Demon Accords 8: College Arcane (44 page)

At least by being home, I didn’t keep Mack
awake. I crawled out of bed early and took a long, hot shower, my
second in less than twelve hours. Something about not having to
share a bathroom with a bunch of sloppy, loud, obnoxious dudes.

When I entered the apartment behind the
restaurant, I found Darci cooking breakfast. A quick review of the
newspaper headlines found no mention of the apocalypse, so I must
have been looking a bit confused when she glanced over at me.

“Plot twist. The tough but beautiful deputy
uncharacteristically demonstrates her sophisticated culinary skills
to her favorite step-nephew,” she said with a grin, shoveling runny
scrambled eggs and overcooked bacon onto a plate for me.

I kissed the top of her head, which both
pleased her and simultaneously pissed her off. Her mock growl
failed to scare me.

“Just because your center of gravity is a
mile off the floor and your most vulnerable parts are in easy
punching range is no reason to get cocky,” she said.

“Thanks Darci,” I said, both for the food and
the banter. “Where’s Aunt Ash?”

“Hey, sensitive and savvy, that’s me,” she
said to the first. “She’s out making sure everything is in place
for the restaurant tomorrow. She’s gotta big gig at that fancy new
college facility, ya know.”

My aunt would run the finals of the
tournament tonight. The finalists would be decided today from among
Caeco’s Commandos, The Burlington Brawlers, Dellwood’s
Wolver-machines, and team Witch Slap. Miss Berg would run this
morning’s event.

“So, how
you
doing?” she asked in an imitation
Brooklyn accent.

“Eh,” I said, digging into the eggs and
discovering melted cheese mixed in. Cheese can fix lots of cooking
errors.

“Ash said you had girlfriend issues on top of
the self-defense incident,” Darci said.

“Caeco thinks I want to be with Ryanne and
I’m of the opinion that she’s crushing on our survival instructor,
Mr. Jenks,” I said.

“Ah. Jealousy mixed with hot for teacher.
Classic. Listen, Declan. Caeco’s a great kid, which despite the
whole engineered-for-combat thing, is what she is. Same with you:
you’re just a punk-ass eighteen year old, despite the being the
Goddess’s gift to witchkind. You’re both kids and this is the first
real romance for both of you. So the emotions are sharp and pointy
at both ends of the spectrum. But this is just the beginning for
both of you. If it ends, and who knows… it might not, then treasure
it for what is was and let it help guide you in your next
relationship.”

I didn’t want to think about next
relationships. I didn’t feel like there would be any next
relationship.

“Now, any issues with defending yourself and
your friend? Any second doubts about preventing two homicides by
someone who, for reasons outside your control, attacked you with
intent to kill?” she asked, her voice shifting to a more
professional tone.

Only the idea that if I tried to get rid of
Sorrow, it would find another witch and do the same thing all over
again. I kept that to myself, as I had already kept quiet about
Sorrow’s appearance. No part of me could see how involving others
would help me with my book problem.

“No. I spent the whole night thinking about
it. You know, wondering if I could have done anything different and
kept her alive. Like that,” I said.

“And?”

“She was kicking my ass. I’d blinded her, but
there are ways around that and she was going to settle down and
start using them. She was really skilled, had some spells and
shields I didn’t know what to do with. No, I can’t think of
anything else I could have done. I couldn’t beat her shield on raw
power, not without time to draw from somewhere else. So I snuck
inside her guard and pulled rather than pushed,” I said.

“Listen, I don’t know shit about the Craft,
but I understand confrontation. Believe me, I do. When you are
fighting for your life, you have to take the kill shot if it
presents itself. Your aunt and I would be holding a wake for you
right this moment if you had chosen different,” she said.

That
mental image was sharp and clear. It helped put things in
perspective.

“Thanks, Darci. A lot. For breakfast, too,” I
said, getting up and giving her a hug.

“No problem. Just don’t tell Ashling about
how devastatingly delicious my cooking is. It would crush her
self-image,” she said with a smirk.

“Hah. Don’t worry about that. I can guarantee
those words won’t come out of my mouth,” I said, grabbing the
Beast’s keychain.

“Brat! Go on; we’ll see you later,” she said
as I left my home.

I got back to Arcane a few minutes before
nine a.m. and headed straight for the basement.

Miss Berg was drawing the teams for the first
match, the team captains standing around her as she pulled marked
tokens from a paper bag.

“It’ll be the Brawlers vs. Commandos, and
Were-machines vs the Witch Slap,” she said, lining up the four
tokens as she had drawn them. “Brawlers and Commandos first.
Captains, you have ten minutes to get your act together.”

“Oooh, Carl, you are so gonna get your ass
spanked,” Erika, team Slap’s captain, said to the leader of the
Brawlers. Then she saw me. “And Declan, when we’re all done down
here, we can head to my room for some other spanking.”

Schlampe!
Sorrow said. Gonna have to look that one up, but
from the tone, it didn’t sound complementary.

“Then he can run home from that, too,” Caeco
said, just loud enough for the other captains to hear.

Hündin!
That one I already knew… bitch.

“Oooooh, dude, she burned you,” Delwood said,
his expression a combination of delight and surprise.

I didn’t say anything back, just looked Caeco
up and down before deliberately looking over to Mr.Jenks, who was
now talking to Miss Berg. Caeco’s khaki tactical pants and black
skin-tight performance top were almost identical to his. They even
wore desert combat boots.

My silent comparison was not lost on the
others, who looked either puzzled or shocked. Caeco flushed, ever
so slightly, then frowned and got up in my face.

“You up for this match today? Say the word
and we’ll get a replacement,” she demanded.

“No substitutes this late in the
competition,” Erika said. “That’s the rules. Otherwise, we’d take
him on our team, where he belongs.”

“Ready. In fact, if you want to sit this one
out and watch from the teacher’s box I can carry your slack,” I
said back, ignoring Erika.

“As if. You will follow my instructions or
sit out yourself,” she replied. I recognized her Leader mode, one
of her fallbacks when she was upset.

“This is gonna be fun,” Mack muttered to his
sister, Ashley, and Justin as they came up. Caeco led us over to a
dark corner.

“Ashley, you plant the flag and post on
overwatch. Make sure you have extra gun tubes. Jetta, Mack, Justin,
you are all with me. We’ll hunt both the Brawlers and their flag at
the same time,” Caeco said. I waited, but she didn’t address
me.

Mack and the others looked confused and
finally Mack opened his mouth. “What about Declan? Where are you
going to use him?”

“Declan can go do whatever
he wants, which is what he usually does. I only want people that
will
listen
to
me,” she told him after glancing at me. I snorted, turning my back
on her and heading over to check on Double D. I was actually so mad
I could literally see red.

Each avatar had a cubby on the wall, with a
warded door and storage for ammo and spelled weapons. I put my hand
on D’s door and it popped open, allowing me to grab gun tubes and
start loading them into his arm brackets.

The use of replaceable copper tubes,
preloaded with spelled ammo, had grown out of the flamethrowers.
Turns out that fire wasn’t very useful against clay people, not
unless you used plasma and that was forbidden by Gina as too
dangerous to the school, the students, and the spectators. But the
fire tubes quickly evolved into single-shot guns shooting ball
bearings, propelled by a compressed air spell, cast by enterprising
witches. I skipped the standard tubes and loaded some experimental
ones of my own design, a new approach.

The bleachers were filling up and I could see
lots of extra people with the witch families. I also saw Ashley’s
minder, Neeve. The two agents, Mazar and Krupp, were back and that
hard-assed general, Creek, was even there, sitting with a man and
woman who looked as military as he did.

“Dude, you okay?” Mack asked, Justin just
behind him.

“Okay? Why Mack, I’m abso-fucking-lutely
fantastic,” I said, smiling. They both recoiled a bit from my
expression

“Uh oh,” Justin said in his deep voice.

“Just keep it together for the match,
alright?” Mack asked, clearly worried I was going off the deep
end.

“Sure,” I agreed, pulling more spelled
artifacts out of storage and sticking them to DD’s vest. All the
avatars wore loadbearing gear now, most of it hand-sewn or modified
from toy dolls. DD’s is handmade from fine copper mesh, with a
rune-carved chest plate of soft copper. All my own work, which
puzzled the hell out of my friends and competitors. It was new and
its secrets would soon be out.

“Teams to the benches, faces away from the
course,” Miss Berg called out.

We placed our avatars on the landscape, then
turned and sat on the benches so that we faced the audience. Only a
few of us could drive the dirt players with our regular eyes open
and it was considered cheating, if you could handle the double
vision. I had been doing it forever, but a couple others could do
it, Delwood surprisingly one of them.

When we were seated, Miss Berg nodded to
someone out of our view and the sounds of the landscape remolding
itself rumbled through our ears. The audience oohed and ahhed,
clearly impressed.

“Alright, players. Wake up your avatars and
proceed to your assigned starting points.”

I closed my eyes and pushed into DD, letting
my senses adjust to his perspective. Driving an avatar was
thrilling, but the mini-golems lacked the sensory input a real
human deals with constantly. We had vision and hearing as well as
smell. But touch was very muffled and there was obviously no pain.
If your avatar got burned, blasted, or knocked to powder, you felt
the impact but not the damage. It allowed kids to do horrible stuff
to each other’s avatars without causing any pain. Lots of anger,
though. People got pissed when you trashed their dirt partners,
more so than in video games.

The others were grouping up and I took last
position, following as Caeco led us along the edge of the course to
the far end. The referees had reformed the course into what looked
like six or seven mountains, with deep valleys and peaks that
almost reached the ceiling.

At our end, Caeco’s green and black
tiger-striped avatar turned and waved one hand at Ashley’s green
and brown mottled fighter. Ashley took off at a trot to the nearest
mountain slope, the team’s flag over her dirt shoulder.

Dropping a stone from her vest, she stood
back to watch as it formed an avatar-sized hole in the side of the
mountain. One cave, ready made.

It was illegal to bury your flag, but hiding
it in a cave was okay. She laid some stones and wood chips at the
opening and then moved back till she was almost off the landscape.
There she built a sniper hide, draping a handkerchief over her form
with an arsenal of gun tubes lined up in front of her. The
handkerchief was the result of a photo of the game course ground,
printed by a specialty shop on Church Street onto the handkerchief.
It made a perfect camo sniper cover.

Caeco pointed at her three other teammates
and waved them to follow her, ignoring me completely. I watched
them go, my temper doing a slow boil. Then I looked at Ashley’s
hide. The ground appeared to shrug. Great.

Fuck it. I sprinted around the opposite side
of the mountain from Caeco’s path, running across the valley on the
other side, ignoring the newly mounted cameras on the ceiling that
were projecting our activities to the freshly installed monitors
for the audience to watch.

The next mountain over, I climbed. Right
straight to the summit. There I paused, setting up a concave-shaped
piece of wood that had been spelled with a hair from Matthew the
werewolf’s ear. The woodchip linked to DD’s hearing and suddenly I
had a werewolf-powered hearing aid.

Soft little shifting rock sounds came from
two mountains ahead. The listening chip went into its pouch and a
flat pebble replaced it on the mountain peak. Some careful aiming,
a quick jump up while activating the pebble, and the kinetic blast
shot me across the valley and almost over the next peak. Sharp
brass feet and hands stuck into the dirt and stone of the new
summit, stopping me from falling seven real feet to my doom.