The Demon's Apprentice (25 page)

“Brad and the boys enjoy taking runs,” she said softly. “I started to do my own jobs for him, if they were going to steal things from people who could afford it. But even if we didn’t want to, Dominic could make us do it. He’d get in our heads, and we’d be doing what he wanted us to do. It was like he was there, pulling our strings or something. But tonight, when Chance hit him with whatever it was he did…he couldn’t make me turn anymore, like he used to. I mean, I felt the call, but I…I didn’t.”

“She saved our asses, Dr. C,” I offered.

“She made all the other werewolves calm down long enough for us to get out of there!” Lucas chimed in.

“Yeah, she’s cool, Dr. Corwin,” Wanda said. Shade looked from one face to another as we vouched for her, and I saw her eyes go all misty again.

“I don’t doubt that she is, guys. Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything to her. Alexis, did you calm the other wolves, like Lucas said?”

“I’ve always been like the pack’s mother. Since Dominic never helped us out, I was sort of the one to keep the peace when the boys got a little high strung. They may be jerks sometimes, sir, but they’re still my friends.”

“Alexis…”

“Shade,” she corrected him. “It’s my pack name. When I turn, my fur is black.”

“Okay, Shade,” Dr. C continued, “from what all of you just told me, I’d have to say you’re probably an alpha. Specifically, the alpha female of the pack, or
an
alpha female, depending on your desires.”

“Doc, you aren’t making a lot of sense,” Lucas prompted him.

“Sorry, it’s hard to concentrate tonight. Shade, you're a bigger threat to Dominic than you know, simply because you may be his equal as a werewolf. Alphas are rare, and even the weakest alpha can still be very potent. The Conclave isn't sure of their full range of abilities. However, we believe that they're not only able to induce the change on other werewolves, but they can sometimes prevent it, as well. And, they’re reputed to be able to call on the power of the pack to make themselves more powerful in battle. If he knows you’re an alpha, he’s going to go to great lengths to get control over you again. Which is an abomination in and of itself, to say nothing of the way he ran the pack.”

“Dominic’s big on blind obedience. The Law Of the Wolf: the strong rule, and the weak obey, or suffer. He always made it seem like he was the only alpha, and that was that.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s not the true Law of the Wolf. So, why did he let you go?”

“He didn’t. I walked on my own. I left the pack.” The pain in her voice mirrored what I’d seen in her eyes after she had touched Brad. Her wolf instincts needed them, I guessed, and stepping out of that circle must have been hard to do.

“He didn’t challenge you then and there?”

“No, I waited to see who my rebellious little bitch was gonna run to,” came a voice from the back of the room. We all turned to see Dominic King crouched in the empty window frame.

Chapter 15

~ Even a demon will keep his word when his pride is on the line. ~ Johann Faust 15
th
century mage

Wanda let out a little yelp, and Lucas didn’t quite stifle a curse. Dr. C, Collins, and I all drew weapons. Mine wasn’t loaded, but I was betting King didn’t know that. Shade’s shoulder went tense under my right hand, and I felt as much as heard the low growl she let out. King just looked at us and gave a satisfied grin. Smug bastard.

“You’re on neutral ground, King,” Dr. C said calmly.

“Yeah, the flagpoles out front are kinda hard to miss,” King said. “Ain’t gonna stop me from killing the boy for trespassing on my pack’s turf.” He hopped down from the windowsill and walked halfway across the room.

“Careful, King,” Dr. C said in a chilly voice. “The boy is my apprentice. If you’re accusing him of wrongdoing, you’ll face me in challenge, not him.”

“I ain’t gonna challenge him, mage. I got the right to just kill him. Besides, the Council won’t give a damn what happens to a warlock anyways.” His words must have hit a nerve with Dr. C, because a bright red dot appeared on his chest, and I heard Dr. C take a sharp breath. King turned and started for the gaping window. “Hell, I could kill his family, and the Conclave would prolly give me a damn medal or something.”

My heart started pounding in my chest as I felt my world start to crumble around me. This was my fault. My mother’s and sister’s death would be on my hands.

“Dr. Corwin, you have to
do
something!” Wanda cried.

The red dot disappeared, and I saw Dr. C’s gun drop. “I can’t,” he said softly. King started laughing, and I felt a line of ice slide down my spine.

“Challenge!” I called out, the words hard on the heels of a half-formed thought. The silence that fell was thick, and I felt every eye in the room turn to me.

“What?” King chuckled as he turned to face me again.

“Chance, what the hell are you doing?” Dr. C demanded.

My thoughts tumbled around in my head as I asked myself the same thing. “Dominic King, I accuse you of the murder of Sidney Chomsky,” I heard myself say.

“Who the hell are you to challenge me?” King demanded with a sneer.

“I am Chance Fortunato,” I said, and for the first time in years, I stood straight and tall. Anger coursed through my body like fire. “Mr. Chomsky was my Master…and he was my friend. As his apprentice, I challenge you to trial by combat.” The word Master barely tripped me up, but where Mr. Chomsky was concerned, I could use that word without getting too messed up.

King laughed and turned his back on me. “Fuck you, warlock,” he said over his shoulder. “I don’t gotta accept no challenge from you.”

“Coward!” The word hit him like a brick. I turned to Shade as she continued, “You’re too scared to face him. I’ll make sure the rest of the pack knows you ran from a challenge.”

“Shut up, bitch,” King snarled. “Only Pack members got the right to challenge. He’s just a dumbass human who insulted my honor.”

“What honor?” Alexis snapped. “You turned us and use magick to slap us down when we act like the wolves you made us into. You hide behind us when it suits you, but now it’s
your
honor that’s all insulted? I
am
Pack, Dominic King,” she said as she stood up beside me, “and I say you're weak. I say you’re afraid to face a normal human.”

“He ain't normal, bitch,” King replied. He turned to face me. “You wanna challenge me boy? Okay, I’ll take that challenge. And after I kill you, I’m gonna find your family, and I’ll kill them, too.” He crossed the room as he spoke, and ended up right in front of me. “You think you can handle the price for losing to me?” he planted his finger in the middle of my chest.

I raised my hand and let the hatred flow. I mouthed the activation word, and black fire flickered to life around my fingers. “Touch me again, and I’ll rip your arm out of its socket. Threaten my family again, and I will incinerate you.”

He snarled at me, but his finger came off my chest, at least. “Big words,” he said. “We’ll see if you can back ‘em up. Tomorrow night, midnight. At the camp. The bitch knows where it’ll happen.” He turned and walked to the window, then slipped through it into the darkness.

“And don’t call her a bitch!” I called after him.

“What the hell was that all about?” Collins lowered his pistol.

“Chance just backed King into a corner, and very likely ensured that he is going to have the shortest apprenticeship ever,” Dr. Corwin said in exasperation. “However, he does have a fighting chance, this way. A very slim one, but better than if he’d let him walk out of here.”

“Is he gonna have to fight this guy?” Collins sounded unsure of himself. Everything he’d just seen went against the way things were supposed to go in the
cowan
world. Kids weren’t supposed to have to fight grownups. Werewolves were supposed to stay safely on the TV screen or in scary books, not chase you through the woods at night.

“Yes, Officer Collins, he is. To the death, most likely, in a codified, sanctioned duel.” He turned to me, and his eyes turned hard. “You’d better be right about your accusation, Chance. Unless you have some kind of proof, King can refute your challenge. If he does that…no one can help you.”

“I’ve got proof, Dr. C,” I said slowly. I pulled the baggie with the hair and claw sliver in it out of my satchel. “All it’ll take is a quick poppet spell to prove that it was either King, or one of his pack.”

“You’re betting your life on this, Chance. You’d better be right,” he countered as he took the baggie from me.

“I’m betting my mom and my sister’s life on it, sir. I’m really right. I’m sure of it.”

“Then we have a lot of work to do. From what I’ve seen, you’re not much more than a cookbook sorcerer.”

“Hey!” I protested. “I can cast spells without a focus or a circle…well, a couple, anyway.”

“You can’t be serious about letting him do this!” Collins interjected. “I got King dead to rights on assault at least, and I know I can make a case for a lot more with Miss Cooper’s testimony.”

“After what you saw tonight, do you actually think you could bring him in?” Dr. C asked flatly.

Collins face went tight and his hands balled up into fists, but he didn’t have an answer other than that.

“Can I kind of ask a question here?” Wanda said quietly, reminding us that there were still people in the room who weren’t mages, cops, or werewolves.

“You kind of just did,” Dr. C pointed out with a wry smile.

“Then I’m going to ask a few more. Why does this Conclave want to kill Chance; what do you mean, warlock; and just who or what the hell are
you
, Dr. Corwin?”

“I’m afraid you two already know too much, Wanda. If I answer your question, you’ll only be drawn into this even further. You should probably go home now, and forget everything you just saw tonight. Convince yourself that none of what you saw was true, and that there’s a rational explanation for all of this. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll walk away now, and never look back,” Dr. Corwin said. As much as I hated to, I had to agree with him.

“Screw that!” Lucas said vehemently. “This guy knows who we are, and I smarted off to him. We’re as ass-deep in alligators as anyone else in this room. We deserve to know the whole truth!”

I raised an eyebrow at Dr. C; Lucas had a point.

“Some of it…isn’t my secret to reveal. Chance, it’s up to you if you want to tell them the whole story.”

“The whole story would take too long. My father sold me to a demon named Dulka when I was seven, as part of their agreement. Dulka did his bidding, kept him rich, laid and powerful, and I did Dulka’s dirty work for him so that the Conclave couldn’t come after him for anything. Nothing got traced to a demon, since it was me doing the work, technically by choice. He also made me recruit souls for him. I made him more powerful, and I learned a lot of black sorcery while I did it.”

“How did you helping him…recruit…make him so powerful?” Lucas asked.

“Even a part of a mortal soul is very potent, since it’s supposed to be infinite. If he got a person to the point where they had given too much of themselves to him, they’d do anything for him. After a while, when you’ve lost too much of your soul, you don’t care about right and wrong, and you can’t really feel anything good. You’ll do anything for a little happiness, or even something that seems like it. Once I had enough of their soul stripped from them, I would point them to Dulka, and they’d offer him anything he wanted. Then, he could make a deal, and their soul was his.”

“But, if a soul is infinite, how do you get ‘enough’ of one?” Wanda asked me.

“What’s lost from a person’s soul can heal, but it takes time. I kept them giving it up too fast for it to restore itself.”

I stopped then and waited for their reactions. Wanda looked like she had a thousand more questions for me, and I could see the wheels spinning behind Lucas’ eyes. I looked to Shade, and saw a kinship in her eyes. We’d both been used, and we’d both been scarred by it. We understood each other. I looked over to Dr C, but he’d already seen this through my memories.

“Last Friday night, I escaped.” Such a simple thing to say, and it didn’t really cover how big a deal that was. “I blew up part of a school in the process.”

“Truman High School…you really did that?” Wanda asked.

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing!” Collins exclaimed.

“No familiar has ever escaped from his master before. Chance, what you did was unprecedented, and supposedly impossible,” Dr. C said after a moment. “I’m afraid the Council will take a somewhat less…compassionate view of your plight. If you were truly unwilling, in their eyes, you would rather have died than do his bidding. So we’re on our own in dealing with this.”

“Nothing new,” I said with a bitter smile. “Not for me, anyway.”

“What about your scars, dude?” Lucas asked quietly.

“Mostly Dulka’s work.”

“That’s…that’s…
evil!”
Wanda blurted.

“Demon. Go figure!” I said sarcastically.

“Neither one of you should have had to suffer like that!” Wanda finally sobbed. Lucas took her in his arms and let her sob into his shoulder.

“She’s right, you know,” he said to us, over her head. “And this Conclave? They
suck
if they think you’re a bad guy, Chance. What about you, Doc? What’s your story?”

“The Conclave sent me here to look for Sydney’s killer and act as his replacement. He was also looking into reports of a warlock who had been released by his master. But Sydney and I are part of the Conclave that
doesn’t
suck. Neither one of us agreed with the High Council’s decision to execute all warlocks.”

“Oh. Well, that was kinda normal and boring compared to Shade and Chance,” Lucas said skeptically. “Listen to me! You’re a wizard, and
that’s
normal and boring compared to the tale of woe my friends just told me. How screwed up did my life just get?” Wanda gave a hiccup of a laugh from his shoulder and turned to face us, her eyes damp, red, and puffy.

“Sir, you called Chance a warlock, but you said you were a wizard. What’s the difference?” Shade asked.

“A warlock is generally someone who uses dark forms of magick, like the Infernal magick that Chance was taught by Dulka, or certain kinds of necromancy, among others. It’s also a term the Conclave uses for people who break the Laws. As for me, a wizard is a ranking among magi. Like a Jedi Master is to a Jedi Knight.”

“So, you’re like, one step from the top of the heap?” Lucas asked.

“Two, actually, but that’s a conversation for another time. Right now, we have a very serious problem on our hands. In case you’ve all forgotten, Chance has a challenge to deal with tomorrow night, and you can bet that Dominic is going to do everything he can to stack the deck in his favor. Which means we have to do the same thing, only honorably.”

“If he’s gonna cheat, why can’t we?” Lucas asked.

“One thing you have to learn about true magick, Lucas, is that breaking rules can have serious consequences. Your word has to be good. You can’t cheat, and you can’t break your promises. It’s part of the price of a wizard’s power. When you work magick, the universe listens to you. If your words and your actions match, it keeps listening. So, you have to behave honorably and keep your promises, Chance. That doesn’t mean you can’t be clever, but you have to avoid lying if you can.”

“Do I have to tell the whole truth?”

“There is a subtle difference between telling the truth and not lying. It’s a good bet he’s going to try to limit you in what you can do, but keep as many of his own advantages as he can. We’re limited in what we know about a challenge among Weres. I need some time to do some research and check some references, and you kids are probably expected home soon. Can you make it back here tomorrow?” He looked at us,
all
of us, expectantly.

Wanda and Lucas blinked in shock for a few seconds, and both nodded.

Collins’ face didn’t change, but he nodded. “I can’t believe I’m even thinking about doing this,” he growled.