The in crowd, p.15
The in Crowd, page 15
part #2 of Hellbent Academy Series
“Well,” I said, lowering my voice in a way I hoped was seductively, “I was hoping you would bend the rules a little. As a favor to me?”
“No,” said the butler flatly. He yawned. “Now, run along. Go back to school, please.”
Frustrated, I gathered power in one of my hands. I threw it at the butler, a shower of purple sparks.
But the butler threw up a counter spell, and a white bubble encased him.
My spell bounced off his protection, and I had to duck.
It sailed over my head and hit a shrub. It fizzled out amongst the green leaves.
Phist came out from hiding, sprinting over the driveway, heading for the butler and me.
The butler narrowed his eyes at me. “What are you really doing here, girl?”
“I really want that book,” I said. “The prize for the semester project is pretty great this year.” I gathered more magic in my hands. I figured that if I used enough, it would tear down his counter spell, and then I could get at him.
But the butler dropped his counter spell of protection to throw magic at me. Two bolts of bright blue power sizzled into my chest.
I gasped in pain, going down on one knee, clutching myself and panting.
Phist was there. “Don’t touch her,” he said, throwing his own magic at the butler.
Who threw up a counter spell again, and the bouncing thing happened.
Phist tried to duck, but he didn’t make it. The spell glanced against his forehead, and Phist dropped to the ground, unconscious.
Shit.
The butler laughed from inside his little white cocoon.
Screw this. I lunged at him.
His counter spell did nothing to protect him from a physical attack, so when I collided with him, we both went down to the ground, me on top of him.
He was so startled, he dropped the protection spell. “Help!” he yelled.
“Stop that,” I said and poured magic into his chest.
He gurgled and thrashed and then went still.
I climbed off him, running a hand through my hair.
Behind me, I heard a grunt.
I turned, and Phist was getting to his feet.
“You’re all right,” I said.
“Takes more than that to take me out for the count,” he said.
I surveyed the butler. “How long do you think he’s out for?”
“You do know what flirting means, right?”
I gave him a withering look. “He was not the least bit interested in my flirting, and I was laying it on thick.”
Phist knelt next to the butler and put a sparking finger to the man’s forehead. “There. He’ll be out for a while.” He glanced over his shoulder. “How about one of those camouflage spells you do? You’re really good at those.”
I beamed at this. Phist thought I was good at a spell? He was so much more accomplished than I was when it came to magic. I put a camouflage spell on the butler, which meant that anyone who saw him would see him but wouldn’t think anything was amiss.
“Let’s move him behind these shrubs anyway,” I said. “Just so he’s not so obvious.”
“And by ‘let’s,’ you mean I should do it, right?” Phist got the guy under his shoulders.
“I can get his feet,” I said, picking them up.
Phist just chuckled.
The butler tucked away, we slid into the house.
Inside, the foyer was red and brown. There was a fireplace with a mantle, a mirror over the mantle. A vase containing a twisty looking branch sat on it. There were artful antique couches swathed in red velvet flanking the mantle. The place had the air of a fancy boudoir.
I followed Phist up the stairs. We went quickly, hoping no one would see us.
Upstairs, the red theme continued. There was red wallpaper on the walls, patterned with a sheen. We walked down a narrow hallway and stopped outside a door, which was half-open.
Voices filtered out from within.
“Damn it,” muttered Phist. “Someone’s in there.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Phist pushed me into the wall next to the doorway and flattened himself there too. We listened.
“…couldn’t go higher than that, I’m afraid,” a voice was saying. I recognized the voice as belonging to the potentate. I had heard him give speeches before.
“Not even for one of the ones I’ve trained myself?” said another voice, and I didn’t recognize this one. It was male and deep.
“You do amazing work, Gatmos, but I’m afraid I have a limit to what I can pay.”
“This demonborn is worth it, I assure you,” said the other voice. Gatmos, I supposed. “He’ll pay for himself three times over in the first fight he wins for you. I put extra special care into the spells I worked into this one. He is nothing but a ball of rage and power.”
They were haggling over selling a demonborn, then. Gross. It made me feel a sick feeling in my stomach. How did we stand here and listen to this?
Also, the talk of spells? Maybe Gatmos was responsible for that demonborn I’d freed from Edgar’s house. Maybe he was the one using magic to rob the demonborn of reason.
“Yes, as I say, I am an admirer of your work,” said the potentate. “But I think that the spells you put on your specimens can be detrimental. Leaving a demonborn with his capacity for strategy is sometimes preferable.”
Gatmos laughed. “Most people don’t like it when the demonborn beg, and they are wont to do so when they are left with the ability to speak.”
“Yes, well, I have no such concerns,” said the potentate. “They don’t talk much in the ring, what with being preoccupied with fighting. I do find the concept of your specimen intriguing, though, and I am willing to pay for one. But, as I said, there are limits to what I will give you. Now, I’ve made my offer. Take it or leave it.”
“Ah, I understand your position,” said Gatmos. “But you must understand mine. If word gets out that I let one of mine go for so little—”
“So little? Please. I am offering you a small fortune.”
“Yes, but the market will bear much more,” said Gatmos. “I must see to my own interests. Currently, I am taking all the money and putting it back into the business. It used to be that the boy spawn were killed off, and I could have them for nothing if I chose. But now, the demonborn farmers are asking money for the boys. More and more each day. And it is not cheap to raise and train them.”
Next to me, a bang. At first, I didn’t realize what it was, but then I saw that Phist had clenched a fist and slammed it into the wall.
I looked at him, eyes wide.
His nostrils were flared and he was baring his teeth.
“What was that?” said the potentate.
Phist shut his eyes. “Shit,” he whispered, pushing away from the wall. He pointed at me, still whispering, his voice fierce. “It’s you. It’s your fault. This stuff never gets to me. I have it all buried, and then you make me dig it up, and—”
“I didn’t make you do anything,” I protested.
Phist pushed open the door to the library.
The potentate was already there, on his way out to investigate the noise. “Mephistopheles, right? You’re one of those boys in the Black Circle? What are you doing in my house?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Phist narrowed his eyes. He was seething.
I pushed my head around the doorway brightly. “He broke in to impress me!”
The potentate eyed Phist. “How did you break into my house? It’s covered with more spells than I can count.”
“We attacked the butler,” I said. “Phist was very sexy.” I wrapped my hands around his bicep, looking up at him adoringly.
The potentate looked at me. “You. You’re the Astaroth girl. The two of you were involved in that unfortunate incident involving Abbadon and the women, weren’t you? You had some preposterous story about it… I never did quite buy it. And that Diablo boy? If he was killed by a demonborn, where is his body? Magical spells keep going to the demonborn body.”
“Yes, but that’s because the demonborn cast a spell to make it so,” said Phist.
“Right, I remember your making that argument.” The potentate looked him over. “So, now, you’ve broken into my house in order to impress your girlfriend?”
“Yup,” I said. “And boy, am I impressed. But, we should go now.” I tugged on Phist’s arm.
The potentate smiled. “I don’t believe you.” He gathered magic up in one of his hands, and it was bright red and glowing.
Phist sneered at the man. He raised one hand, palm out.
The potentate released his power.
Phist made a gesture with his hand and the power veered right, sucking its way into Phist’s palm. I remembered he’d done this trick the first time I’d met him.
The potentate’s brow furrowed.
Phist flicked his wrist and the power burst back out of his hand, colliding with the potentate, burrowing into his stomach and chest.
The potentate cried out, stumbling backwards.
“Now, see here!” yelled Gatmos, stepping forward, sending waves of green sparking magic at Phist and me.
It missed Phist, but it caught me on the shoulder, and I gritted my teeth.
The potentate was gathering more power.
I shot a spell at him.
The potentate blocked it.
Phist put up his other hand, and power burst out of both of his palms. It was rainbow colored, swirling blue, yellow, pink, green, and purple. It reminded me of the power I’d used to kill Abbadon and Grayson.
And this power surged across the room, slamming into the potentate and Gatmos at the same time.
They both shrieked, throwing back their heads. Rainbow-colored flames came out of their eyes and mouths and they fell to the ground, dead.
I gaped at them.
Phist shut his eyes, shoulders slumping. “Fuck.”
“What did you just do?”
“Motherfucking shit piss hell damn.”
“Okay, we come up with a story to—”
“There’s no story for this, Suther,” said Phist. “We run.”
* * *
I threw up a camouflage spell in case anyone would see us on the way out, and we did run into several different servants running for the room. They must have heard the shrieking. But they ran right past us without paying us any mind.
When we got back to the front door, Phist stopped and looked down at the butler. “He saw us. He can describe us.”
“But he doesn’t know who we are,” I said.
Phist cringed. Then he knelt down next to the man, who was still passed out. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He poured magic into the man’s chest.
The man’s eyes burst into flame, just like the potentate and Gatmos. Just like Grayson and Abbadon.
“Phist!” I protested.
“I know,” he said, looking up at me, anguished. “I fucked up. This man is paying the price.” He got to his feet. “Let’s go.”
We went.
We climbed back onto the motorcycle and zoomed out of there, all the way back to campus.
Once back at the Black Circle house, we went to Phist’s room. I sat on the bed, hugging my knees. He paced.
I still felt bad about Grayson sometimes. And Abbadon too. They were bad people, but other people had cared about them. I had hurt Tess. I had hurt Grayson’s family and Abbadon’s family too when I’d killed those men. Sometimes, it kept me awake at night, the guilt of it.
I knew that this fight that Phist and I were part of would mean more killing, but this…
What the hell had Phist done? There was no way that they were going to let the death of the potentate of the Acclasia go. They were going to investigate it. We were in danger of being found out.
“They’ll think it was demonborn,” he said. “That kind of kill, like what you did to Grayson and Abbadon, with the eyes burnt out? It’s a demonborn kill. Only our kind of magic can manage that. Maybe they’ll think that the war is starting up again, that this is a first strike.”
“But the Resistance doesn’t want a war.”
“No, I know that,” he said. The Resistance could function better if the occultist community didn’t have its guard up. That was why it was so important we kept up our covers. “With what happened with Enid, and then the stuff we did with Grayson, and now this… It’s bad. Erik is going to be so pissed at me.”
“Yeah, not to mention, we didn’t find the map.”
Phist sank both hands into his hair. “Fuck.”
“Why’d you do it?” I said. “Just because you got mad?”
Phist walked into the wall of his room and rested his forehead against it. Then he brought his forehead down against the wall twice. “Fuck.” He turned around and slid down the wall so that he was sitting on the ground.
“I mean, I get why you were mad,” I said. “They were talking about demonborn boy babies and—”
“Stop.” His voice cracked.
I was quiet.
He was quiet.
The silence dragged on for so long, it seemed to take form and mass, like a live thing.
Finally, Phist said, “I’m falling apart. I’m losing it.”
I got up off the bed and went to him. I sat down next to him on the floor. I thought about touching him, then I decided against it. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Oh, it is?” He was sarcastic.
“We’ll find a way to make it okay,” I said. “We fixed what I did to Grayson and Abbadon, right?”
“Yeah, that’s worked out real well,” he said. “The potentate was suspicious, and you’ve been here, in my face, every single day, and that’s been a disaster.”
I was hurt. “Disaster?”
He leaned forward. “When your sister was dying, she made me promise to look after you. She didn’t want you in this school. She didn’t want you in this life. So, what do I do? First, I fail spectacularly at getting you out of the school. Then I somehow help you get into the Black Circle, where you have to endure all kinds of harassment from every guy in the place. And let’s be honest, I do it because I want you, because I’ve always wanted you, and I like having the excuse to touch you. And then when you get dosed with drugs against your will, I take advantage of you.” He pointed at the bed. “Right there.”
I drew in a long, slow breath. And then I said, “You’ve always wanted me?”
He rubbed his forehead. “I can’t do this. I can’t protect you and fulfill the mission. Ever since you’ve showed up, I’ve been shit at both of those things.”
I picked at my thumbnail. “I know you want me to leave.”
“I don’t,” he said.
I looked up at him.
“I should want you to leave. I should want to be away from you. But I never wanted that, not since the moment I saw you on that porch. Why the fuck is that? What did you do to me? Did you know I was there? Did you cast some kind of spell?”
“What?” I scrambled backwards, offended. “Why would you even say that? I didn’t know you existed until you showed up in my dorm and started trying to chase me out of Hellbent Academy.”
“Sorry.” He leaned his head back on the wall. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Look, let’s try to focus on the problems at hand, which is whether we’ll be caught for what we did to the potentate, and what consequences his death will bring to the Resistance, and how to find that map.”
“I’m really just sorry about everything,” he said. “You’re so pretty and sweet and soft, and I never wanted to hurt you.”
My lips parted. I gazed at him, and I didn’t know what to say.
He hung his head.
“Phist,” I murmured. “You didn’t…”
He dragged his hands over his face.
“Look at me,” I whispered.
He raised his gaze to meet mine.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not hurt.”
“You say that, but after everything you’ve been through—”
“I’m strong,” I said, and a hint of fire stole into my voice. “I want this mission too.”
“I…” He swallowed. “I know you’re strong. Believe me, I see that. You’re incredibly strong.”
“So, stop trying to keep me safe. Can you do that? Can you work with me?”
“I…” His gaze found mine, and he looked into me. “I can work with you, Suther. We work together well. But I don’t want anything to happen to you. And I can’t help but feel responsible—”
“Well, stop it.” I glared at him. “I make my own decisions. I chose to be with you last night. That was my choice. So, find some way to care about me without taking away my power.”
He blinked, speechless.
I blew out a breath and got to my feet. I was shaking. Because, okay, big talk, but I was still confused about a lot of freaking things with Phist and me, and I wasn’t sure that it had been a good idea for us to be so physical with each other, especially when our feelings for each other were so complicated.
“Okay,” he said. “I can do that.”
I turned around.
He was on his feet. “You’re right. I wasn’t treating you like an equal. I didn’t see how it diminished you, but I do now. If I’m always trying to protect you, it means I never give you enough credit. And frankly, you deserve that credit, because you’re kind of amazing.”
I blushed suddenly, and I looked away for a moment. But when I looked back, he was staring right at me, and the look on his face was a mixture of adoration and respect, and I had the urge to grab him and start kissing him.
“You mean it?” he said. “About last night?”
“Yes,” I said. “I wouldn’t undo that, not for anything. I’m glad we…”
“Me too,” he said, swallowing. “I… the way I feel about you, Suther, it’s…”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I cringed. “I mean, what I feel for you, it’s…”
Another yawning, gaping silence opened up between us.
It went on and on and we kept glancing at each other and then looking away. More than once, I drew in breath to speak, and then let it out, unsure of what words to say.
