Fierce Lessons (Ghosts & Demons Series Book 3) Read online

  Douglas spun on his heel and marched away.

  That felt good. Besides the taste of hot cocoa with a fudge brownie, my encounter with Mr. Douglas was the first thing I’d done that had felt good in days.

  Lesson 158: Just because you’ve won an argument doesn’t mean you’ve changed anyone’s mind.

  4

  I was stronger now, so my archery instructor, Devin Anguloora, worked me harder than ever. While I did pushups, the big Samoan planted his foot on my back. When that didn’t slow me down, he sat on me. I wasn’t breathing hard enough for his liking, so he switched to psychological warfare. “I heard you shot a shaman.”

  “Arrow in the shin,” I said. “He’ll be fine, sir.”

  Anguloora ordered me to switch to the kind of pushups where you stop halfway down so I got twice the work out of each rep.

  “Should I be counting?” I asked.

  “I’ll let you know when you’re done. How did it feel, shooting the holy man in the leg?”

  “Bad.”

  “The periosteum of the tibia is very sensitive. Getting an arrow there must have hurt him bad.”

  “He’ll live.”

  “So you don’t care so much?”

  “I care that I was aiming for a huge blue devil and missed.”

  “Some people think maybe you missed on purpose.”

  “I am Iowa, Castrator of Demons. I didn’t get that title for playing nice with the enemy. Anybody who thinks that is a stupid bigot.”

  “So you don’t worry about what your comrades think of you?”

  “Of course, I care, but I’m trying to care about the right people. Not everybody’s opinion is equal. Are you saying I should have to consider the opinions of all those people who hate anybody in a turban…sir?”

  Anguloora had a high, girlish giggle for such a large man. “I suppose it’s possible you’ve been demonized.”

  I kept pumping out the reps. “How long have you been waiting to spring that one on me, sir? I’ve heard that pun several times already.”

  “I’m in control of your conditioning program, Iowa. Do you think it wise to talk to me like that? Doesn’t that strike you as a tactical error? Like the one you made shooting poor Spider Richardson?”

  “That wasn’t a tactical error. It was an error. I missed my target.”

  “And antagonizing me?”

  “Are you so easily antagonized, sir? You might want to think about why that is, sir.”

  He laughed again, got off and made me run along the walls of the entire Keep as fast I could. When I returned, he glanced at his stopwatch and nodded. “Let’s see how fast you do it with me on your back.”

  I scooped Anguloora up in a fireman’s carry.

  “No, no. You be Skywalker. I want to ride like Yoda.” He jumped on my back and I piggybacked him around the Keep. He slowed me down considerably, but I still managed to jog at a good pace. When the path along the wall proved too easy, he made me switch to breaking new trails through snow drifts with each circuit. Anguloora was clever at making people miserable, but it was his conversation that fatigued me more.

  “Do the Keep’s blessed stones bother you, Iowa? Any rashes or nausea? You’re half unholy, after all.”

  “No, sir.”

  Sword singers training in the central courtyard stopped to watch us pass. I couldn’t wait for them to grow bored of staring at me every second.

  “How do you feel about humans now?” Anguloora said in my ear.

  “Depends on the human. I still love Mama. I’m not crazy about you, sir.”

  He giggled again.

  “We don’t make you hungry? Now that the beast is unleashed, you don’t look at us and think, we’d be good with some A1 steak sauce?”

  “Only you, sir.”

  “How long before you start to grow fangs, do you think?”

  “No idea, sir. No way to know. Trick got fangs right away. I got horns.”

  “What if I were to grab your horns and steer you around the courtyards that way? What would you say to that?”

  “I’d say that rodeo riders try to stay on the bull for eight seconds. You wouldn’t last half that before you got slammed to the ground.”

  “Strong words from a strong demon girl.”

  “Strong half-demon woman, sir. Our enemies would strip us of our dignity. Even if you’re a superior officer — check that. Especially if you’re a superior officer, when you try to take my dignity, too, I owe you nothing and you’ve thrown my loyalty away.”

  “I’m concerned about your attitude, sword singer. I call you sword singer because you’re a lousy archer.”

  “Are you saying there’s no sense majoring in my minor, sir? Should I get back to focusing on what I’m good at?”

  “I’ll ask the questions.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I heard about what happened in the cafeteria,” he said. “I heard about the knife, too.”

  “Did Douglas squeal? That — ”

  “No. The man said nothing. He’s too embarrassed to say anything. The Magicals watch over the Keep closely. They may be unreliable when it comes to demon detection, but they saw what happened this morning. They told Victor and Victor told me. Now I’m telling you. Judgment was passed on your friend before you had time to change into sweats.”

  “What’s going to happen to Manny?”

  “She’s lucky she’s so valuable. She got off easy. Manhattan has been demoted from training new recruits. We can’t have a hothead in charge of training anyone. She’s down in the parking garage. She’ll be washing every vehicle and greasing every wheel and tank tread until the end of the war. Tell your friend to start taking more vitamin D because she’s not going to see any sunlight.” He pointed to one of the towers that rose above the courtyard. “Do the stairs.”

  “I’ll try not to drop you on your neck…sir.”

  “Was that a threat to a superior, Iowa?”

  “I don’t see how you could interpret my concern that way.” I let another beat pass before I said, “sir.”

  “And that is why you fail,” he said. He giggled a moment as we bounced up the stairs.

  I began to sweat and breathe harder. Burning some energy felt good. I tried to take the stairs two at a time. I could.

  “You’ve got a lot of power now that you’ve changed.”

  “I had a lot of power before. Seems to me that me getting horns has changed everyone else, sir.”

  “Do you really wonder that your loyalty is questioned now that you’re a half-demon? For instance, what really happened at Castille, Iowa? The place was incinerated. All we have is your story on that. Did you kill any of the humans there? How many? Can we really trust you?”

  I had killed one. I kept silent and ran harder. I got to the top and ran along the parapet, past the guards at the machine gun nests. Then I turned so I ran along the top of the snowcapped bailey. Morning fog suffused Brooklyn’s skyline, softening everything, streets and sky alike, to white. “I’m the same person I always was, sir, but stronger. Kurt Vonnegut was of German heritage. He fought the Germans in World War II. And would you suspect every veteran who sacrificed in the US military if they also happened to be Muslim? Lots of Muslims fight for us.”

  “You’re talking to a superior, Iowa. You forgot to call me, ‘sir.’”

  “I didn’t forget. You’re trying to play mind games with me. You’re trying to push me into some sort of admission. What’s the plan? Piss me off enough and I throw you off the parapet to prove you right?”

  “Put me down, Iowa.”

  I did.

  “I am a superior,” Anguloora said. “I’m concerned that, with all your newfound power, you won’t think of any human as a superior. Haven’t you ever heard what absolute power does?”

  “It corrupts. Like you think you have absolute power over me. My first boyfriend was a big Spider-Man fan. I like his take better. ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’”

  “Can you handle th
at responsibility, Iowa?”

  “Victor wanted a secret weapon and here I am. You’ve got me. Now I can’t walk around without everyone knowing I was the secret. I didn’t know what I was! Sounds to me like I should be questioning our superior’s motives. Victor should have told me what I was in for.”

  Anguloora stepped closer. “That’s what I have to know. If you’d known what was going to happen to you, would you still have gone down into that quarry and broken Rasputin’s suppression spell?”

  I paused a moment to think. “Yes. Sir.”

  “Well, that’s fine, then.” Anguloora stepped back and turned to gaze at the city. “When the fog lifts, all is revealed.”

  He pointed to the parapet’s inner wall. “Do the wall sit until your legs give out. When that’s done, we’ll go back down to the archery range and work on your aim.”

  I slid my back down the wall until my knees bent to a ninety degree angle and it looked like I was sitting in a chair that wasn’t there. “This could take quite a while, sir.”

  “That’s okay. I love this view of the city.”

  After a time, he added, “Your father was Peter Smythe.”

  I sighed. “Yes, sir.”

  “He passed for human for a long time, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can pass for human, too, you know. Go to the Magical in the deepest part of the stone labyrinth under Command and Control. He could fix you up with a glamor spell. The horns will still be there, though none but Magicals will see them.”

  “I already asked several Magicals about a glamor spell to conceal my horns, sir. They all shook their heads and turned away. ‘Demon magic is dark magic,’ is what I was told, sir.”

  “Then you didn’t ask the right Magical. There is one who can do that sort of thing. I understand it’s pretty straightforward.”

  The important stuff is never straightforward. That’s Lesson 159.

  5

  It took a while for Anguloora to make me tired, but we found out he had a talent for training non-humans, too. When he let me off training for the day, he told me that tomorrow we’d work less on conditioning and more on my bow skills. “You won’t leave until you hit the targets one hundred times in a row, so you better start early. It’s going to be a long day. That’s the key to getting good. Pretend you have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I have it naturally, but anyone can fake it till they’re awesome.”

  I headed straight to C&C without changing, eager to pursue the archery conductor’s suggestion. Apparently, there was one Magical who could be useful to me and I was excited. If the Choir couldn’t see my horns, then maybe I could get back to the ordinary torments, tortures and terrors of fighting the Ra. Keeping the doors between dimensions locked tight was enough work without worrying that one of my fellow sword singers might stab me in the back one day.

  The air cooled as I descended the stone steps toward Command and Control. My damp clothes chilled my skin but I didn’t mind. The Amish warlocks looked away and pointed the way farther into the labyrinth as I passed. I’m not sure if it was the horns that freaked them out or because I was still sweaty from my workout. Given their beliefs, I think they would have preferred I fight demons wearing a long black dress and a bonnet. After it was over, we could celebrate saving the world with a barn raising.

  After five turns through the maze, a child met me at a fork in the tunnel. She might have been seven years old, but her hands were still chubby, with babyish dimples instead of knuckles. Blonde hair poked out at odd angles from beneath a blue hat decorated with red ladybugs. “Hello, Iowa.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Fawn.”

  “That’s a nice name. I haven’t seen you before.”

  “I stay down here. It’s supposed to be safest down here.”

  “You never go outside?” To me, the Keep was a fortress. To the child, she must see it as a dank prison.

  Fawn revealed she was a mind reader. “My father says most people’s minds are prisons. To a free thinker, there is no darkness and there are no walls.”

  “Your dad sounds like a smart guy.”

  “My dad is the Great Psymon the Inimitable. He’s not quite as smart as he thinks, though.”

  I laughed. “Don’t tell him that.”

  “He knows what I think. In my family, we all know what everyone thinks.”

  “That sounds like a sure way to make everyone mad at each other all the time.”

  “Dad says the sight is a gift because, without lies, we trust each other more. Mom says that’s why they divorced. No matter how much he tried to cover up, she knew when he was ogling other women. Then Mom looked at other guys too long and they live at opposite ends of the labyrinth now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. You’ve got — ”

  “Quite a vocabulary for a seven year old. Reading books and people’s minds all day makes that happen quickly.”

  “That’s — “

  “Amazing,” she said. “You were just going to say that. Oh, and now I’m annoying and you’re worried about what your thoughts will reveal about you.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s okay. I keep secrets. I won’t tell anyone about Brad.”

  It turns out, even when you’re a badass half-demon warrior for the Choir, your cheeks can flush hot with embarrassment. I didn’t want this little girl poking around in my horned head about my first love. Or anything else.

  “Your intention is all cloudy,” Fawn said, suddenly all business.

  “I don’t remember this part of the maze.”

  “The maze changes twice daily in the power hours of midnight and noon.”

  “Oh.”

  “You are still deciding if you should ask Mr. Fuentes for permission to talk to the Magical who can cast a glamor spell for you. To get to Command and Control and Victor, go right. Then keep turning left at each corner after the long bend. You’ll find him there at his desk. He has a new standing desk he likes very much. Victor is hungry for lunch and is thinking about ordering in pizza from Grimaldi’s, even though Dr. Moosejaw says he shouldn’t eat it so often. Sometimes Victor wonders what Wilmington looks like without her clothes on, but mostly he worries about how to get into the other dimension where the demons live.”

  “I see. You said you keep secrets.”

  “I do. I have so many more than that. And you won’t tell anyone, anyway. You aren’t going to the right. You aren’t going to ask Mr. Fuentes for permission, either.”

  She was right. I didn’t want to face Victor, especially with the revelation about him picturing Wilmington naked. What should I say to Wil next time I saw her?

  “You won’t say anything to Wil. She’s his bodyguard and as long as you say nothing, you won’t make it weird between them.” Fawn pointed to the left. “I can take you to the wizard now.”

  “Do we follow the yellow brick road?”

  She frowned. “No. Follow me.” However, instead of leading the way, she took my hand. In my calloused palm, her hand felt soft and almost boneless. To my demon senses, holding hands with Fawn was like holding a pile of warm mashed potatoes.

  “You shouldn’t compare humans to anything to do with food. It freaks me out,” Fawn said.

  “Sorry.”

  “And I’m almost eight. My birthday is in February.”

  As we walked through unmarked hallways, torches flamed on to light our way. I tried to think of nothing. That’s a sure path to start thinking of something.

  “Even if you meditated more, it wouldn’t help,” Fawn said. “I can see the stuff you’re thinking and I can see the stuff you aren’t thinking. That’s why my life is in danger all the time. Bad people don’t want me alive.”

  “But you’ll always see your enemies coming, right?”

  “Mind reading only works if I can see who I’m reading and if they’re close by. Somebody could still trap me. Or get me in my sleep. I’m still just a kid, you know.”

  “Couldn’t you pret
end you aren’t a mind reader?”

  Fawn laughed and I sensed no bitterness or fear. “No. My Mom says no one should hide their light under a bushel of dumb people’s expectations. Everybody has to play their part. Dad says if you’re a great bricklayer, be a great bricklayer even if you know it might hurt your back when you’re old. We all have to be who we are. You’re destined to try to save the world. And if you save the world, I’ll rule it.”

  I stopped and stared at her.

  “Don’t worry,” Fawn said. “There’ll be a vote. Geez. You didn’t really think everything would be the same forever even if you keep the demons out.”

  “I didn’t think about it at all.”

  “Until now. And now that you’re thinking about it you — ”

  “I think you should keep your talents secret a bit longer.”

  “If I did that, we’d definitely lose the war. Chumele said so.”

  “You knew Chumele?”

  “All the Magicals did. I called her Grammy. She was nice and she never had mean thoughts about anyone.”

  “I’m sorry she died.”

  “She knew what she was doing when she took you down to that place. Grammy could see into her future a little bit. She said you were worth the sacrifice. She told me to tell you something when you came back. She gave her life for you to have a chance to win the war and my future depends on you, so don’t screw up.”

  Lesson 160: don’t hide the light of your genius under a bushel of dumb and don’t screw up.

  “Okay…good talk, Fawn. Good talk. Thanks.” Cute as she was, I couldn’t wait to get away from that kid.

  Fawn read my mind, squeezed my hand and smiled. “I get that a lot.”

  6

  The way was always down. The tunnel straightened. The Magicals wove elaborate spells to make the labyrinth around Command and Control. However, I was sure we were beyond the cast of that spell and back into the real world, whatever that was.

  Lesson 161: The more we know, the more we understand that we don’t know. The concept of the real world is a moving target, a chimera grounded only in the shifting sand of imagination. Lots of so-called facts change. Look at history. Everybody who ever thought they had the world nailed down to one reality turned out to be wrong. Statistically, our chances of being right about what we think we know aren’t that much better now.