True Colors (The Demon's Apprentice Book 6)

by Ben Reeder

  “Shade can’t touch me,” Kain said. “She’s my docile little bitch now. I’ve broken her and I’ve taken her. She comes when I call and she does as she’s told.” I looked behind him and saw Brad shaking his head, his face a mask of fury.

  “Ha! Like that would ever happen,” I said, playing to his game.

  “She took some convincing, but in the end, I made her see things my way,” Kain said,swaggering toward me.

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” I said, feeding him a straight line.

  “Then believe. Shade, get out here, bitch.” He gestured toward the trees, and Shade stepped into view. Her head was down, her hair draped down on either side of her face. She walked toward us with her shoulders slumped, even her pace subdued.

  “I’m here, Jacob,” she said when she was a few feet away, never looking up.

  “Show these two gamma fucks whose woman you are.”

  “Shade, no,” Brad said, his anger washed away by the pain on his face.

  “This is who you wanted me to be, Brad,” she said, her voice flat. “It’s who you let Dominic try to make me, and who you wanted Jacob to bring back for you.” My fists clenched as I fought down my own reaction, and Shade took another step forward.

  “Tell them, Shade,” Kain siad, his eyes bright. “Tell them whose woman you are.”

  Shade closed the distance between them until she was standing only inches away. “Jacob Kain, I am…” she paused, finally looking up as he reached for her. “...my own woman, asshole.” Her right knee came up like a rocket, and drove Kain a few feet into the air. His eyes were wide, and even in mid-air, his hands went to cup his wounded pride. He hit the ground like a slab of beef, landing on his side, still curled around his deflated manhood, moaning in pain. She turned and walked toward me, now straight and tall like the goddess she was.

  “You rock,” I told her.

  “Damn straight I do,” she answered. “Whose man are you, baby?”

  “All yours,” I said with a smile. “All yours.”

  “And I’m your woman,” she said, leaning in for a quick kiss. “He’s got Dee locked up at the Wolmert Institute building, about a mile northeast of here.”

  “Thanks, babe,” I said. “I got you a little something, too,” I said. “Compulsis negatis.” The insidious hexes Kain had been using burned away by the same extra strength spell I’d used to break Dulka’s controls over me. Kain slowly got to his feet and looked at us.

  “I thought you would understand,” he said. “Only you were worth my time, worth the effort to break your will and mold you into something better. But instead, you slink back to this...half-breed mage. And worse yet,” he turned to me, “you take the worthless slut back, knowing what I did to her.” Shade and I turned to give him matching glares.

  “Who are you calling half-breed?” Shade asked, her voice going into a low growl.

  “The Gypsy mongrel who just lost his sister!” Kain said. He sprinted forward, transforming as he went. Shade sprang after, and I started running and casting. The cloud formed beneath my feet and lifted me into the air between steps. I arced up over the trees and saw Shade racing Kain, her lean black wolf gaining on his massive gray one. Once I cleared the trees, I spared a quick look to either side before swooping down behind them, leaning into the cloud’s forward motion. On my right, I could see Dr. C’s Range Rover bouncing across country, leaving long gouts of turf ripped apart in its wake. Sinbad’s bike followed it, the mane of white hair as distinctive as the paint job on the gas tank.On my left, two oversized foxes ran alongside Kain, one with five silver tails flowing behind it like ribbons on the breeze, and another with one tail half as long as her mother’s five. Further off, I could see a green Barracuda and a blue VW heading down one of the few remaining streets.

  As he went, Kain split into two, then six, then twenty wolves. Four split off to the left, and two went toward Shade. That left only Kain and me out front, with a dozen racing behind him in an uneven V. They were moving too fast for me to split my attention between speed and offense, so I poured on the speed, overtaking him in the last quarter mile and speeding toward the big, gothic building ahead of us. When I got to the front of the Wolmert Institute, I twisted in mid air and drop to the ground at the top of the steps.

  A terrible, dark presence pushed against my senses, one I remembered from my previous visit to Twisted Oaks Asylum, not far from Nevada. For anyone else, this might be something to avoid, but there was a familiar cruelty to it for me. I transferred the rod to my right hand and stretched my right arm behind me, toward the building. There was hate in this energy, a futile anger, a madness beyond the reach of any reason, and a certain purity to its malevolence. I smiled.

  I could work with this.

  Kain and his dozen furry doppelgangers ran up, and he transformed to human, wearing the same kind of fur belt I’d seen on Brad, but where Brad’s had only one fur strip, this one had more than a dozen that I could see, maybe more.

  “Can you feel it, little mageling?” Kain asked, his face twisting into a harsh smile. “There is evil here that will crush you. Did you think you beat me? I let you get here ahead of me. No, you ran to the one place I wanted you, herded like a sheep to the slaughter.”

  “So, this is you telling me I’m right where you want me?” I said, adding a few shades of sarcasm to my voice.

  “I’ll do better than that,” Kain laughed, then uttered an Infernal Syllable. Dark magick flooded me, hitting every chakra and energy point with a hundred thousand volts of pure evil. I felt it flare around me, an unholy fire that consumed all the light around me. Instead of trying to fight it, I focused on drawing it into the rod, into myself, on infusing myself with the raw wrongness of it. I let out a sound that was part roar and part primal scream. Every ugly, nasty impulse I ever had tore through me, and I focused my thoughts on one person: Jacob Kain.

  “Yes!” Jacob yelled. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” He uttered another Syllable, and the energy got even more intense. “You can’t last much longer!”

  “You think this hurts?” I roared. “You think this is painful to me?” I stepped forward, wrapping myself in the dark fire. “I was raised on this shit!” I threw a bolt of Hellfire at him. He jumped to one side, then all twelve of his wolves bounded forward, heading for the building. I roasted two with a single gout of Infernal power, but the others leaped through the windows, intent in one thing: killing Dee.

  In that moment, I made a painful decision. I turned my back on Kain. If not out of love for my sister, then for hatred of him, and the desire to deny him of any satisfaction. Another wolf went crispy, but then the rest were in the building. I started for the door, hoping to get in before they got to Dee.

  I got a feeling that something wasn’t right even as I twisted in place. My body went from leaning into a step to leaning back to get out of the way right before the heavy doors exploded outward. I was vaguely aware of someone flying past me, but my full attention was on the person on the other side of that threshold. Standing there enveloped in the dark fires of her pre-teen wrath was my little sister, her eyes blazing a purple energy, hair standing on end, fists ablaze with dark fire.

  “Leave me alone!” she shouted. Glass shattered at the sound of her voice, and eight wolves vanished just by being too close to her. She stepped out into the sunlight, then came to my side.

  “Dee?” I asked. She gave me a thin smile.

  “Now we match,” she said. A crack appeared in the perfect wall of darkness inside my head. This was my sister, tainted by the same kind of evil I had just willingly absorbed. Then her smile turned a little bit closer to normal, and she gave me a wink. “Let’s show this guy what we can do.”

  “Oh, this is perfect,” another voice came. I looked down to see that Kain had been joined by a young woman not much taller than Dee. She was pretty in a waifish way, looking younger than she probably was, her face round and cherubic, her eyes cruel. Her voice was familiar, but I was having a hard time pla
cing it.

  “Have we met?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, warlock. We’ve met before, back at the Franklin Academy. Let me remind you,” the girl said. “Fulmens!” A jagged bolt of electricity arced toward me, and I brought my right arm up. Runes on the leather vambrace I wore flared to life when the bolt struck it, and the electrical charge was absorbed into the matrix on the vambrace. Dr. Corwin had originally designed it to absorb Hellfire, but it worked well for pretty much and kind of plasma energy.

  “We meet again, Miss Hart,” I said, remembering where I’d last heard her voice with the attack. She’d gone missing from the Franklin Academy to hide her own involvement in the coven of warlocks that had been working there. She’d even gone so far as to use neglinom charms to mask the presence of her own room. We’d run into each other when I was trying to find and beat the coven during my single, short semester there. The last time we’d faced off, she had blown me out her window. Then, I’d been trying to stay under the radar. “But you missed.”

  “How did he get his magick back!” Hart demanded of Kain.

  “I don’t know. I didn't think he could!” Kain yelled back at her.

  “Well, he obviously can, and what were you thinking, bringing him here? He eats this kind of magick like candy!”

  While they were yelling at each other, I looked to Dee and nodded toward Hart and Kain. She nodded, so I tossed the rod to my left hand. Dee snarled and brought her fists up, channelling so much power that it lifted her off the ground. I leaned forward and yelled “Mitterre!” A column of fire flew across the space between us, then Dee’s assault hit like a tidal wave. Channeled by my rod, my attack felt like it was a hundred times stronger than it would have been on its own, while Dee’s was more just raw power thrown at her opponent. We matched, alright.

  Hart crossed her forearms in front of herself and held both of our attacks off for a full minute, but the sheer force left a pair of furrows in the ground from where her feet had slid along the turf. This girl’s shields were tough. More importantly, she knew how to use them. By letting the attack push her back, she’d effectively drained out attack of a little of its oomph, and instead of trying to brute force block it, her shield was angled so it deflected more than simply stopped the bulk of the energy. Dee and I broke off the attack at the same time, both feeling the dark power we were tapping into starting to wane. Steam rose from the ground around Hart, and a black circle of scorched earth surrounded her. Dee floated back down to the ground, then came over and held her hand up in a fist. I tapped my knuckles against hers, and felt the thrum of power passing between us. My eyes went wide for a second, then I forced my attention back to Josie Hart.

  “You failed,” Hart said over her shoulder to Kain. “He still has his magick, and now his damn sister is throwing spells around, too. I told you not to involve his family.”

  “We can still kill him,” Kain said. Beside me, Dee was gathering power for what I assumed was another attack, her eyes bright with an unnatural glee. I put a hand out to her and shook my head.

  “I don’t need him dead, and I don’t need him like this,” Hart said. “You’re on your own. At least one of us did their job right.” She turned to Dee and me. “I’ll see you two again soon enough.” She smiled and brought her hand to an amulet. Then she was gone. There was no flash, no sound, she was just not there, like a bad film edit or something.

  “I don’t like her,” Dee said, then her gaze fell on Kain. “And I don’t like him.” She took a step in his direction, and I put a hand on her shoulder. The surge of power started again the instant I touched her, and I knew what I had to do. The longer she was exposed to this kind of corruption, the worse it would get, until she was consumed with rage and hate. I couldn’t let that happen to my little sister, not when I could stop it. With a grimace, I shut down the connection to the Woltmer Institute’s tainted energy. Dee staggered and fell to her hands and knees, and Kain thought it was a good idea to come at us.

  “Ictus,” I said with a casual wave of the rod. Even weakened as I was, the rod amplified my TK bolt to the strength of a small howitzer and sent Kain flying back, proving my suspicions correct. My astral connection had bonded to Dee, not the local magick energy. And without me trying to vacuum up the dirtiest, most polluted source of power in the area, Dee was still connected to magick normally. And my little sister was strong in the Force.

  Dee came to her feet, her face twisted with rage, her fist drawn back for a punch. I caught her knuckles in my palm. “Dee,” I said, and her eyes focused on me. “Chill, sis.” She shook her head, then looked around.

  “Wow,” she said. “That was weird.”

  “Yeah, now get behind me.” I turned to face Kain and take stock of things. Brad had finally caught up, and Kain had summoned a troupe of his own wolves, almost two dozen strong. On my right, Kim and Amanda were facing down a group of Weres’, with Shade holding down the middle, and Dr. C, Lucas, Wanda and Sinbad facing down the left side. And not far behind all of them was the Mulani Clan, advancing with guns drawn.

  “Jacob Kain!” Sinbad yelled. “Stand down and get the hell out of my state.”

  “Fuck you!” Kain said. “I’ll kill you and take over all your damn packs. I challenge you for alpha of your packs.”

  “Hell, no,” Sinbad yelled back. “That’s not how we do things.”

  “It’s how I do it, so you either face me or-” Whatever threat he was going to make, Shade shut him up with a punch. He hit the ground and slid to a stop at the base of the steps. Brad leaped to his side, standing over him in a protective crouch.

  “No, asshole,” she snarled, apparently unconcerned with the fact that she was standing in the middle of his wolves. “You don’t get to come here and tell us how to run our packs.”

  “Shut up, bitch!” Kain yelled, coming to his feet. I felt his will hammer at Shade, but this time, she was ready for him. With his hexes burned away, all he had was his own mental strength, and he was no match for her.

  “No,” Shade snarled. “That mind control bit doesn’t fly here. We follow who we choose, if anyone. I lead my pack because they give me that.”

  “I’m an alpha, you will treat me-” Kain went to backhand her, but she caught his fist against her forearm and stopped it cold, and stopped his words just as hard.

  “Only tame wolves do the alpha-beta thing,” Shade said. “I’m a free bitch, mister. And you’re in my house.”

  “Then die in it,” Kain said, reaching for his waist. He groped for a moment, not finding what he was looking for.

  “No,” Brad said from behind him. Kain turned to see his belt in Brad’s hands. “I won’t let you hurt her. Not any more.” He turned and leaped for the edge of the circle, but Kain was still too fast. Even as the younger wolf leaped, Kain transformed to his hybrid form and slashed Brad’s back open.

  Brad landed in an ungainly heap, and Kain was in the air the moment he touched the ground. So was Shade. Mere inches behind him and in a slightly shallower arc, she also effectively blocked my shot at him. But I knew Shade, and I was pretty sure of what she was really doing. I took the steps two at a time and hit the ground a microsecond before they did. True to my guess, Shade landed in a crouch that covered her injured ex-boyfriend and also knocked Kain off target. He hit the ground, rolled to his feet and drew his hand back, claws out.

  “Ictus!” I yelled, sending a TK bolt screaming over Shade’s arched back to slam into Kain. He tumbled across the turf a little ways, then came up snarling and spitting. If I expected him to jump back at me or do something equally dramatic and easy to counter, I was wrong. Dead wrong if Jacob Kain had anything to do with it. He was still in hybrid form, but he stayed low to the ground, and he came at me in a zig-zagging path. I blew big chunks of real estate up when I had clear shots, but before I knew it, he was on me, and I had to duck under his claws.

  Tactically, it was a smart move, since it kept anyone else from jumping in to help for fear of hurting me or getting hurt the
mselves. Not that there was anyone who could help me. Not all of Kain’s wolf buddies had come from his belt. Easily half a dozen were still slowing down my friends. Even with my upgraded fighting skill and the residual flexibility from being turned, I knew that I was only holding off the inevitable if I stayed on the defensive. And the rare opportunity to go all out against something without worrying about hurting or killing them? That was pure bonus.

  I dodged a slash from Kain, then kicked at his right knee, enjoying the sound of it breaking. He went down on his good knee, and I grabbed his arm, pulled back with one hand and landed a shot across his scapula to dislocate it. He was staggering to his feet even before I could step away from the second blow, so I did a spinning kick that hit him in the side of the head and staggered him again. I channeled the momentum from the spin into a punch that broke bones in his back, then followed up with a series of kidney punches that kept him off balance long enough for Shade to jump in with a slash across his side that sprayed blood on the steps. It spin him around to face me, and I unloaded a side kick into his jaw that knocked him back onto the steps. No sooner than he landed, Shade ran at him and delivered a kick that sent him flying across the steps to slam into one of the statues flanking the entrance.

  He scrambled to his feet almost as soon as he hit the ground, so I sent a TK bolt at him, bouncing him off the statue to land at Shade’s feet again. She punched down, cracking the concrete around them and bouncing him into the air to meet her fist again. Only this time, we’d given him too much time to recover. He swept his leg around and knocked Shade’s feet out from under her, then kicked her at me. I caught her in the kinetic sponge, but by the time she came to the ground, he was on me, and I was frantically ducking and weaving away from his attacks. But by focusing on me, he left himself open to Shade, and she came at him from behind with a flying leap.