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

by Ben Reeder

  “I was so worried,” she said to me. She gave me a smile, as she looked over her shoulder at the walls of the school. “I don’t think we’re having class today.” Her voice held the promise of all kinds of possibilities, and a lot of them ran through my mind.

  “Yeah, it looks like you need the day off,” Wanda said. “Have you even been home since you left Dr. C’s place?”

  “No, I had a rough night. Did you guys find anything useful?”

  “Well, with the pollen and dirt on Mr. Chomsky’s pants and boots, I managed to narrow it down to part of Mark Twain National Forest. That narrows it down to about sixty five thousand acres or so.”

  “Guess it’s better than thirty thousand square miles. Okay, when Dr. C gets back, we’ll figure out where we’re going and stuff.”

  “Oh, it gets better. Remember, Alexis said she smelled fish? According to Dr. Corwyn, the gunk on his shoes was algae. So we know he walked through at least one stream. That narrows it down a lot more.”

  “Dude, you’re a freakin’ genius,” I told him. “Maybe you need to be the detective.”

  “Nah, I’m more the forensics geek. I’ll leave the getting beat up and knocked out part to you.”

  “Okay, kids, it looks like your worst academic nightmares are coming true. Classes are cancelled for today, and probably tomorrow,” Dr. C said with mock seriousness.

  “Damn,” Lucas said. “I was so looking forward to a pop quiz today, too.”

  Dr. C pointed at him and Wanda. “You two, go home, get some rest. You’ve both done a lot more than was expected of you. I may need both of you tonight and I want you sharp. Now get.”

  They trooped off reluctantly, and only after getting a promise to call them if I found anything new.

  “So, what are you guys going to be doing?” Shade asked.

  “Legwork,” Dr. C answered. “Lots and lots of legwork. You’re welcome to tag along if you want, Alexis. I warn you, it’s likely to be pretty boring. Lots of walking around in the woods, that kind of thing. You can ride with us if you want.”

  Her face lit up and she nodded.

  “Can I stash my bike at your place?” she asked.

  “Sure. We’ll meet you there,” he said with a smile. She gave me a quick kiss, then bounded off. I watched her bounce away for a few seconds, then turned back to Dr. C.

  “So, why didn’t you send her home like Lucas and Wanda?” I asked.

  “Chance, she’s your girlfriend, or she wants to be. And . . . I wanted to give you two some time together.” His face fell a little, and I could see the sadness behind his eyes.

  “Like normal kids, huh?” I said wistfully.

  “You’ll never be normal,” he said after a moment. “Your life is going to be filled with problems other kids will never have. But it’ll also be filled with magick, and wonder. I can’t give you a normal day. But sometimes, I can give a good one. Maybe we can grab some stuff from my place, and you can have a romantic lunch out in the woods.” He got in the truck and started it up. I climbed back in and closed my own door.

  “You know, Dr. C, sometimes you can be okay,” I told him a few minutes later as he navigated the streets toward his place.

  “I try,” he said with a slow smile. He was pretty damn cool most of the time, but there was no way I was going to tell him that. He was hard enough to deal with as it was.

  Chapter 15

  ~ Details. It’s all in the details. ~ Dwarven proverb.

  I woke up in the back seat of Dr. Corwyn’s Range Rover with a comfortable, warm weight on my chest and the half-remembered fragment of a sound in my ears. Shade was snuggled under my left arm, with her feet curled up under her and her left hand on my chest. Whatever I’d heard had woken me up, but Shade was still dozing, and I filed that under “Odd things that happened today.” If anything, she should have been the one telling me she heard something.

  I looked around, more than a little disoriented. The last thing I remembered was Dr. C pulling in to a gas station in a little town south of Springfield called Ozark. I was slumped up against the passenger side door in the back seat with the most beautiful girl I knew curled up under my arm. The sun had disappeared under ominous looking clouds, and we were parked in a gravel lot surrounded by forest. Through the front window, I could see Dr. C walking through waist-high brown grass with a pendulum swinging from his fingertips. I watched him walk a slow circle, then he lowered his hand and shook his head when he completed a circuit back to his starting point. He scribbled in a notebook that he pulled from his jacket pocket, then tucked it back away and walked a little further away.

  The only other thing out here was the little Conservation Department bulletin board off to my right that had maps of the area, a bathroom and the boulders that blocked cars from driving across the field. None of that was likely to make noise and wake me up. Even the clouds just looked depressing and heavy with rain, without a hint of thunder or lightning.

  Then I heard it again. A soft, plaintive moan came from Shade, and her hand clenched for a moment on my chest. Another, and this one was louder, more desperate. A nightmare. I was familiar with those. When she whimpered, I kissed the top of her head.

  “It’s okay, Shade,” I said softly and slowly. “It’s all right, I’m here. You’re safe, everything’s okay.”

  What I said was only half as important as how I said it. Calm, slow and reassuring, those were the things I wished for every time I woke up from my own nightmares. That, and a sudden case of amnesia. I slowly stroked her hair, and she let out a little sigh before she relaxed into my arms again.

  “Goodnight my angel, time to close your eyes,” I sang softly, “Save your questions for another day.” The rest of the words were blurred in my head, a half-remembered Billy Joel song my mom had sung to me when I was three. Her breathing slowed again, and I savored the feel of her hair against my lips as I kissed her again. I tried not to imagine what she was dreaming about, but the image of her being pawed at by her old alpha, Dominic King, popped up in my head anyway. I’d literally knocked him off of her that night, but the image of her face turning to the side as he lay on top of her was one I would never forget. Never again, I thought.

  She stirred in my arms a few minutes later, and I looked down to see sleepy gray eyes looking back up at me, with a curtain of red strands laying across her cheek and a dreamy smile spreading across her face.

  “Dr. Corwyn’s coming back,” she said softly, her voice a little slurred with sleep. “I dreamed that you sang to me.” Her smile melted my heart.

  “You were having a bad dream,” I told her. She nodded and looked down.

  “I heard your voice.” She looked up at me for a moment, then she kissed me, and the world went away for a few seconds. When she pulled back, I wanted to follow her, but I kept myself in place. “I felt safe again, when I heard your voice. Thank you.” She smiled at me, and I tried to tell myself it wasn’t because my face was turning red.

  Dr. C saved me from having to fumble through a response when he opened his door and slid in behind the wheel. “Well, we’re still south of where he went.”

  “Where are we?” I asked as he pored over his map.

  “Just a little north of Bradleyville. Pretty much dead center in this section of the Mark Twain National Forest. And he was north of here. So, that cuts it down quite a lot.”

  “Shouldn’t I be doing this, sir? Since I’m the Seeker, you know?” I asked.

  He handed his pendulum over the seat to me with a gesture, and Shade and I climbed out of the back seat.

  Divinations were usually divided into two different types among the mystic world: spirit summoning, and aetheric or akashic. The first relied on summoning a (hopefully) helpful entity to guide you to the answers you were looking for. There were hundreds of minor spirits that could be summoned, but it was a fifty-fifty shot at getting one that would help you unless you had a specific name. That was why Ouija boards were so damn dangerous. They weren’t even real summ
oning tools. A game company had invented them back in the nineteenth century, but they were close enough to automatic writing to do the job. Using one for casual divination was a lot like opening your door in the middle of the night, leaving the lights on, and hoping that the first person who walked in the door wasn’t going to rob your ass blind. Aside from being kind of iffy on the results, it was really easy for someone to find out what you were looking for when you used spirits to do your scrying. Most spirits, even the helpful ones, really didn’t get things like loyalty or privacy, and the more helpful they were, the more likely they were to spill what they knew if someone summoned them and asked what you had been doing.

  That was why people like Dr. C and me used the akashic form, which was more like accessing a huge, aetheric database. I’d tried to explain how that worked to Lucas once, and he’d instantly said it was like cloud computing, only more intuitive. Everything ever known or experienced was imprinted into the akasha, the primordial aether that touched everything. It was what the Four Elements came from, and what Alchemy called quinta essentia, or quintessence. According to Dr. C, when I opened my Third Eye, I was seeing the place where the physical world was affecting the quintessential.

  Divination was more like watching a silent, foreign movie of what had happened. A silent, foreign film with mimes trying to act out a musical. The mind had to break it down into symbols or interpret it as images. That was why most people had to be in a trance state to do akashic divination, to make the left side of their brain shut the hell up and let the right brain finger paint like a kindergartener to show what it saw.

  Using a pendulum took that to an even more basic level, bypassing the language part of the brain and using the part of the body’s energy system that could touch the aether and interpret it directly as movement. Without a chart, pendulum divination, or radiesthesia, was limited to yes or no questions and pointing in a specific direction.

  I stepped away from the Range Rover and into the grass. After I was a few yards away, I let my eyes close and concentrated on letting the energy centers in my body, what most people called chakras, open up. The crown, or sahasrara energy center was the first one, since it was like the antenna that let me touch the akasha, then the brow, or ajna, the part that let me interpret it. The central chakras were the ones most people knew about, but there were also minor chakras along the arms and legs, and I opened those up to act like a conducting wire for the energy I needed. My limb chakras were pretty messed up from all the times Dulka had broken my arms and legs, then healed them the next morning. Still, I felt the tingle of energy slide down my left arm and through the cord to the little crystal pendulum. Truth was, you could use almost anything, but crystal was the easiest for most people to work with, since it naturally conducted energy. I felt it quiver as the energy hit the end of the cord, then flowed back up as it completed the loop.

  Almost immediately, the crystal started spinning in slow circles. I took a breath, held it, then let it out through my mouth to center myself. I started to concentrate on finding Mr. Chomsky’s trail, but every time I tried to get my mind on the subject, the pendulum stopped spinning. I knew better than to fight it. Instead, I went from specific to general.

  “Show me where I need to go,” I said after a few seconds.

  The words had barely come out of my mouth before it started swinging back and forth, almost in a straight line in front of me. But when I started forward, it started swinging side to side. My eyebrows collided as I turned around and walked the other way. That took me back toward the Range Rover. When I got to the driver’s side window, I stopped and gestured at Dr. C to roll it down.

  “Which direction am I facing?” I asked.

  He pulled a black compass from his pocket and opened it, then looked back at me.

  “Northwest. That’s a lot more specific than what I got.”

  “That’s funny, because I didn’t get anything when I asked about Mr. Chomsky. I asked where I needed to go, and it started pointing this way. Can I see your map?” I asked.

  He handed it to me as he got out.

  Shade followed him as I laid the map on the hood of the Range Rover and held the pendulum over it.

  Again, I focused my chakras, this time aligning the map in my head as the symbolic world to the pendulum, so that instead of trying to point to what I wanted in the world around me, it would show me where the right symbol on the map was for where I needed to be. Almost as soon as I set it to spinning above the map, it pulled tight against the chain. I let it draw my hand along, until the pull was straight down. Right over New Essex.

  “Crap,” I muttered. “We’re missing something, sir. Whatever we need is back in New Essex.” I tossed the pendulum down on the hood of the truck and took a step back. Between the slow headache that was creeping in behind my eyes and the dull ache of my busted ribs, I was feeling pretty cranky. It didn’t help that I’d been feeling like this place was familiar, like I’d been in the woods recently.

  “The trip isn’t completely wasted, Chance. You had no way of knowing this was going to happen. Let’s just stop someplace, get some lunch and make a day of it. We’ll figure the rest out when we get back home.”

  Lunch ended up being at a place with wooden floors and bench seats in the lobby. License plates and state flags were all over, next to retro magazine covers, fishing tackle and antique tools. Shade and I let Dr. C talk us into getting the country-fried steak.

  When they brought our food to us, I thought they were going to serve it straight from the frying pan on to our plates. Then it turned out the frying pans were our plates. And these weren’t your normal skillets, either. Each pan had to be more than a foot wide, and the steak took up more than half of it. Between the full pound of batter-and-gravy covered steak, the baked potato and the bowl of corn, I barely finished the whole thing.

  “I’m not gonna eat for a week,” I moaned melodramatically on the way back to the truck.

  Shade leaned against me. “Me, either,” she said contentedly.

  “I shouldn’t have had the potatoes and onions they brought.”

  “Or the other three rolls,” Dr. C added.

  “They threw them at me, I swear.”

  “So, I’ve been giving some thought to what we’re looking for,” Dr. C said once we were in the Range Rover and Shade had snuggled back under my arm. “Maybe you should do some more general divination when we get home. Yours was the only good read we got today.”

  “Guess I should. It’s my wyrd and all anyway, right? I just keep feeling like I’m missing something, and I don’t know what it is. I should be closer to finding this damn thing.”

  “Don’t let it bog you down, Chance. Remember, your emotions affect your magick. So do your doubts. You’re an apprentice mage, and your words and your thoughts have power. Be gentle with yourself.”

  “Be gentle with myself?” I hissed. “I don’t know if you missed this news flash or not, sir, but I’m not exactly battin’ a thousand here. Hells, I’m not even a very good apprentice.”

  “Why do you think that?” he asked.

  I wished I could believe the concern I heard in his voice, but there was just too much telling me it was so much bullshit.

  “It only took you three days to make your first touchstone. Draeden only took a month. It took me more than two months to get one to hold. And I know exactly how far behind I am in the rest of my studies, too. I’m never going to catch up.”

  “Chance, being a mage isn’t about what you know. It’s about what you do. Your magick is in the way you talk, the way you live your life, in the way you treat other people. It isn’t what’s in your head that makes you a good mage. It’s what lives in your heart. You’re the best damn apprentice I could hope for.”

  “Then why does it take me so long to learn stuff?” I asked around the tightness in my throat.

  “That’s simple. I had a better teacher than you do.”

  “Now who’s being hard on himself?” I asked, unable to
resist the comeback.

  “Sydney was a terrific teacher. I’m not so bad, but he was a lot better. So, you two relax, enjoy the ride back, and try not to steam up the windows, okay?”

  “We’ll behave,” Shade said. She put her mouth close to my ear and whispered, “Mostly.”

  When we got back to Dr. C’s place, Lucas and Wanda were waiting by the side door with Collins. Dr. C pulled into the garage at the back, and Shade and I tried to make it look like we hadn’t been making out the whole way back while Dr. C grabbed his staff from the back. Technically, it was true. We’d only been making out most of the way back. My mom would have probably gone off on him if she knew about it, but I didn’t think he was going to talk.

  “Any luck?” Wanda asked as we opened the door.

  “We narrowed it down to only a few thousand acres of forest, if you call that luck,” Dr. C said. He set his staff by the door, then grabbed one of his Coke bottles from beside the refrigerator and slumped into the heavy wooden chair at the end of the kitchen table. Collins sat at the other end, and Lucas and Wanda took the pair of chairs next to the kitchen window, on the other side of the table from me after they grabbed their own sodas from the fridge. Shade sat down beside me, and sat a bottle between us.

  “Demetrius, I could put on a pot of coffee if you’d like some,” Dr. C said.

  “Nah, I’m good. And you can call me Tré,” he replied. “We been through too much shit to be all formal.”

  “So, what’s next?” Lucas asked.

  “Chance found out today that specific divinations are probably not working because we’re looking for the wrong thing. So he’s going to do some more general scrying to see what he can find.”

  “What about your visions?” Wanda asked me.

  “You didn’t mention any visions, Chance,” Dr. C said.

  “I forgot all about them. I’ve had a lot on my mind. I saw the first one in the alley with Dani, then I had one Saturday morning at the house. The last one I had was at Dani’s house.”

  “What did you see?”