes downward. She didn’t look at them again, but she could feel them looking at her.

  The instructor glared at her with obvious distaste, before finally introducing himself as Stefan and telling her he supposed she ought to take a seat. He was big but soft and running to fat, with thinning yellow hair. For some reason it struck Thea as funny, that furies went bald, too. She quickly converted the mocking smile that came unbidden into what she hoped was the expression of an enthusiastic pupil, and chose a seat at the end of the table, next to an empty chair. There was a notebook and a pen in front of her, and a bottle of water.

  “I’ll be up front with you, Thea.” Stefan’s voice was slightly shrill and bound to become annoying. “You’ve got a long way to go to prove yourself. We haven’t had a human transformation in over half a century.”

  Thea nodded. She’d heard that repeated plenty of times already.

  “But more importantly, you are not an authorized hire.” Stefan narrowed his eyes at her. “As the head of FR, I do the recruiting here. Graves went entirely outside of protocol.”

  Thea wasn’t sure whether he was expecting her to apologize for Graves’s overstepping his boundaries, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Very well then, what do you already know?” Stefan asked.

  “Nothing,” said Thea, and ignored the snickers of Philip and his friends. “I just got hired yesterday. I only know a little about what the company does. They gave me a month to pass training.”

  Stefan burst out laughing. Thea kept her face neutral as he explained to her, with great relish, that the average student took three months, and the exceptional ones, two. And that was for people who were born to it. He didn’t know how long the last human transformation had taken, but he was willing to wager it was a lot more time than Thea had.

  “And they didn’t even go over the basics of the transformation process with you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He narrowed his eyes again, down to slits that made him look reptilian. “Yet you accepted the job anyway, without knowing what you were in for? I wonder why you wanted to join the colony so badly?”

  “Probably because nobody in her own world had a job opening for a slut,” said Philip.

  His friend—the male one—laughed. “Nah, always room for sluts.”

  For once, Thea didn’t resent the teasing; she was glad they’d deflected attention from Stefan’s question.

  “Well, you’ll want to take notes, because I’m only going to say this once, and quickly,” Stefan said. “We won’t be wasting our time in here with things the others learned before they were ten. The transformation happens in three stages. The mental, physical, and spiritual components of each phase are aligned, so that as you master the concepts of each, a corresponding physical change will happen. In your case, your skin will also change, and that will happen gradually throughout the process. The scope of stage one is virtues and claws, and we’re beginning it immediately.”

  Thea was scribbling in her notebook as he finished, and spoke without looking up. “So none of these guys have claws yet either?”

  “No, nor wings, as you can see,” Stefan said. “Their blood is already purple, unlike yours, but it thickens when they complete stage two.”

  Without waiting for more questions, Stefan turned to the white board behind him. “Virtues,” he said as he wrote the word, then underlined it, “are the easiest characteristics to identify in humans. They don’t try to hide them, you see? But that doesn’t mean working with them is without subtlety. Sometimes it’s possible to confuse a virtue for a vice, or vice versa. Who can give me an example?”

  The others looked blank, but Thea raised her hand.

  Stefan rolled his eyes. “This isn’t school, Thea, it’s training. We’re all civilized adults here. I’m sure we can be trusted not to talk over one another without having to enforce hand raising.”

  She ignored the needling in favor of answering the question. “I once saw shame and confused it for the sin the person was ashamed of,” she said. “But Graves tells me what I was actually seeing was a virtue.”

  “Ah, so good of Graves to answer the question, then.”

  The other female student, a tiny, dark-haired thing with a pixie cut and several tattoos on her purple skin, tittered.

  “Yes, contrition is a virtue,” Stefan went on. “Of course, atonement is better, but humans rarely make it that far.”

  Thea spoke quickly, before she could stop herself. “You seem to have an awful lot of contempt for humans. Isn’t that kind of unfair?”

  Stefan smiled at the other three students. “I’m sure we don’t think it is. How so?”

  “Well, I’ve heard some of you say you’re third generation, or something like that. Which
would suggest you weren’t always furies. Everyone here comes from a human transformation somewhere along the line, right?”

  “As I said, this is training, not school,” said Stefan. “If you need answers to such basic questions, see me after class and I’ll direct you to some of our elementary schoolbooks.”

  His nastiness was having its desired effect, but Thea would never let him see it. When it came to putting on a smile for the world and making them believe it, few were as expert as a Baird Frost girl. She gave Stefan the very sweetest version of that smile and said, “Thank you, that’s wonderful.”

  Without acknowledging that, Stefan tapped the word virtue on the white board again. “As I was saying.”

  The rest of that day was far more boring than Thea had imagined a magical transformation into a mythical being would be. She took notes as Stefan lectured them about courage, purity, humility, honesty, diligence, charity, fidelity, temperance, and contrition. Later he talked about identifying those virtues in humans.

  “Different furies find different visualization methods useful. But the most common way to think of vices and virtues is as a deck of cards. As a fury you can see a person’s deck, but only the top few cards, at most. Sometimes you might misinterpret what you see. Or sometimes what you’re looking for won’t be on top, so you’ll have to shuffle them a bit. Seeing the virtue cards and learning to shuffle them is the focus of stage one of the transformation.”

  “And the other stages?” It was the pixie cut girl—Florence turned out to be her name—who asked. Stefan didn’t seem at all impatient with the question, although Thea was sure he would have been if she’d asked it.

  “In stage two, we add the vice cards to the deck. Stage three is where the excitement happens. That’s when you learn to flip the cards over.” Stefan packed his laptop back into his leather briefcase, a cue to the others to close their notebooks and gather their things as well. “Stage two, sins and blood. Stage three, hexing and wings. But you’ve got virtues and claws to contend with first. I want you to spend the rest of the weekend reviewing your virtues. We begin hands-on training with them on Monday.”

  He didn’t go into just what that would entail, but Thea didn’t worry about it. Virtues, according to Graves, were the part of all this she had a natural aptitude for. And most of her worrying energy was already being spent on Alecto’s threat to have her watched. Thea hadn’t seen anyone following her, or any obvious signs of being tracked, but she didn’t have a good sense of what could be accomplished with magic, either. She decided it would be best to play the model trainee for the rest of the weekend, which meant the search for Flannery would require a patience she did not feel.

  Thea ate dinner with Cora and Nero again, grateful that they seemed so willing to take her under their wings (figuratively, in this case). She told them about her hostile classmates, and even more hostile instructor, over two glasses of wine and some delicious ribs. She’d learned to view food as a friend again since This Unfortunate Incident had freed her from the requirements of being always thin and always beautiful, and the food at Hexing House was surprisingly good.

  “Stefan’s a joke,” said Cora. “You can’t let him get you down.”

  “You know why he’s head of FR, right?” Nero asked.

  Thea shook her head.

  “Because he’s the only one in the department.” Nero laughed.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope,” said Cora. “He handles the job placements and everything, but it’s not like there’s a lot of recruiting to do, given we don’t do it outside the colony as a rule. And he does the transformation training, but everything else is done by people from the individual departments. I do some tech training myself.” She signaled for another glass of wine. “One person is plenty for his job.”

  “Speaking of tech.” Thea took a deep breath. “I have a favor to ask. We don’t really know each other well enough for favors yet, so if you think it’s too risky, just say so.”

  Cora smiled. “We’ve already established that just saying so is my thing.”

  “But risky favors are our favorite kind,” said Nero.

  Thea almost asked Cora right then and there to find Flannery’s files for her, but she wasn’t ready to trust her quite that much yet. Better to test the waters with something smaller first. “It’s just, they won’t let me have any outside contact while I’m training, and I’d love to let my aunt know I’m okay. She hasn’t heard a word since she dropped me off and she’ll be really worried. I thought if maybe one of you guys could email…”

  “Is that all?” Cora laughed. “What’s your aunt’s email?”

  Thea smiled. “Even in a time of senior citizens doing online dating, Aunt Bridget still can’t figure out how to use email. You can write to my friend Pete, and he’ll tell her. Just, don’t mention Hexing House or what I’m doing here. He doesn’t know about it.”

  Nero leaned forward and stage-whispered, “He’ll probably get suspicious when he sees the wings.”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

  “So what should I say, then?” Cora asked.

  That was a good question. Where could she claim to be, that would justify her being away from him and Aunt Bridget right now? Or that would explain why she wasn’t writing to him herself? They even had internet access on planes now.

  Well, Aunt Bridget must have told him something. Let her work that part out.

  “Just say I asked you to get a message to Aunt Bridget, telling her I’m okay. You don’t have to say any more than that. Then if Alecto finds out you sent an email for me, she’ll see the content is harmless. No trade secrets being spread to suspicious yam farmers.”

  When Thea got back to her residence she sat down with The Book of Flower Friends, as she had the night before. For the third time since Flannery disappeared, the old book failed her. Thea couldn’t understand it. When she’d touched Hester, she’d had her first vision since she was a girl. She’d been able to do all sorts of things when they were testing her. She thought her powers were waking up here. Were the flower friends just out of juice, or something?

  Considering she had no idea how or why the book worked, she supposed there was no hope of figuring out why it didn’t anymore. Just one of many things she couldn’t figure out, and transformation training was bound to bring her plenty more.

  But she was wrong about that, at least in the short term. Stage one was much easier for Thea than it seemed to be for the others. The exercises were mainly about sensing people’s virtues and identifying them clearly. Stefan’s tip about visualizing them as cards was helpful, but not as helpful as her memories of childhood. She began to sense virtues in all sorts of ways, but they were still more like scents to her than anything else. As a girl, even before she knew or understood words like shame, she’d always known they were there. They were just part of sensing a person, like hearing their voice.

  The new hires practiced on one another, and sometimes on volunteers who came in. But Thea noted that Stefan wore one of the amulets Nero had shown her on her first day there, and never took it off. Apparently he wanted to keep his own secrets.

  Her classmates, hostile to begin with, only became more so as Thea quickly surpassed them in skill. Florence openly accused her of cheating, insisting there was no other way a mere human could pick up something faster than those who were born to it. The boys, who apparently thought themselves witty, took to writing Go Home Slut in her notebook, or on slips of paper tucked under her water bottle. On one occasion, they made a sign and taped it to her residence door.

  In the meanwhile, Thea had dinner with Cora every night, sometimes with Nero, sometimes with others. Elon was there on occasion, but he traveled a lot on cases. Nero privately told Thea that it was a good thing for Cora, that Thea had come along when she did. Cora’s closest friend had recently died of cancer.

  It surprised Thea, that such a mundane thing as a disease would affect furies the same way as humans.
They seemed so much stronger. But then, Aunt Bridget always said that cancer was stronger than all the saints and apostles put together. They’d lost Uncle Gary to pancreatic cancer just before Thea took up with Baird. She still missed him, but a part of her was glad that he hadn’t lived to see what she’d become.

  Thea and Flannery hadn’t talked much since then, apart from holidays, and those were bound to be awkward with Pete around. So it was strange to have a girlfriend to laugh with and confide in again. Strange and dangerously welcome. Thea told herself that none of this was real, that she was an undercover agent here. There wasn’t anybody at Hexing House she could really trust.

  As the days went by, Thea’s skin tone began to change. Not by much—it certainly wasn’t purple yet—but it was taking on a sickly gray cast. Yet she felt anything but sick. She felt stronger than she had in years, maybe than she ever had. She found she needed less sleep, and fidgeted if she sat still for more than an hour. It became addictive, this feeling of vigor, almost of might. She continually reminded herself that Flannery was the reason she was here. But she was beginning to want to stay, to want to transform, for an entirely different reason: for the first time since This Unfortunate Incident, the constant, crushing burden of fear began to ease.

  She put away her packing tape, and thought she might even try a night without the bells, soon.

  And it was an even bigger relief than she’d imagined it would be. So big that it almost didn’t matter that these monsters cursed people for a living, and that some of them had probably done something awful to her cousin.

  On her fourth day of training, Thea woke to find that seven of her fingernails had fallen out. The next day, the rest were gone, and her fingers ached so badly she could hardly hold her spoon at breakfast. Her hands didn’t look any different, but they felt like they’d been crushed.