Demon Accords 8: College Arcane (34 page)

“You’re the stud of the game, Duckland,
seeing as you created it, and they’re all going to want a piece of
you. So your job is to raise hell, create diversion, and give our
strike team a shot at their flag,” Delwood had challenged me. I
think he was surprised when I grinned and agreed completely.

“This will be fun, but I don’t know how long
I’ll last against them, so don’t dick around,” I’d said, grinning
from ear-to-ear.

Honestly, I’d been so afraid that I’d get
stuck as captain—which was fairly egotistical of me—that I’d
thought it wouldn’t be fun at all. Instead, I got to kamikaze over
the hill and wreak all manner of havoc until my dude ended up
buried under an avalanche of red team strikers and defenders.
Delwood led an assault that easily beat the few avatars held back
around the flag. Our own flag was never in any jeopardy at all. The
other team didn’t even see it as a loss. They were all glad to have
had a dirt hand in taking me down, especially my friends.

Somehow, through all the chaos, my aunt
managed to teach everyone in the class something new, every week.
Shockingly, so did Miss Berg. My aunt covered the practical
aspects—kind of the lab, so to speak. Miss Berg talked about
concepts like symbolism in magic, harnessing your will, and
carefully defining intent. That last was important because a lack
of focus and definition in magic crafting could be disastrous. The
witches all learned new spells, including some for other affinities
that could be executed by any witch if laid out properly. The other
students all learned a considerable amount about general Craft and
spell work, and were easily able to identify various spells and
wards by their structure and components. Some spells could be
activated by nonmagical people, and a few basic wards could be done
by anyone.

Avatars quickly became customized and a heavy
trade developed around spells and spelled items for the game.

All of the witches came up with new tricks,
from air bombs and water cannons to spelled stones that could
create berm walls and instant pits. The air witches learned to
create a Wytchwar version of a flash-bang grenade. Erika, of all
people, stumbled on it using a hollow reed. When activated, the
spelled tube would pull in air for about ten seconds, compress it,
and then release it all at once.

We learned to make some things that were very
useful, like magic lifts, which lifted any avatar up about two feet
in a split second, making short work of high climbs, and some
things which were complete duds, like the air bridge spells that
were put together to get people over chasms or the river. The
little golems kept falling off and either got trapped or swept
away.

Aunt Ash also had us change the landscape
weekly, tweaking the underlying spellwork to allow the river to
move and the ridges to change into separate mountains and
valleys.

Wytchwar quickly permeated the entire school,
from group discussions on tactics and rules to new versions of game
and competitions on both a team and individual level. Even the
teachers and staff were drawn into watching the weekly Monday night
games.

Not too surprisingly, I did well although my
team didn’t always win. Caeco quickly proved herself the best
tactician, but Delwood seemed to have a knack as well. My own
skills were usually utilized as sort of a heavy weapons platform.
Sometimes I was used to spearhead an attack and other times I was
left almost on my own to defend, allowing the team to field the
most attackers possible.

Interestingly, my greatest challenges came
from whatever robot T.J. was driving at the time. His inventiveness
was crazy good and the fights between his robot and my dirt dude
became a spectator favorite.

In one area, I had no equals. I was still the
premier avatar maker and so my services were always in demand,
which allowed me to trade my skills for favors, spelled objects or
even, once, help with an essay. I could easily trade for alcohol,
but Arcane didn’t have a whole lot of ilicit drinking going on.
Weres couldn’t get drunk, the result of their metabolisms, and
witches are iffy with any drugs. Some of the rest experimented, but
really, if you went to a school where the most dangerous and most
prank-prone kids couldn’t drink, would you risk getting blotto? We
did have some kids who were prone to attempting mind expansion
through pot.

Even Explorations of Power class got
marginally better. Miss Berg had settled for leading us through the
vast body of written knowledge, or I should say, supposed
knowledge, of the psychic and supernatural world. Most, possibly as
high as ninety percent, was bullshit. But some kernels of wisdom
did pop up here and there. She split us into two-person teams and
had each team review a book. The teams were almost always a witch
and a nonwitch, and she changed them after every assignment. The
result was that I learned more about clairvoyants, psychometrics,
telekinetics, telepaths, and distance viewers than I would have
thought possible. I suppose that they learned about witches at the
same time.

The one area of study that proved to provide
little gain was the witches learning the Irwin knack of borrowing
or, as Paige called it, leveraging magic. It wasn’t that they
didn’t try hard, as I think most of them worked on it out of class
more than they did anything else. It lurked just on the edge of
their abilities, with little, sporadic glimpses of success mixed
with hours of fruitless attempts. Maybe it had to be taught young.
I don’t know and apparently, neither did my aunt.

Winter was passing quickly and the
university’s spring break in March was fast approaching. Gina
announced that none of us were eligible to leave Arcane; instead,
we would have a full week of guest speakers, seminars, and
workshops. The end of the week would be a parents-and-guests
weekend where we would get to show our families around, have a
Wytchwar tournament, and finish with a big dinner and music
party.

Gina was bringing in a couple of different
types of performers, including a young up-and-coming rapper and a
pretty well-known D.J. We were also informed of a special
performance by the Sisters Eerie, as Ryanne’s other three sisters
were accompanying her parents to visit. I would have thought that
would make Ryanne happy, but instead she got moody and even snippy
with me. The weather was a bit warmer in early March and she
stopped catching rides with me. I didn’t know if I had somehow
offended her or if she was tired of having to pretend to be
interested in me. That made Caeco very happy but left me completely
confused. I would have sworn we were friends, yet she blatantly
avoided me.

The exact opposite was true of the rest of
the witch pack. Somehow, I had become their best buddy or favorite
guy in the school.

One day between classes, I stopped in one of
the UVM campus eateries for lunch and spotted Mack in close
conversation with a pretty girl. I waved and he waved me over. Her
name was Alexis and she gave me a friendly smile when Mack
introduced me. After the introduction, I went through the line to
get food and discovered the entire witch pack had just arrived.
They dragged me to their table and put me just about dead center of
the group, chattering and laughing through the whole lunch.

Across the room, I could see Mack and his
friend Alexis watching us, their heads close together, obviously
conversing about us.

I asked him about it later when we were in
our room.

“She’s a Psych major,” he said.

“But she seemed so normal,” I said.

“F.U. buddy. She’s hot and
you know it,” he replied. “Anyway,
she
thought you seemed like a nice
guy but was fascinated to see the witch bitches glom onto you that
way, so I asked her for an analysis.”

“What did she say?” I pressed.

“Oh? Now you value the Psych major’s
opinion?” he asked.

“Dude, you
know
that a lot of them
are a bit… different. Doesn’t mean they don’t know stuff,” I
said.

“No kidding? Really?” he asked, mocking me. I
think I might have growled a bit.

“Now you sound like one of the wolves,” he
laughed. “Anyway, listen to this… and remember, she’d never seen
any of the witches before. She said that Erika wants to have your
baby—her words, not mine—Britta is fascinated by you but not in a
romantic way, Paige has a crush on you, Tami fears you, Jael is
uncomfortable around you, Michelle has friend zoned you, and
Zuzanna is wicked jealous of you.”

“Jealous? But what about Ryanne? She won’t
say two words to me,” I asked.

“She said she really likes you,” Mack said.
“Which if you remember, I called early on.”

“She’s wrong about that, but you left out her
most important analysis… What did she say about me?” I asked.

“She said you were distrustful of them, but
you covered it well. Said you were confused and uncomfortable by
all the attention, which struck her as odd. Said most guys our age
would just dive headfirst into the pool. She was amused that you
were completely put off by Erika, said it reaffirmed her faith that
some guys might be slightly deeper than a puddle. She thinks you
may have trust issues,” he said, smirking.

“Ya think?” I asked. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, she wanted my number.”

I whipped a Nerf football at him, but he just
caught it, spiked it, and did an imitation touchdown dance.

Chapter 31

Break week arrived along with somewhat milder
temperatures and definitely longer days. The colleges were closed
so we had no classes and our Arcane classes were to be replaced by
workshops and seminars of all kinds for the first three days of the
week. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were scheduled for family and
guest visits and had their own schedule of events.

Sunday night, we hung out in the student
lounge at the far end of the second floor and tried to figure out
what we wanted to attend, as Gina was requiring essays from each of
us at the end. The witch pack held court in the cluster of chairs
and couches next to us, nearer the gas fireplace, and some of the
wolves were watching college basketball on the big flatscreen
mounted on the wall.

Some presentations were mandatory, like the
opening remarks, which would feature Gina and supposedly Nathan
Stewart, who had yet to make an appearance at Arcane since the
semester had started.

Other time slots featured
multiple concurrent topics such as
Drone
Tactics and Applications, Portal Development Frequency,
Technological Advances in Portal Closure, Demonic Combat, Global
Supernatural Capabilities, Implications of Mythic Species, Economic
Reactions to Emergence,
and
Weapons systems for a New World.

Some parts of the weeklong
schedule were filled by single presentations like
National Security Issues in Post Emergence
America
and
Pressure Points in Today’s Society.

The schedule and information
packet that we’d received via email told us no fewer than a dozen
times that we were under no obligation to reveal any personal
knowledge of ourselves or our abilities to the speakers. It went on
to observe that many, if not most, of the visitors held jobs with
high-level clearances in intelligence or law enforcement and would
be professionally curious about their young, college-aged
audience.
It was pointed out that recent
global and national events had brought Oracle from the shadows into
the limelight and the rest of the national intelligence apparatus
was curious, jealous, and threatened by anything related to
Oracle.

The last part of the week, when the speakers
were gone, would provide us a chance to show our families and
guests things we had learned.

“Is it odd that Oracle seems to be dissing
the other agencies?” Ashley asked.

“Nah. It’s like a big old family where the
kids all get jealous of each other,” Justin said. “Bureaucracies
always feature rivalries by department for resources and
budget.”

We must have all had the same expression
because he shrugged. “What? We cover some of this in my poly-sci
curriculum.”

“It makes sense that they’d be crazy curious.
None of the regular agencies were at all equipped to deal with
demons or the other species,” Jetta said. “Mack and I were held by
some FBI types at one point and they were like fish out of
water.”

“Oracle has always had the smallest budget,
by far, even smaller than the Department of Anomalous Activity. Now
they’re at the front of everything,” Ariel said.

“The who and the what?” I asked.

“Department of Anomalous Activity. Previously
secret group that monitored werewolves and vampires before the
whole portal breakout,” Ariel explained. “They have history with
Chris and Tanya. I’ve heard Oracle people say that they’re pretty
militarized.”

“What do you mean? Oracle has military
components. I’ve seen them,” Caeco said.

“Yeah, there are some security and strike
elements, but DOAA is mostly drawn from the military, particularly
special operations types. Oracle has worked with them many times
but I don’t think that Nathan Stewart and General Creek like each
other very much,” Ariel said.