Demon Accords 8: College Arcane (22 page)

Oh. I thought you were disgusted with me,
being all weak and all.

“Yeah, real weak,” she said. “That’s why you
just tossed a quarter ton of monster up a wall and held it there
while burning a hundred pounds of wood up in less than ten seconds.
You don’t think I know how strong you are? Hello? I was with you in
that field last September when you wiped out all those zombie
things.”

Revenants… not zombies.

“Whatever. Now you sound like me, Miss
Correction and Logic. Watch out or you’ll find yourself following
orders next,” she said, truly disgusted.

Fight wasn’t your fault. Okay, so you did
what you’ve been trained to do your whole life. So you couldn’t
break all your advanced conditioning in under half a year… so what.
Make a note and move on. I don’t blame you.

“But you got hurt. That’s not all right,” she
said.

I survived. No one is dead, although I might
be when Aunt Ash is done with me.

“Yeah, you’re in trouble, but she loves you
to pieces. You’re just gonna have to suck up to her and grovel till
you get back into her good graces.”

I can grovel with the best of them.

“No doubt. Hey, let’s go get breakfast before
we have to go to class. You can tell me about these battle tattoo
thingies,” she said, poking at the one on the back of my right
hand.

I
was
pretty hungry. We headed out to
the dining room and sat quietly in a corner, far from where my aunt
sat with Gina, drinking tea. I didn’t have too much time to explain
the glyphs because class was fast approaching for both of us, but
that was okay. At least she was talking to me again. I wrote out a
lengthy bit about using my mom’s grimoire to find the tattoos and
about how it was in the section I’d promised not read.

I gave her a ride to the campus and just
after I parked in student parking, she unzipped her bookbag and
pulled out an envelope.

“These are the results of your karyotype.
They’re a little… unusual. My professor was very interested but
unfortunately your blood sample was accidentally soaked in strong
acid. Unfortunate,” she said with a slight smile. “I got some stuff
off the Internet and put it in there about your type. Don’t read a
lot into it, although it maybe helps explain how you turned out to
be who you are. As a witch, I mean. Anyway, see you later, okay?”
she asked, kissing me quickly. I nodded, clutching the envelope,
and watched her walk away.

We were still a bit awkward, but I felt
better. Grabbing my stuff, I hightailed it to Programming, getting
in early enough to have time to open the envelope.

Declan, generally speaking, most people have
46 chromosomes. You have 47. In your case, instead of having one X
chromosome from your mother and one Y chromosome from your father,
you ended up with XYY, or in other words, two Y’s from your
father.

It’s rare… about 1 in every thousand people…
but not really a big deal. I printed out some stuff about it and
some of the things it can cause. I don’t think you have any of
those except you fit the general genotype of tall and slender. XYY
Syndrome is the least detrimental of the abnormal karyotypes. XXX,
XXY or X syndromes all produce disabilities, some quite severe. You
don’t suffer from any mental retardation other than what’s
basically normal, in my experience, for all males. LOL (there I
used those stupid letters). The Syndrome may explain your
extraordinary power. Super mom X and double dad Y. You should maybe
tell your aunt and get her opinion. I’m not going to tell anyone.
It’s your information to do with what you want.

Again, I have no excuses for my failure to
act, but it will not happen again.

Love, Caeco.

On the pages behind it were some Wikipedia
article stuff on XYY Syndrome, and I glanced through them quickly
as class started. The professor lectured without looking for any
class participation, which was awesome because between what I had
just learned about myself and the exhaustion I had been feeling, I
was pretty much out of it. All I could think about was the accident
of birth that made me the way I was and what I might have been—or
more to the point, not been—if I wasn’t as freaky as I was.

My magical strength was part of who I was.
What would I be without that?

Chapter 22

Somehow, I got through my classes, picked up
the notes I had missed on Friday, and even got a head start on my
homework at lunchtime.

When I got back to Arcane, the place was
buzzing. Apparently, both the Control class with Jenks and the
Explorations class were meeting together at the regular time down
in the basement. Speculation ran rampant as to why and from all the
looks and stares I was getting, my name figured prominent in most
of the theories.

I ate with our regular gang, a pad of paper
next to my food to answer the torrent of questions.

“So your mom is famous… er, was famous?” T.J.
asked almost as we sat.

Among witches I guess.

“And somebody murdered her?” he asked
bluntly. I just stared at him, deadpan.

“Idiot,” Ashley said, eyes furious. “What the
hell is the matter with you?”

“What? Just asking,” he said
unconvincingly.

“Let me guess—both your parents are alive?”
she asked.

“Well… yeah. So what?” he came back.

“So for those of us who have only one, or
even none, it makes a huge difference. Then to have you quizzing
Declan about his mom’s passing… that’s not your business. Step
off,” she said.

He shut up and took a bite of food, face
bright red. T.J. was one of those kids who used his social
awkwardness as a tool, not really ever embarrassed about his lack
of grace. But I suspected that Ashley’s opinion carried a much
heavier weight than any of ours.

“I lost my mom about the same age. Car
accident. It was… really, really rough,” Ashley said to me. “I
don’t know what I would have done without my dad.”

“Declan’s aunt is a really strong person and
so is her partner, Darci,” Caeco said.

T.J.’s head snapped up at the word
partner
, but Ashley, Caeco, and even his roommate Justin
were glaring at him, which headed off any unfortunate comments.
Just as well, because I was ready to dump his dinner in his lap if
he had gotten out any comments about gays.

“So, what do you think this combined class is
about?” Jetta asked in a very obvious attempt to change the
topic.

“I heard that Jenks got in a lot of trouble
for failing to control his class,” Ariel chimed in.

“How’d ya hear that?” Mack asked around a
forkful of mac and cheese.

“I have connections in Oracle. One of them
texted me asking for dirt about what went down this morning. She
works at headquarters in Nathan Stewart’s office and heard the
Director cursing a blue streak about Jenks and his ‘incredibly bad
judgement.’ Apparently he was on the phone with somebody high up in
the Demidova Corp. She never found out who. But the whole thing is
a big deal.”

“So why, if mixing weres and nonweres
resulted in mayhem in the morning class, would we mix them in the
night classes?” Mack wondered.

“So we’ll learn to get along,” Justin said.
Everyone stopped eating and looked at him, startled that he’d
spoken. He looked around at the rest of the table and shrugged his
big shoulders. “Stands to reason is all,” he said.

“Justin, what’s your major again?” Mack
asked.

“Poli-sci,” he answered without looking up
from his chicken alfredo.

The rest of dinner passed with fruitless
speculation about our class. We all headed down early and found a
set of folding bleachers had been set up on one side of the open
space. The concrete floor over much of the room had been marked
with white chalk lines that I couldn’t quite make out.

The rest of the kids filtered in, sitting in
clumps on the cool metal seats. By mutual unspoken agreement,
Delwood and his wolves sat on the opposite side of the bleachers
from me. Surprisingly, the witch pack sat on my side, just below my
group. Most of them even nodded to me or said hello.

At five minutes to seven, Gina came in,
followed by Miss Berg and Mr. Jenks. The two teachers took seats on
the bottom level of the bleachers and Gina stood in front of
us.

“The first day we assembled upstairs, I
mentioned that this whole thing was an experiment. We’ve never put
so many kids of such wide-ranging talent together before. Mistakes
were bound to happen, and they did,” she began. “But learning is
about making mistakes and then overcoming them. Finding what does
and doesn’t work. Trial and
error.
So we go forward and
learn from our mistakes. Find opportunity in failure. With that in
mind, we’re going to change up things a bit.

Monday nights, from now on, we’ll hold a
combined class, down here, with a guest instructor.”

Mondays? Rowan West, my aunt’s restaurant,
was closed Mondays. Oh shit.

“We are very lucky to have an extraordinarily
gifted witch who has consented to instruct you. Her family has been
practitioners of the Craft for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Please welcome Ashling O’Carroll of the Clan Irwin,” Gina said,
pointing one hand toward the doorway.

My aunt swept toward us, dressed stylishly in
designer jeans and thick sweater, with calf-high brown boots.

I forget how young my aunt is, but she was
only about sixteen when she and my mom fled to America. She looked
more like one of the young associate professors or teaching
assistants up at the campus than a successful restaurateur or
accomplished witch.

“Good evening to ye all. We met under
different circumstances this morn, but the thing that stood out to
me is that ye could all benefit from a different perspective,” she
began. Most of my classmates were listening intently, the witch
pack literally on the edge of their seats.

“As Mrs. Velasquez mentioned, me name is
Ashling O’Carroll, but I was born Ashling Irwin. For those of you
that would have no way of knowing, the Irwin witches are fairly
well known among the circles of Ireland.”

“Fecking right they are,” Ryanne muttered
loud enough to be heard. My aunt flashed her a smile, then
continued on. “After this morning’s meltdown, we decided that maybe
I could shed a different light on things as it were. So I’ll be
teaching ye some and I suspect ye’ll be seeing some others come
here now and again.

“Now, it was apparent to me, at least, from
the fiasco that shall remain unmentioned, that none of ye know all
that much about each other. Things that work well for training a
shapeshifter don’t work much at all for witchkind or psychics, now
do they?”

She turned and waved at the lines on the
floor behind her. “I’ve heard that me nephew has mentioned the game
me sister and I created for him when he was a wee lad. Most young
witches begin to exhibit power at about eight or nine. Now, if I
understand it right, were children don’t change till puberty,
although they are always stronger and faster than regular kids.
Anyway, always being a bit of a cheeky lad, Declan started in the
cradle. His toys would be floating about his head all on their own
like some great spooky mobile. So we needed something to train him
with even as he learned to walk and talk and stop crapping his
nappies.”

Oh my god. Did my aunt really just reference
my toilet training? Half the class was giving me amused
glances.

“Made it tough to keep sitters, it did. They
always thought our home was haunted. But I digress. We came up with
this game, what Declan eventually called Wytchwar. I understand ye
were all going to get it going here,” she said, frowning at the
bricks, wood, and Barbies. “So we’ll dive right in. First, I’ve
marked out some parts of the floor. I need me witches to come down
and do some preliminary spellwork before we put in the course. So
come on down, ladies,” she said, waving the girls forward but
ignoring me.

She quickly organized them by affinity and
took them to various parts of the floor. She took each group,
explained what she wanted, and put them to work with chalk,
sharpie, ink, or whatever they wanted, marking spells on the floor.
“No, ladies, use yer own spellcraft. I’m sure it’ll work just
fine,” she said to Erika and Paige when they asked how the spells
should be done.

Michelle ended up teamed with Miss Berg, both
listening as Aunt Ash described something in the middle of the
floor. They started to draw out spells, Miss Berg directing most of
it. Tami and Zuzanna were working together on another section, Tami
using colored ash she produced from her bookbag. Both Britta and
Erika, who were working with Ryanne and Jael respectively, were
weaving straw, vines, and small sticks together into little shapes
and figures, which they set down on the floor where the spell was
to go. A big ziplock bag of weeds and stick stuff was sitting on
the concrete in the space between them.

Most of the witches used chalk although
Zuzanna was using an artist’s paintbrush and a jar of black paint,
while Jael used a bird’s taloned foot as her brush. It looked like
it might have come from a big crow or maybe a raven.