The Demon's Apprentice

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by Ben Reeder


  The words were in Latin, like most of my spells. Latin gave my words power because it was the language I used only for magick. It helped my brain get into the place it needed to be to shape my will into reality, because I didn't have any association with the words other than magick. I sat with my legs crossed, back straight, and put my hands on my knees. My eyelids lowered as I started the next step.

  The words and symbols of the circle had created the start of a seeking spell. Now all I needed to do was give it something to seek. Magick was shaped by the will, and the will, as much as most magi hated to admit it, was fueled by emotion. I'd seen rage drive people to impossible acts of stupidity, and love drive them to superhuman acts of courage and strength. I focused on my few memories of Mr. Chomsky. He'd only known me for a few hours, but he'd believed in me, seen things in me that no one else had. He'd offered to teach me. Me: a warlock, a demon's slave. In his eyes, a demon's apprentice. And he'd been willing to risk his life for me to do it. He didn't know me, but he believed in me. My breath caught at that thought, and it felt like someone had poured a pound of sand down my throat as my eyes stung. After years of being a slave, having someone see me for something other than an Infernal plaything had felt really, really good.

  And someone had taken that away from me. Hurt and anger boiled over in my head as I concentrated on the loss, and on my hunger for vengeance on the person who'd killed Mr. Chomsky. The first person who’d seen who I really was and offered me a hand in friendship had been taken from me, and I wanted to find the thing who had done that in the worst way. All my thoughts focused in on that one goal, and I uttered the spell again. The words forced their way through my teeth as I scooped up the pile of copper filings and held them in my left palm. I held the amethyst pendant in my right hand as I focused my will on the copper filings. They started to glow as I repeated it a second time, and started to float and swirl over my palm as I chanted the third time, letting the pendant drop to dangle from its chain as they spun. When the pendant started to rotate in the same direction, I stood with the little metal slivers spinning like a miniature tornado over my palm and moved the toe of my boot to the purple ring of chalk.

  “Invenio!” I hissed, as I broke the circle with my boot. The whirlwind of metal scattered in two directions: some going toward the school, and the rest flying the opposite way. My pendulum started swinging back and forth. I took a couple of steps to one side, and the pendant's swing changed, one half of its arc pointing toward the window frame on the grass. When I moved in the direction of the swing, it got faster and faster, until I had it suspended right over a spot where it spun in place. Bingo.

  I dropped to one knee and looked down at the grass, but I couldn’t see anything worth picking up. Whatever the spell had homed in on was small; I had to practically lie on the ground before I saw it. A single hair, thick, coarse, and brown, was sticking up among the blades of grass with bits of copper filings sticking to it. I kind of doubted that the cops would have seen it, or even given it much attention. Only my fine-tuned little spell had led me to it. I plucked the lone hair from the grass and slipped it one of the baggies, then stood up and swung the pendulum in a circle to reset it.

  It started swinging back and forth again right away, only this time, it barely moved when I took a few steps to zero it in. I stood there for a few moments trying to figure that out. If it had been here, even one step would have made it change direction a lot. Then I remembered that some of the filings had gone flying the other way, and I looked the other way. Past the end of the wings of the school was an open field, backed by a neat line of wood privacy fences. I chuckled as I started following the pendulum toward the fence line.

  New Essex cops were good at dealing with normal crimes. I'd been lucky to catch a single fiber outside the actual crime scene. I figured they'd probably scoured the lab pretty thoroughly, and had all kinds of things they couldn't identify. But whatever had ripped the window out of its frame to come in had left the same way, courtesy of Mr. Chomsky. The cops had searched the area for thirty feet or so outside the building, but anything that a full-fledged wizard had hit was probably going to fly a lot further than that before it hit the ground. I almost didn't need the pendulum to find where it had landed. A five-foot wide section of fence was simply obliterated, and it had taken out a good-sized section of someone's tool shed, too.

  The last thing I needed was a trespassing charge, so I snuck a quick look in before I slipped in through the gap in the fence. The pendulum led me to the crumpled remains of a riding lawnmower. An inch-long sliver of something horn-like was glistening with copper filings, stuck on the edge of the mower's bent blade. There was even a little blood on it. I snagged the sliver, then turned one of the baggies inside out to use as a kind of a glove to scrape some of it off, then pulled it back right-side out when I was done.

  I reset the pendulum again, but it just hung there after that. And here I’d been hoping for something vague, like a wallet with an ID in it, or perhaps a taped confession. It probably wasn't nearly as much as the cops had, but the things I could do with what I had were a lot more effective. Talon, fur, and blood, I mused as I jogged back across the field. More than enough for a dozen curses I knew.

  It took only a few seconds to collect Mom's bike and head for the back of the school through the breezeway that ran through the middle of the wing. The sound of a door opening and closing made me pull up short, then I heard a voice I recognized.

  “Damn, sergeant, this is wrong!” I heard the familiar tenor of Officer Collins.

  “Collins, I know you don’t like it, but it’s not our call,” came a familiar woman’s voice.

  I nosed the bike forward and hoped they weren’t looking my way. Luck was with me. Detective Roberts stood just behind and to the left of the tall, lean form of Collins. He turned away from her for a moment, and I heard the rasp of a lighter and smelled tobacco smoke a moment later. When he turned back, I could see his eyes were ablaze with anger. He paused long enough to blow smoke away from Roberts before he spoke again.

  “It may not be our call, but it’s still the wrong call, Sergeant. We both know that,” Collins growled.

  “Look, I know you don’t agree with Captain Sloan, but…”

  “This is no animal attack, Holly,” Collins interrupted her. “This is a murder. At a high school. Sloan is just trying to cover his ass.”

  “What would you suggest he tell the press, Collins?” Roberts demanded. “We think a creature with four inch claws tore a teacher apart and ate part of him?”

  “It’d sure make good copy,” he said.

  “For the World Post, maybe!” she shot back. I stifled a snicker at the irony in that, because most of the time, the World Post was partly accurate. Most of what they wrote about actually did happen, but the reporters’ understanding of what they saw or heard were usually a long way from right. But no one took a tabloid seriously.

  “What if he just said something brilliant like, ‘No comment,’ or that line about not commenting on an active investigation, or some shit like that? Like he does when it’s something he can get the big, believable headlines for later on.”

  “Collins, you can’t make waves on this. The only reason you're here is because of the Fortunato kid. If you buck the captain on this, he’ll bust you down to traffic in a heartbeat, if he doesn’t fire you just to get your ass off the force. You’re too good a cop to let that happen.”

  “I’m too good a cop to let this happen, Holly. Whoev…whatever the hell did this, it did it at a school. What if the next time we come out here, it’s to mop up some kid off the gymnasium floor?” Collins hissed. Roberts gasped, and I even found my nose wrinkling at the thought. But, to her credit, she didn’t have a good answer to his question.

  “Point,” she said, holding up one hand in surrender. “Look, let me talk to my father. The Gang Task Force is usually short-handed for things like school presence and Drug Awareness presenters. I’ll see if we can get you assigned to them
for the next week or so, okay?”

  “Aw, hell,” Collins spat.

  “It’ll keep you here, at least for a little while, and out from under Sloan’s thumb,” Roberts said quickly. “I know you don't think he had anything to do with it, but keep an eye on the Fortunato kid. His story checked out, but I know he’s hiding something.”

  For a moment, Collins glared at her, then gave a nod and shrug. “The Spartan’s kid? Hell, yeah he’s hiding something.” I stifled a curse. Being on the cops’ radar was going to make this a lot tougher.

  “Damn straight. But, what? Now get your ass back down to precinct and get your report done. If it’s on the chief’s desk before Sloan shoots his mouth off to the press, we might be able to at least keep the case open, even if it’s put on the back burner.”

  At Roberts’ order, Collins headed for the other side of the building: away from me, thankfully. Once he was away, she reached into her jacket and pulled out a cigarette of her own and lit it, taking a deep drag with her eyes closed. She exhaled the plume of smoke, and I could see her trying to relax. Today, I didn’t envy her for her job.

  I turned the bike around and was silently grateful that there were cops like her and Collins working this case. Mr. Chomsky deserved better than a lame-ass lie about his death. Even if no one else ever knew, I wanted his killer. And even if they didn't catch the son of a bitch, at least they were really trying. I rode home with a sense of accomplishment growing in me. In the satchel at my side were the beginnings of my spell arsenal, and I had put a dent in Dulka’s resources in the process. I ran the math in my head as the city streets flew beneath my wheels. Between the physical and mystical beat-down I'd laid on him, Dulka would be at least two months in recovering to the point where he could get another apprentice and at least another six after that to get them trained. And I didn't envy his new familiar when the poor idiot had to come back with the news that he had only half the money he thought he had.

  The clock in the living room showed a few minutes past one when I got home. Only a couple of hours left before my time wasn't my own again, and I needed a weapon if I was going to handle Mr. Chomsky's killer on my own.

  Magick is mostly done in the practitioner’s head. The caster has to be in the right frame of mind to channel mystic energy through his or her body and create the desired effect out in the world. That takes years and years to get good at. Eventually, you get to the point where you can simply will something to happen without saying a word or moving a muscle. Usually, by that time, you’re older than dirt, and you can do more with your mind than with your body, anyway.

  For everyone who’s not a Master, there are foci and rituals. Tools act as a physical focus for the energy you’re trying to channel, like a magnifying glass turning a sunbeam into a pinpoint of heat that can start a fire. That’s why the materials and shapes and squiggly marks on them are so damn important. Foci are also symbols that help the mind to get in magick making mode. Ritual helps the mind tune itself like a radio to the right station for magick. The words themselves are important, but not the language, because you only need to understand what they were supposed to mean. The big thing was, it had to be something outside of your normal everyday language. The more often you used a word for normal things, the more it became tuned to the mundane station in your head. Even without the Gift, if you had enough tools and toys, and followed the ritual just right, you could get some halfway decent results every now and then.

  Tools, because they’re symbols, and they’re usually made with stuff that is naturally sympathetic to magickal energy anyway, take spells very easily. That was going to be important today. I pulled out the copper tubing and caps, and grabbed some of the red leather strips I'd picked up at the craft store. The quartz chips and lodestone from the Hive joined the rest of the stuff on my desk, and I started constructing a power rod.

  A power rod isn’t really a “rod” so much as a copper wand filled with lodestone and quartz fragments, since lodestone acts as a terrific amplifier for magickal energy, and quartz is a good focusing element for it. Copper is a great conductor, and all it takes then is a decent-sized quartz crystal on the end to act as the focuser. Putting the materials together only took a few minutes. Etching the power runes on the copper rod was the time-consuming part. They were like the circuitry that guided the flow of magickal power that the lodestone and quartz created, and turned it from unfocused energy into a bolt of pure kinetic energy that would hit like a minotaur.

  The sigil sheet Ari had sold me was the best I'd ever seen, and she hadn't stopped with just marking the sigils down. Ratios for placement, angles of relationship, and order of inscription lined the margin, making it worth every single ounce of silver I'd paid for it. It took me over an hour to etch the sigils into the copper tube. My eyes stung and my hands ached from holding the stylus when I finally straightened up from my work and stretched.

  My shoulders weren't too happy with me, and I still had several steps to go. The packets of carnelian and garnet chips I'd bought had to be ground into a powder and mixed with the hawthorn oil, then worked into the sigils I'd just etched. Mom's marble mortar and pestle were perfect for the job, but crushing gems wasn't easy work, even with the right tool. I could almost hear Mr. Gonzalez's voice in my ear, telling me there was a tool for every job, and a job for every tool, as I twisted the marble pestle to grind the gemstones into a powder. My forearms were burning by the time I got them to the right consistency and added half of the hawthorn oil to the mix. The oil made it a sort of conduit, and made it stick better in the etched grooves of the sigils.

  Once the oil was mixed in, I dug the point of my knife into the soft flesh of my thumb, and added three drops of my blood to link the magick to me. I slowly followed the lines I'd carefully carved into the copper, and made sure each one was properly filled in. I wrapped it gently with strips of red leather to hold the powdered gemstones in place, and pulled out the charging spell.

  Spelling scrolls always fascinated me because they were so complex. The activation phrases were scattered among the symbols that covered the page, in colored and metallic inks to store the energy. I closed my eyes and picked up the rod in my left hand, with the scroll in my right. I was left-handed, so my left was my projecting hand, and my right was my receiving hand, opposite of most people. As I uttered each phrase, the corresponding symbol on the page flared to life, its magickal power contained by the border until I said the last phrase, when it erupted into flame, and the power flowed up my right arm, down my left, and into the rod. I could feel the power slide through the sigils I'd carved into the copper with the stylus as the spell took hold and turned it from a collection of random parts into a potent weapon.

  The sweet scents of hay and clover filled the room as the spell finished, and I could feel the now-complete TK rod hum under my fingertips, ready to be charged. I had a lead on Mr. Chomsky's killer, and a weapon to use against him when I found him. For my first day as a sleuth, I figured I was doing okay. I wondered if he would have been proud of me.

  Evidently, my little sister didn't do pink. She came storming into the house with a purple backpack held by the straps in one little fist, and a bag from Bangles And Beads dangling from the other. Her feet thumped on the stairs as she ran up them, and Mom came in a few seconds behind her.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said from behind my book. “You're late, young lady,” I looked over it at her with a mock frown. Being flat on my back robbed me of every bit of seriousness I had.

  “Feet off the couch, Chance,” she said without missing a beat.

  My boots hit the floor and I sat up at her tone. “Is everything okay?” Her head tilted toward me and one eyebrow went up. “I mean, aside from one of my teachers getting killed in his classroom, and me being a suspect,” I clarified.

  “No, I think that pretty much covers it, son,” she said as she sat down beside me. “Are you all right?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so. It doesn't seem like it's real, ya know? I mean, I
only knew him the one day and all, but…” My thoughts went back to the bloody room, and I fought back a shudder.

  “What you saw today was really terrible,” Mom said. Her hand was warm on my arm, and the contact helped me anchor myself as my head started to spin a little.

  “Big time,” I said with a little nod.

  “Listen, son. By tomorrow morning, everyone at school is going to know you were one of the people who found Mr. Chomsky. Your friends are going to have a lot of questions, and you're going to need to be able to either answer them, or put them off. Whichever you do, think it out tonight, so you can deal with it tomorrow without thinking too hard about it. It won’t be easy, but that’s the way people are.”

  “Why can’t you tell me everything is going to be all right and let me be surprised tomorrow?”

  “Because you know better, so you wouldn’t believe me,” she said sagely. She was right, I had to give her that. “Besides, I’d rather you be prepared than painfully surprised. It’s one of those enigmatic Mom Things. It’s unpleasant, so it has to be good for you.” She smiled sadly as she kissed me on the forehead. “I wish you didn’t have to be dealing with this, son, but it's what’s in front of you. All you can choose is how you deal with it.” I couldn't help the quirk at the corner of my mouth as I thought of the little copper rod I had hidden in my closet. My version of dealing with it wasn't going to be fun for the guy who did this, that was certain.

  “Can we work on my backpack Mom?” Dee yelled from upstairs. The heavy sound of an elephant sprinting down the stairs reached us, and Dee came back into the room with her backpack and craft booty still in hand, only now she was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt with an orange-haired girl on it.

  “Yes, honey, we will, but chores and dinner come first.” Mom's words fell on deaf ears while Dee upended the plastic bag and dumped a pile of bright and shiny things out onto the couch beside me. Like Mom, she had the Roma love of color, glitter, and jingle, and, to hear her talk, a plain backpack, even a cool purple one, was just too boring to even take to school.

 

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