Demon Hunter (The Collegium Book 1) (2 page)

She stooped, dislodging his touch, and picked up her bag. Even trying to answer him made her vulnerable. She couldn’t spill her emotions on the steps of the Collegium. He made her feel—and that was unacceptable. She looked at him. “Please.”

A harsh, indrawn breath answered her.

Fay dropped her gaze, appalled by what he might have read in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m tired.”

“You’re scared.”

“Not of you.”

“Who?” Voice, body, aura, everything about him vowed vengeance.

“I don’t know. Of myself.” Her breath choked in a strangled half-laugh. “Of how I feel.”
Serviam. I will serve
. Standing on Collegium ground, the words bit into her bones. She felt as if she balanced on jagged glass. One fall and she’d be gutted. She would bleed out.

“I’ve never had a lover. I can’t take one, now.” The truth, harsh and painful, freed her feet. She ran, and left him standing on the bottom step scowling after her.

Fay’s boots rang on the polished granite floor of the Collegium foyer. The rhythm was too fast and uncollected, revealing her distress. She recognized the giveaway and paused between one step and the next. If she couldn’t force calm, she could pretend it.

Three men and a woman sat at a grouping of sofas and chairs in the corner, intent on their own discussion. The receptionist smiled at nothing, talking on the phone. Then like mice scenting the cat, they all turned, sighted her and went still. The receptionist hung up his phone.

“Ms. Olwen.” At the Collegium, receptionists were chosen for their courage. While mundane politicians and business people came through the front door, anything could come through the back door, the roof or the basement. The receptionist was smoothly charming. “Welcome back. Mr. Olwen is expecting you.”

The four expensively dressed people in the corner returned to their discussion after shuffling to keep her in sight.

Fay’s hand tightened on the bag she carried. She had hoped to steal some time before seeing her father: an hour, a day, a month. She was raw from her encounter with Steve, and Richard Olwen was a master at using someone’s emotional turmoil against them. He had done it all her life.

“Thank you.” Defying his order would bring retribution and Collegium gossip. If it had been dangerous to show weakness at the airport, here it was positively suicidal. A magic user who brought her down, would make their own reputation.

She marched across to the bank of elevators and stabbed the call button. Inside the cage, she kept her shoulders square, aware that cameras recorded every moment in the Collegium building.

The Collegium guardians had always resented her power and her father’s ambition. Her training to become one had been a test of endurance, punctuated with challenges. She’d become accustomed to blocking out her anger and pain. Fear, she’d learned recently, was more insidious.

Steve had banished that fear for the length of a cab ride, encouraging in her the ridiculous hope of intimacy.

She remembered how he’d looked in the jungle when he’d stripped off his shirt and offered it to her in place of her demon-torn and bloodied clothes. The shirt had smelled of him, and returned her to the warmth of human existence. She’d hugged his shirt around her for reassurance.

Steve couldn’t protect her, here.

Her shoulders tensed despite herself. The frightening reality was that she didn’t know the source of her fear. Dread had become a constant companion, and it screamed at her when she stepped inside the Collegium. She couldn’t even blame the demon because she’d felt like this before answering Steve’s call of a demon on the loose.

The elevator doors chimed open, allowing in a swirl of warm, perfumed air.

Fay shifted from introspection to combat alertness. That scent, expensive and cloying, had always meant battle. She strode out, broadcasting confidence.

“Ms. Olwen,” Nancy Yu said. It was a naming, not a greeting.

Nancy was Richard’s secretary and mistress, and Fay was the child of his failed marriage. Fay’s mother had rejected everything Nancy had never been offered. But a three year old child doesn’t understand the reason for an adult’s hatred. A seven year old child learns to protect herself.

As an adult, Fay fought back, with politeness. “Good morning, Nancy.” For all the emotion in her voice, she could have been addressing office furniture. If others saw that self-protective distancing as arrogance, let them. Nancy should never have taken out her anger on a child.

Richard should have stopped the behavior for both their sakes.

Fay paused and looked around. The outer office had been redecorated, again.

It was Nancy’s lair, and designed to provide a suitable backdrop for her rigorously maintained beauty. Hints of peacock blue in the Persian carpet were picked up and repeated in an accent wall and in a large glass vase that sat on a low table. Fronds of exotic grass extended from it, head high, dead and dried. A bronze sun disk flared across the wall behind Nancy, its rays giving the impression that she wore a crown.

Queen Bitch.
Her own burst of bitterness shocked Fay. Nancy wasn’t worth such hate; wasn’t powerful enough for Fay to attack. Then again, there were forms of power other than magic.

“Richard is expecting you.” Nancy’s cool voice accused Fay of sloppy time-keeping. Her scornful gaze scanned Fay’s travel-mussed blonde braid, the crumpled collar of her unbelted coat and the worn jeans beneath it with their faded spots where bleach had taken out blood stains. Apparently her sturdy boots were a final insult, because Nancy reared back in her seat. Her own feet were delicately clad in lethal high heels.

The derogatory appraisal sourly amused Fay. “If I wore high heels, I’d be taller than Dad. He’d hate it.”

Startled, Nancy met her eyes, and the two women in his life shared a unique moment of understanding: the President hid a dangerous insecurity.

And why has it taken me this long to acknowledge it?
Fay dropped her bag, letting the thump of it distract them both.

“May I leave this, here?” When she looked at Nancy, they were back in their familiar roles of wary duelists.

“If you must.” Nancy granted grudging permission for the scruffy bag to temporarily contaminate her elegant setting.

Fay knocked and entered her father’s office.

One step took her from a feminine domain to a masculine den. Her father’s office smelled of expensive cologne, leather and the ozone of strong magic. Richard believed in wards and spent most of his minor magic on them. He wasn’t a powerful mage, but had achieved his eminent position in the Collegium by relentless ambition. That drive for power disciplined his life—and had defined Fay’s.

“Good morning, Dad.”

“Do you have the demon?”

The typical exchange provoked an unhappy smile from her. There she was observing the courtesies, while Richard made his demands. But perhaps he didn’t need to use careful politeness as a protection against others’ expectations and envy? His shield was arrogance.

She fished the silver disk from her jeans pocket and stared at it as it lay in her palm. It felt light. “I nearly died for this.”

“Problems?” Richard raised an interrogative eyebrow and leaned back. Now that he’d seen the amulet, he could adopt his usual pose of detachment. Fifty eight years old and still physically strong, he’d drilled a generation of guardians into respecting and fearing him.

“It was the strongest demon, yet.” Fay sat, uninvited. She let the familiar routine of reporting steady her. “Steve was right. The whole village called the demon. I felt age and youth, not many men. A survivors’ village.” The sort of place that appeared and disappeared in a long-running civil war. The people ran from one atrocity, only to be caught in the next. These people had decided to stop running. “They must have been so scared.”

Great pride could contemplate calling a demon. So could anger. But fear was the most desperate reason—and in the end, it always hurt worst.

The demon summoned and bound by the villagers’ blood broke its binding and entered a new host, the warlord Leo. He was why Steve called her.

People do evil things, but demons laugh at the atrocities. Once heard, demon laughter is never forgotten. Steve and Fay had fought a demon before and Steve had invited her back to do so again.

They returned to the original village because it was marginally easier to exorcise a demon if you acted at the site of its release. The rupture in reality could be torn again to return the demon to hell. Fay had hoped it would also aid the demon’s transference and capture in the amulet.

“We returned to the village and everyone was dead. Trees, huts, people, everything hacked down by machete. Something hadn’t wanted to waste bullets. Or it had wanted the greater bloodshed.”

In the village of the dead, chickens pecked among the corpses. The jungle animals had stayed clear of the evil. Steve’s eyes had flared to yellow and his upper lip pulled back in a silent snarl, but he ruled his instincts and not vice versa. He’d prowled the perimeter, then entered.

“The demon responded to my summoning, coming in the body of the warlord. We fought.” Magic against magic, until the demon closed with her, raking her body with unnatural claws.

When she thought back, it must have required enormous self-control for Steve to stand out of the fight. He had trusted her and her judgment.

“I won in the end.”

The vicious wounds pulsed a moment in memory. She’d lain on the ground, too raw for touch, her breath bubbling as she called magic to heal the unnatural violence. Ants ran over the drying puddle of her blood. She met her father’s pale blue eyes and mentioned none of the fight or its aftermath.

“The warlord died and I drove the demon into the amulet. It’s double-warded.” She looked down at the silver disc. It sat in her palm, warm with blood heat. “Do you want to call a researcher to come and claim it?”

“Don’t you trust me with it?” The thin smile said Richard was pleased and risking a rare joke.

Fay’s fingers closed about the disc. Her phantom wounds throbbed again. Here was the problem, the source and power of her disintegration. She just hadn’t wanted to see it. “No, I don’t trust you.”

The challenge jerked him straight in his executive chair.

“Fay.” Part protest, part scold. Richard eased back, gathering the power of his position. “If you’ve warded the amulet correctly my
lesser
,” he emphasized the word with acid. “My lesser power won’t matter. The demon will remain bound.”

Once again, any blame was deflected and became Fay’s. She identified the ploy with weary clarity. Her greater power as a mage was Richard’s weapon in so many ways.

She placed the silver disk on the mahogany desk. It gleamed against the polished surface.

“You can have the amulet, Dad.” There was little relief in relinquishing the demon. “You know, the Collegium has always watched to see if I get special treatment, being your daughter. They’ve been watching for the wrong thing. When you can’t get me to do something because I’m a guardian, you ask me as your daughter, and it’s the same in reverse. The person being used, here, is me.”

She stood. “I don’t trust you because I can’t.” And so she balanced on jagged glass. “You ask too much and you take too much. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to see it.”

Because I love you. Because I want you to love me.

“I tried to tell you I’m burning out, but you gave me the spiel, all about service to the Collegium.” She could hear the echo of the cold words in the heavy air of the office.

Her father’s voice in her memory, calm, measured and distant. “It’s battle fatigue, Fay. I know it feels like you can’t go any further. All powerful guardians go through this stage. Fieldwork is the answer. Aggression will channel your fear and anger. Fight through it and you’ll be tempered steel, pure warrior. Nothing will touch you.”

“I gave you good advice,” he said now.

“Did you? You gave me words and orders to hone me as a weapon. Another demon fight, and another. Harpies, rogue mages.” Her breath shuddered. The pain of betrayal was no less acute for being belatedly recognized. “You don’t care about my feelings, my empty life.”

“I advised you to take Lewis Bennett as a partner. He shares the guardian life.”

“And has a ruined marriage and burnt-out powers, but he’s loyal. My father, the pimp.”

“That’s enough.” Richard roared to his feet.

“Yes. It’s enough.” Her lungs were crushed with the ashes of her old life, the ruin of the world she’d been trained to serve. Once she opened her eyes and
looked
, it was all too much. Intolerable. She had bled agony for the Collegium, and for what? Her father’s ambition? “I resign.”

“You can’t.”

The simple, satisfied certainty in his voice shattered the last of Fay’s control. As President of the Collegium, Richard thought he owned her oath to it. He was wrong.

Her misery translated into power. Raw magic tore through the room. It hunted down the oath ties and drilled loyalties that bound her to the Collegium. They ripped from her father’s grasp and incinerated.

“I resign.” She met his glare. Collegium training had given her one gift: despite the wounds that bled and shivered inside her, she gave no physical sign. Training gave her the strength to walk out with dignity.

“You’re no longer my daughter.” He followed her to shout it from his office door.

Nancy stared, wide-eyed. The large glass vase lay in shards on the coffee table.

Fay scooped up her bag and kept walking. Mouth set in a grim line, chin up, shoulders straight. Her boots sank in the deep carpet, then struck the wooden flooring of the corridor.

Collegium staff, drawn by her storm of power, watched from office doorways. Fay ignored the elevator and clattered down the stairs. More staring eyes waited in the foyer. Some among them would have felt the snap of her ties of belonging. Any number would have heard Richard’s shout.

And not one was a friend to offer sympathy or a farewell. Rage stirred because they had all used her power. She was the mage without limits on the magic she could call and control. Theodore Coomb’s bloodline had triumphed in her. Richard’s gamble in marrying Yolanthe, Theodore’s granddaughter, had paid off.