Dark Light of Day (5 page)

True to his word, he told me about himself. He’d been raised in Bradbury, a working-class Hyrke neighborhood in the southwest section of New Babylon. He had a younger brother, Matt, who was seventeen and trying to decide where to go to college. The top contenders were my alma mater, Gaillard, and the Engineering Institute. Apparently Matt was some kind of mechanical genius. I told Ari that I’d gone to Gaillard.

“You’re kidding?” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. Was he surprised at finding a connection between us, no matter how tenuous? New Babylonians tended to do that when they found they shared something in common with a stranger. That’s what happened when you lived in a city populated with a million people. Or was he surprised that someone who’d willingly jumped off a pier to a moving boat would be accepted at Gaillard? Gaillard wasn’t for academic slackers. You had to have excellent grades just to get in, let alone stand out against your peers. My parents had sent Night and I there before the ink was dry on our Ajaccio
Academy diplomas. It was the perfect solution for them. The urban campus had no plants for me to kill and the Hyrke curriculum offered no occult training to confuse (or educate) us.

Ari told me he’d gone to Etincelle last night to stay with his aunt. She was his mother’s sister and I gathered they were close. He’d brought her a birthday present—a garnet pendant on a silver chain—because the sisters’ favorite color was red.

“What’s your favorite color?” he said suddenly.

I opened my mouth to answer but then realized I’d be opening the door again to further questions about myself so I said instead, “What’s yours?”

“Black,” he said slowly, looking at my hair and then bringing his gaze back to my eyes. My heart skipped a beat. I hoped he’d think my rosy cheeks were due to the cold.

“Who’s your aunt?” I asked, thinking I would probably know her.

“Judy Pinkerton.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “She lives on the Decemai estate.” He nodded. The Decemaus family lived off the Lemiscus too but miles from us.

I felt myself opening up a little as we talked. Ari wasn’t the type to burst into spontaneous laughter. But I had fun. It had been a long time since I’d chatted it up with a Hyrke. Their conversations always seemed so
normal
. Maybe pretending to be a Hyrke at St. Lucifer’s wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Too soon the crossing ended and our little ferry started docking on the north bank. I grabbed my pack from underneath my seat and prepared to go. Ari grabbed my hand—a not unpleasant habit he had adopted over the last hour or so.

“Let’s get together again,” he said.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Why? This crossing was one of the best I’ve ever had.”

Wow. Really?
Surprisingly, I felt the same, but I knew he wouldn’t have said that if he’d known he’d been sitting next to someone who could instantly turn him to ashes.

“Come on, I want to hear more about you, Noon. You made me talk about myself almost the whole time. Next time, it’s your turn.”

I just stared at him, speechless and nearly numb with the power of my wanting things to be different.

“Come on, you can’t hide forever.”
Was that my plan?
I hope I didn’t look as pained as I felt.

I shook my head. “I’ll see you around.”

I resisted the impulse to hug him. Sure, he’d maybe saved my life and we’d spent a pleasant hour crossing the Lethe, but I didn’t even really know this guy.

“I’m sure you will,” he said and smiled. Then he turned around and walked in the opposite direction of where I was headed.

I watched him for a while, wondering if I’d made a mistake. I’d had Hyrke flings before. He might be a welcome distraction from all the stress St. Lucifer’s was sure to heap on me. On the other hand, it was more likely the guy would become an unwanted complication. I turned away. I walked for a while and then couldn’t help myself. I glanced over my shoulder. Ari was gone. I could see our ferry though, tied up and loading passengers bound for Etincelle. Its name was as faded as the rest of it, but I could just make out the lettering:
First Light
.

So much for the augury idea. A boat named after its arrival time told me nothing about my future. I turned my back on it and kept walking.

M
y boots squished with every step so I took a cabriolet from the waterfront instead of walking. My cabbie, a polite nontalker who expressed zero reaction to my destination, dropped me at a courtyard in front of what appeared to be the main building. I tipped him extra for his reserve on the way over. He looked at the money, grunted, and sped off. I turned to face my new home.

My first reaction was that it looked like a bigger version of some of the Etincelle estates. Lots of heavy, clunky, gothic architecture with an emphasis on pointed arches, flying buttresses, and gargoyles. But there were a lot more people milling around here than there would be on a private estate. And there were more buildings. The campus took up at least five city blocks. That seemed about right, I thought, mentally checking off the buildings I’d read about in the orientation materials—Megiddo, Abaddon, and Infernus (dormitories), Marduk’s (eating hall), Corpus Justica (library), Lekai Auditorium, and Rickard Building, where the main classrooms were. There were probably a few I’d forgotten. On the other
side of the courtyard from where I stood was the Joshua School, where Peter went. But he wouldn’t be arriving for a few weeks so, for now, I was on my own. I trudged into the Warenne Tiberius Rhaetia Administrative Building in search of the student affairs desk. Someone there would be able to tell me where my dorm room was and who I’d be sharing it with.

On the way, I checked out my new surroundings. For the most part, everything was exactly how I’d imagined it. The lounge at student affairs looked pristinely comfortable, with deep couches, overstuffed chairs, and large tables. The walls were a freshly painted beige and the furniture had been recently reupholstered in tastefully coordinated patterns of honey, russet gold, and burgundy. Thankfully, there were no plants. I hadn’t expected to see any in a school where they trained future Maegesters but I was relieved nonetheless. Students were milling about in small groups. More than half of them seemed to be paying more attention to the people around them than the group they were with. I hurried through the room, wanting a hot shower and a dry pair of shoes more than anything.

The Hyrke working the student affairs desk had a cold. A box of tissues, a bag of throat lozenges, and a bottle of aspirin lined her desk like charms. If the charms were supposed to ward off students, it wasn’t working. The line was at least six students deep when I took my place. The woman in front of me mumbled something under her breath to the man in front of her. He turned around to reply and caught me staring. I didn’t want to be rude and was just about to look away when he winked at me and then said to the woman in front of me, “Ivy, she’s
ill
, for Luck’s sake. Give the woman a break.”

“Like Hell,” Ivy muttered. “That bottle of aspirin has been sitting there since summer and those lozenges look so old they’re probably from the pre-Apocalyptic days.”

A few of the other students snickered. I gathered from their collective impatience they’d been there awhile. The
man in front of Ivy interpreted my staring as an invitation to chat. He pushed past her and extended his hand to me.

“I’m Fitz,” he said.

“Noon,” I replied, shaking his hand. His grip was firm and quick. The woman named Ivy turned around. With flaming red hair, a mottled complexion, and light green eyes, she looked every inch a Mederi. And with that name I had to wonder… but what would a Mederi be doing in law school? They were all about healing and growing.

“This is Ivy, my cousin,” Fitz said. The family resemblance was strong, although Fitz’s hair was a few shades deeper and his complexion ruddier.

“So, what section are you in?” Ivy asked. All first years were in one of three sections. You did everything with your section—took classes, studied, ate, and even slept in the same dorms together. The orientation materials had made it sound as if your section was a fishbowl. You’d be able to see the world around you but you wouldn’t be living in it. The only people who were going to share your life during the next year were the people in your section. I had the feeling my answer to Ivy’s question would determine exactly how much longer this conversation would last.

“Section three,” I said.

“Us too,” Fitz said, grinning.

Ivy’s expression changed from impatient annoyance to one that was half-interested, half-wary. I was now someone who mattered, an academic competitor who would have a direct effect on her future. I wanted to reassure her that my only goal was to live in the fishbowl without being eaten by the cat but since saying something so revealing was out of the question, I settled on asking if they’d heard anything about our professors.

“Ben Copeland teaches Sin and Sanction,” said Fitz. “He’s young. Overcompensates for it by being overly strict. Any perceived slight and you are on the outs for the whole semester. Darius Dorio teaches Council Procedure—”

“A real performer,” Ivy cut in. “Turns every class into a
show.” That could be interesting, I thought, provided I stayed part of the audience.

“Promises and Oathbreaking is Telford,” Fitz said, rolling his eyes.

“Ah, yes,” said Ivy. “The professorial equivalent of
Dionaea muscipula
. He lures students into a false sense of security by repeating test questions every year. He even puts the questions
and the answers
on file in the library. But every now and then—and you never know when—he asks entirely new questions. So you have to study everything anyway or risk complete failure.”

“For Evil Deeds, we’ve got Sarah Meginnis,” continued Fitz. Listening to the two of them was like listening to two simultaneously played dueling piano performances. My head bobbled between them, trying to keep pace.

“Very dusty,” Ivy said, flipping her hair and taking a peek at the front of the line. There was only one more student in front of them.

“She’s ancient and has been at St. Luck’s forever,” Fitz said. “Rumor has it she just went straight to teaching without any time in the field. She’s out of touch with real practice, but since evil deeds haven’t changed much since Azazel first defined them in the hundred days following Armageddon, she’s still teaching what we need to know.”

I nodded, acting like some of this was old news and the rest was of no concern, but inside I was sweating. Forget about my concerns over training to become a Maegester. Studying to become an ordinary Hyrke Barrister was starting to sound near impossible too.

“Who’d I leave out?” Fitz asked, stepping up to within sneezing distance of Lady Lozenge. He was next in line.

“Erdman for Analysis and Application,” Ivy said. “We don’t know much about her, except she’s new. I did hear that A and A is a lot of case briefs, though, endless reading and a lot of writing. The only other first year professor is Quintus Rochester. But he’s a Maegester and only teaches Maegester classes.”

I hoped my cheeks weren’t burning. It was so much easier playing Hyrke at Gaillard where no one talked about stuff like this. Was I imagining the hush in the room? Mercifully, Fitz was called up and Ivy, naturally, went with him. I knew they were cousins but they acted like siblings. I watched as they poked and prodded each other, trading little barbs back and forth while Lady Lozenge pulled up their info. A few seconds later, all three of them turned toward me.

Oh no.

“Are you Noon
Onyx
?” Lozenge asked.

“Yes,” I said. Now I knew I was not imagining the hush. The room had gone deadly silent.

“You’re not signed up for Manipulation,” Lozenge said.

“Manipulation—?” My voice squeaked and I refused to look around at anyone else. What was she talking about? How stupid was I for not even reading the Maegester part of the course catalog. I’ll bet even the Hyrkes who were training to become Barristers did that.

“I need to know where to put you.” Lozenge said, exasperated. “Are you here to train as a Barrister or a Maegester?”

Up until this moment, I’d managed to avoid situations that put me in awkward positions such as this. Positions where I’d have to lie outright about who and what I was. Oh, I’d omitted the truth a countless number of times. But I had never stood in front of an administrator at a demon law school and denied being something the demons valued. The demons might view it as stealing. That’s why Maegesters had to declare themselves by Bryde’s Day of their twenty-first year. A Maegester’s adult life was either spent serving the Council or it was spent… not at all. I cleared my throat.

Would Peter be able to find the Reversal Spell? If so, when?

“I’m…”

“Apparently, you’re my new roommate,” Ivy said, staring at me. She gestured behind her with her thumb. “She said you’re in Megiddo. Room one twelve, same as me. You did know that the Hyrkes here have roommates, right?”

Oh.
Right. Of course. Only a handful of students would have the necessary magic to become Maegesters, but hundreds of Hyrkes were here to become Barristers. The school would have to assign roommates or they’d never be able to house them all.