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

by Ben Reeder

  Once I made it through the wall of grinning, leather-clad Pack members, I went to Shade, who was still standing next to her bike.

  Deek was beside her, and he had his hand on her wrist.

  “I don’t care; this kind of crap has got to stop. Humans are not pack,” Deek hissed at her.

  “They stood with us when no one else did, so they’re part of my pack. Deal with it or get the hell out,” she growled back.

  “Someone needs to put you in your place, woman,” Deek said.

  Shade lost it. She pulled her wrist free and shoved him back, then came off her bike at him with her finger in his chest.

  “I spent three years being put in my place by Dominic King, you smug little pureblood! I wasn’t born this way. I got turned because a horny eighth grader wanted a permanent girlfriend! Where was your pretty little ass while I got raped every week? Where were you when he forced us to shake down humans and rob people? Where?” She had backed him up until he was at the curb on the other side of the road.

  “That was his right, he was your alpha,” Deek said.

  “I’M the alpha now! ME! And this is the way it’s gonna be.” She turned her back on him and strode across the street toward me.

  His eyes turned hard and he started after her.

  “We’ll see about that,” he said.

  I gave him a hard stare, and he stopped in his tracks for a second. The rest of the pack was behind me, and I could feel their hostility toward him.

  Then, he plastered a smile on his face and sauntered our way.

  “What’s up tonight?” Shade said as she slipped her arm around my waist.

  “Collins and I got an invite from Thraxus to come out and talk. We can each take one person with us. You can guess who I’m taking,” I said.

  Shade leaned in and grazed her teeth across my neck as I was talking, then smiled at me.

  “Bryce?” she asked innocently. She even batted her eyelashes at me.

  “I didn’t think anyone knew,” I quipped, and a round of chuckles went up.

  “I’m going,” Deek interjected.

  “No, you’re not,” I said just as quickly.

  “We’ve already been over this already. You can’t stop me from coming with you.”

  “I don’t have to. This time, it’s invitation only, and you’re not on the guest list. I’m taking Shade. Collins chooses his guest if he wants one. No one else allowed. Period.”

  Deek glared at me, then took a step back.

  “I’m not taking anyone,” Collins said from behind me. “You done layin’ your dick down, there, Deek? Cuz the big kids got places to be.”

  I gave a quick chuckle as Shade and I headed over to his car and worked out the logistics. I would ride with Shade, and he’d follow us. It wasn’t like he didn’t know where Cromwell Manor was, but on paper, he was still keeping an eye on me. One of the guys, Riley, loaned me his helmet, not much more than a plastic bowl, and his riding goggles.

  Before we got on her bike, Shade stopped and faced me, then pulled her collar aside and bared her neck to me. Without thinking, I pulled her to me and put my teeth to her throat and bit. The now-familiar tremble was harder than before, but when she looked at me again, her eyes were normal. I looked over her shoulder, and saw the rest of the pack nodding among themselves. This had been as much for their benefit as for her. And I wasn’t above liking how much it pissed Deek off, either.

  Chapter 17

  ~ Let your host believe that you fear him in his own house. ~ Infernal saying

  The ride out was a pleasant blur of streetlights accompanied by the hum of the engine. Shade went easy on the way there, but I still held on like I was never letting go. The gates opened for us when we arrived, and we took the drive up.

  “Why didn’t we do this the last time we were here?” Shade asked once we got off the bike.

  “We didn’t have an invitation. The traditional version is that you don’t presume on your host’s stable. The cold-hearted, practical version? You don’t leave your horse where your host can steal it.”

  Collins pulled up behind us and got out. He slid the gun belt around his hips and buckled it into place, then bent down and tied it down by his knee.

  “I feel like Wyatt Earp or Cherokee Bill,” he muttered as he straightened.

  I followed his example and slid the paintball holster around my hips and buckled it to my left leg. My wand went into my front pocket on my right side, along with my touchstone. And, just in case, I tucked my new knife in my back pocket on the left side. Because I’d brought it, I probably wouldn’t need it, and I was good with that. I wasn’t ready to spend any more time unconscious this week. Absently, I wished I had a cinnamon Firebomb, but I’d eaten the last one hours ago. With my backpack settled on my back, and Shade at my side, we headed for the doors

  They opened when we were about ten steps away, and the same doorman waited for us. He stepped aside and gestured for us to enter. We stepped in, and Collins head swiveled around, his gaze stopping on each of the vampires lounging about in the room. Instead of leading us toward the staircases, the doorman led us through the doors under the balcony, then turned to his right and led us down a carpeted hallway. The hall was dim, and the dark wood paneling only made it feel murkier as we went. Overhead, we could hear music and laughter for the first few yards, then silence descended like a shroud. The door-vamp turned to his left after a little ways in, and opened another set of double doors.

  Inside was a room that looked big enough to hold a soccer game in, with a hardwood floor and floor to ceiling rows of windows that sliced the room into neat strips of red moonlight and darkness. We stepped in behind the doorman, and I could see the lone figure in the darkness, silhouetted in front of the pair of French doors set in the center of the opposite wall. The serrated look to the ears and the way the moonlight shone against his bare scalp revealed Thraxus to me. He turned to face us, and two crimson points of light blazed before us. Collins stopped in his tracks, but he kept his hand off his gun. Shade and I found each other’s hand in the darkness, and I could feel her shoulders tensing up through her arms.

  “Good evening, Detective Collins,” Thraxus’ smooth voice filtered through the room. “Apprentice Fortunato, Lady Shade, it’s good to see you again, though I wish the circumstances were better.”

  As he spoke, the lights slowly came up to illuminate the room. Calling it a library fell way short. It had enough bookshelves, reading tables, and map tables to put Dr. C’s to shame. But it didn’t stop there. The wall to my left was bare of shelves, covered instead with glass display cases, armor stands, and weapon racks. Paintings covered the far wall, portraits of people I didn’t know.

  “I wish they were better, too,” I told him after I finished giving the room the once over.

  “Well, no matter how unfortunate the context of our meeting, good manners can smooth the way considerably. Perhaps you’d be so good as to make introductions, Apprentice Fortunato?” Thraxus gave me a smile that never parted his lips, and gestured with one too-long hand at Collins.

  “Detective Demetrius Collins, this is Lord Thraxus, chief vampire of New Essex. Lord Thraxus, you seem to already know Detective Collins.” I hoped I hadn’t screwed that up too much.

  Thraxus nodded, but kept his hand to himself.

  “I do indeed,” Thraxus said smoothly. “First of all, Detective, I must offer my apologies for your ill treatment at the hands of my underling’s people. Overt use of force against public servants is forbidden by our oldest traditions.”

  “And what keeps me from bustin’ you and your boy for assaulting a police officer?” Collins asked.

  “Detective Collins, you could not hope to do more than inconvenience me briefly. The fallout of that inconvenience is what concerns us. If the existence of my kind were to be revealed as more than mere legend to the cowan, open warfare would result. The last time my kind warred openly with mortals, Lemuria and Atlantis were both above water at the outset. Your
civilization has yet to recover even half the knowledge it lost. We two must avoid that at all costs.”

  “And I’m supposed to be good with an apology?” Collins asked.

  I hid a smile at that, but Shade didn’t look amused.

  “No, Detective. Though you do not understand the value of even so small a thing from me, it is not all I bring to the table tonight. But there is more to be asked of you, I fear. When you first stepped into this world some months ago, you realized that many of the rules you held sacred no longer applied. I’m afraid you’re going to have to slaughter a few more of those sacred cows tonight.” Thraxus put his fingertips against each other and sat back.

  “How the hell did you know about that?” Collins demanded a few seconds later.

  “I have sources within the New Essex police department. And of course, when an alpha werewolf is killed, word spreads behind the Veil. And yet your report reads like a simple exchange of gunfire, it leaves no questions, and does not attempt to rationalize anything unusual. Clearly, a fabrication crafted to conceal the true course of events, something a man who was incapable of understanding the Veiled world would never think to do. Thus, I surmise that you are capable of bending the rules of the world you were born to. It is my estimation of you, Detective Collins, that where other men who wear a badge are men of the law, you are a man of justice.”

  Collins gave him a hard stare, and I could see the emotions playing across his face. On the one hand, he wanted to play this straight, like a cop should. On the other, he knew that there was more at stake than due process. No matter which way he went, he was going to betray part of what he believed in. He either followed the rules that his badge said to enforce, or he avoided starting a potential war between vampires and humans. I pitied him until he turned to me.

  “He tellin’ the truth? About a war?” he asked.

  “Well, the demons tell a different version, but yeah, story goes the humans tried to take pretty much everyone else on. Didn’t end well for anyone,” I told him. He nodded, then turned back to Thraxus.

  “Okay, so apology accepted,” he said with a little more of the confidence I usually saw from him. “Now what?” Thraxus gave him a closed mouthed smile that sent chills down my spine and made me wonder if we’d just played into something.

  “I offer you what you desire most, Detective. Justice.” Thraxus said it with the same relish as a hungry man describing a steak.

  “That depends on whether we both think that’s the same thing.”

  “Oh, I assure you, our definitions will coincide. Tell me, do you trust the boy?” he asked, with a nod toward me.

  Collins shrugged. “Most of the time.”

  “Do not play at being coy, detective. When you entered the room, you checked the right side first, the side opposite the boy. When you didn’t trust your own judgment, you turned to him. You treat him as a comrade in arms, in spite of your desire to see him as a child. Now, I ask you again. Do. You. Trust. The boy?” The vampire’s last words hit like hammers, and Collins scowled at him.

  “Yeah, I do. With my damn life.”

  “What of the lives of your nieces?” Thraxus asked.

  Collins and I both took a step forward. Collins’ hand fell to the butt of the pistol at his side, and my hand tightened around my wand. He looked back over his shoulder at me before he answered.

  “I watched this kid kill a werewolf to protect his mom and his kid sister. He coulda backed down from your boy over a girl he don’t even know, but he didn’t, and he wouldn’t go to a safehouse so he could keep looking for her. So, yeah, I trust him with my nieces’ lives, too. Now get to the damn point!” His words ignited something in my heart, a feeling that only being Dee’s hero had compared to.

  “Well said, sir. The point is this. As an officer of the law, your actions are limited. As an apprentice mage, however tenuous his status may be, young Chance here still has considerably more leeway to act on both sides of the Veil. You do still have a claim to vengeance against Etienne. Were you to convey your claim to Chance, who also has a legitimate complaint against him, I would have no choice but to rescind my protection as his liege. You would not be acting in your official capacity as an officer of cowan law, and apprentice Fortunato would be saving the lives of both your families. Assuming he survived.”

  The feeling of pride deflated in my chest at his last sentence.

  “Why the change of heart, Thraxus?” I asked.

  “I will not speak of it here. Come with me, and you will see. The others must stay. What I am about to show you is not for their eyes.” He glided around the desk and gestured for me to follow him as he made for the door. The double doors swung open wide when he was ten steps away. I gave Collins and Shade a nod before I followed him.

  He led me down the hallway, and stopped by an alcove. Set inside was a narrow door with a keypad beside it, with a blinking red light at the top. His hand moved too quickly for me to follow it, and the little light at the top went from red to green. The door popped open, and he led me down a set of spiral stairs into darkness. If he hadn’t guaranteed safe passage in writing, I would never have followed the scary master vampire down the dark stairway under the very old, very spooky house. In spite of that, I still had plenty of doubts gnawing at my spine.

  Finally, we came to level ground, and followed the hallway to a heavy looking metal door set flush with the wall around it. There was no knob, no handle, no lock. All he did was put his hand against the door for a few seconds and it popped open. We went to a second door, this one an old style black vault door with gold trim around it and a heavy brass dial in the middle and a thick handle above it. He spun the combination so fast I could barely see when the dial stopped, and turned the handle to pull it open.

  The room beyond the doorway was lit by a flickering blue light, and when he led me inside, I stopped and stared. Four heavy, black metal pieces hung against the back wall, each circled with a ring of blue-white fire. There was a gap on the right side, between the third and fourth pieces, where I guessed another one should have been. Even from across the room, I could feel the dark, heavy malevolence of them. With so many in one place, they pressed against my mystic senses, even though they were dormant.

  “No cut is so deep as betrayal, nor any sting so sharp as that of treachery, no matter how many times I bear its scars. Even to admit to a mortal such as you that you were right loses much of its sting,” Thraxus said heavily. “I discovered the loss of one of my fragments last night. Coupled with all that you have brought before me, I can come to no other conclusion than betrayal by the childe I sired.”

  “Yeah, your life must be one big suck-fest,” I said flatly. “So, I guess you want me to stop Etienne’s little power play for you. I’m already headed that way to hand him my own box of ass-kicking, so why not toss in a little something from dad, right?”

  I tried to give the other four fragments a closer look without making it obvious. This was the largest single collection of G’Honn fragments I was likely to actually ever see with my own eyes, and each one had a wealth of magickal knowledge from the time of Atlantis and Lemuria. Most magi would sell body parts to get even one, and some had died trying.

  “Perhaps a little something to sweeten the deal is in order. I will allow you fifteen minutes to study the fragments I still retain in exchange for recovering the one that was lost.”

  “An hour,” I countered automatically.

  “Are you attempting to haggle with me?” Thraxus asked incredulously.

  “Do you have anyone else who can go put the beat down on Etienne?” I demanded.

  “Twenty minutes. No more.”

  “Forty-five, or you send in the second string.”

  “Thirty minutes.”

  “I can live with half an hour. Alone.”

  I saw his upper lip start to creep up, but it stopped before the points of his teeth were exposed.

  “Agreed,” he growled. “Your time starts now.” He turned his back and le
ft.

  When I heard the inner vault door shut, I shrugged my backpack off and unzipped it. My sketchbook came out, and the charcoal pencils Dr. C had insisted I buy to help with my visualization skills. I tore eight sheets out and headed for the first fragment. As I got close to it, I could feel the prickling sensation on the edge of my mystical senses that came from only one thing: Hellfire.

  One of the few advantages to being able to summon Hellfire was the ability to temporarily dispel it. It wasn’t something I could do in a fight, but with a spell like this one, that was set on a specific spot, I could disrupt it for a few minutes. For the umpteenth time, I wished for a cell phone with a camera, even if I wasn’t sure the image would take. Old-school magick and electronics didn’t always mix well.

  I went to the first one on the left and held my right hand out until I could feel the phantom heat of the flames against my aura. Once I was familiar with how it felt, I moved my hand along the outside of the ring, until I found the tiny variance where the circle had been started and stopped.

  “Perturbare incaendium Infernum,” I intoned.

  The flames flickered, then chased themselves around the circle. I repeated the incantation three more times before it made it all the way around the circle and stayed out. The real trick to this was that I had no idea how long they would stay out. It was a terrific motivator to work fast. The paper was slightly smaller than the fragment, so I centered it on it and rubbed the length of the charcoal stick against the page until the whole thing was covered. Once that was done, I grabbed another sheet and did the edges in four vertical lines, with the sides labeled as carefully as I could with the little time I allowed myself.