Chapter 9
Quinn
“We’ll ease into it,” Rollick had assured me last night, but it didn’t feel like all that relaxed an approach when he turned up right after breakfast the next morning to make sure I was ready to get started. He waited until I’d put the empty dishes back in the dumbwaiter and washed up before pointing to one of the armchairs. “Sit down, gather your focus, and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
It was the chair I’d normally been sitting in, I couldn’t help noticing. Was that just a coincidence, or had he been paying that much attention to my behavior?
As I sank down onto the soft leather surface, the demon vanished, a stark reminder of just how easily he could pay attention to me without me having any clue. But he hadn’t mentioned the steak knife yesterday. That one time he hadn’t been peering at me from the shadows for very long before he’d announced his presence.
Other times… who knew?
Rollick had told me to gather my focus, but that was awfully difficult when my thoughts were being pulled in so many different directions. Would he really keep my parents safe here? What would he do to them if he wasn’t happy with my progress? Was giving in to his demands that I try out my powers a mistake?
What if I could get strong enough to compel him a little, despite his confidence that I’d never get that strong? It was worth a little risk to give myself an advantage over both him and my other enemies, wasn’t it?
I just wasn’t sure whether it was only a little risk or a huge one. I felt like I was balancing on the edge of a rooftop with only clouded darkness below, no way of knowing whether I was walking next to a drop of five feet or five hundred.
And at least when I was navigating a rooftop, I knew what I needed to do to avoid a fall. I had no clue what was the safest way of testing the strange energies inside me and what might speed us toward disaster.
Selfishly, I wished the three men were here. My men. Torrent would have assessed the situation for me in his pensive way, giving me a more accurate sense of just how much shit I might be throwing myself into. Crag would have loomed menacingly as if he could intimidate my powers into behaving. Lance would have cracked jokes and flirted with me like nothing could possibly go all that wrong.
But it was better that they were far away when we conducted this experiment. Less chance that anything I woke up inside me would hurt them. Especially Lance. The thought of how unnervingly wild he’d gone after we’d visited the sorcerers’ house where my donor had lived, almost frantic in his rampage through the forest, made my stomach twist up.
Other sorcerers had already hurt him—hurt him badly enough that it’d surprised him that I’d hate the thought of doing the same. I never wanted his joyful demeanor to shatter because of something I’d done.
My mind was just meandering in yet another direction, wondering what the three of them were up to now and whether Rollick’s orders were putting them in other kinds of danger, when the door swung open. I straightened up in my seat, a little surprised that Rollick hadn’t just slipped through the shadows, but then I saw the man he was ushering in ahead of him.
The guy was human—it seemed I’d spent enough time around the shadowkind that I could sense his mortal status at a glance. He didn’t look much older than me, maybe his mid-twenties, skinny enough that his elbows stuck out in points where he had his arms folded over his narrow chest and his dark eyes seemed to protrude a bit from his sallow face. He glanced at Rollick nervously, and the demon prodded him forward.
“There she is. Go have a chat. Be cooperative, and you can go back to your awful but insignificant existence soon enough.” Rollick lifted his gaze to meet my eyes. “I’ve brought in a minor sorcerer to talk you through the basics. It seemed like a good idea for you to get a grounding in the theory before you actually try to boss any more shadowkind around. In the magical way, at least.”
He flashed one of his charming grins at me and then wavered away into the shadows again, though I had trouble believing he was actually gone. He wouldn’t let me talk with a sorcerer without listening in on our conversation, would he?
The man crept forward with tentative steps and lowered himself into the chair opposite me. He looked at his hands, at the now-empty coffee table, and finally at me. “He—he said you want to learn sorcery,” he mumbled.
Geez, how badly had Rollick traumatized the guy “bringing” him in?
“Want” was way too strong a word for my actual feelings on the subject, but I didn’t think it’d help the situation to get into the complexities with my unexpected guest.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of. I mean…” It occurred to me that I didn’t even know where to start this conversation. There was so much about sorcery I didn’t know and so little I did. “How did you start learning?”
He wet his lips. “It was my mother. My mother taught me. It’s mostly in families, you know. We aren’t a very strong one, though. There’s no reason to kill us. We’d never even try to work our skills on a higher shadowkind.” His gaze darted toward the rest of the room as if he was talking more to Rollick, wherever the demon was lurking, than to me.
My gut twisted. “I don’t want to kill you. And I think he only wants you to teach me.” Rollick had sounded like he meant it when he’d told me he didn’t bother sorcerers as long as they didn’t hassle him.
The man’s shoulders twitched. “There’ve been—we heard—just in the past few days, a couple of other families were slaughtered. More powerful than us, but not that prominent.”
Oh, shit. So the shadowkind after me were ramping up their efforts to devour all the sorcerer organs they could from other sources too. My stomach turned.
“That wasn’t Rol—that wasn’t the shadowkind who brought you here,” I said, remembering at the last second that Rollick probably wouldn’t want his name tossed around freely. “We’re trying to stop the monsters that are killing people. If I can learn how to use sorcery, that might help.”
At those words, the man seemed to calm down a little. He peered at me. “Are you from a family? I realize every now and then someone totally new gets brought in as an apprentice, but I don’t know how to check whether they’ll be capable, or how to awaken the right energies…”
As if on cue, an emphatic flutter of the energy that’d already awakened in me beat at my chest. I restrained a flinch. “Actually, I’ve already got some power. I—I had a connection to a sorcerer family that I didn’t know about until recently, and they can’t teach me now. I just need to figure out how to use it.”
“Okay.” The man let out a shaky laugh. “That’s the most important part right there. Tapping into it. Once you’re aware of it, you just need to use it, and with practice you get better at knowing how. It comes more and more easily.”
I frowned. “But I don’t know how to use it in the first place. There was—I compelled one shadowkind, but it was totally by accident. I just said some words I didn’t even realize I knew, that I can’t remember now, and it worked.”
The sorcerer nodded eagerly. “That’s how it is. The power and the language to wield it are written into our own beings. We just have to open ourselves up to it and let it emerge, and you’ll simply know how to conduct it.”
This all sounded way too woo-woo and not at all concrete enough. I thought back to what I’d seen at the sorcerers’ home near Miami. “I thought you used drawings and symbols, like with chalk and things—summoning circles or?—”
I cut myself off when the man shrugged. “Those are tools that can help ground your intentions. But you still need to open yourself up to work them right. The symbols and shapes come from inside you, and you use your energy to make them real and potent.”
I tipped my head to the side, still having trouble wrapping my head around how ephemeral his explanation was. “You’re really saying that it’s all inside me—everything I need to become a sorcerer? To become a major one, even? There aren’t any, like, guidebooks or special rituals or whatever that I’d need to learn? Where does the energy even come from? How can it work like that?”
He splayed his hands. “I don’t know. Honestly, it’s kind of a fantastic mystery. I used to ask my mother a lot of questions when I was first getting the hang of it, but after a while, you just accept that as the way things are.”
Just accepting and letting things happen as they felt like it wasn’t my usual approach. I believed in figuring out what I needed to do and then doing it step by step—that was how I’d approached my architecture studies and my urban exploring as well, delving into abandoned and off-limits buildings. But as far as I could tell, this guy really didn’t know anything more than what he’d said.
“How do you open yourself up?” I asked finally. “Is there anything special you do to tap into the energy and let the understanding or whatever come to the surface?”
“I wouldn’t call it special,” he said. “It’s like meditation. You focus on the energy and… sort of listen to it. It’s almost like it whispers into your head if you pay enough attention to it. And you hear it more and more clearly the more often you welcome it. You can picture what you’d like to accomplish and it’ll answer that. But once you get good at using however much power you’ve got, it’ll become more automatic. You think what you want to do and it comes to you without having to pause and really concentrate.”
More color had come into his face as he’d talked about sorcery, as if even thinking about using it invigorated him. I guessed there was something pretty exhilarating about being able to command monstrous creatures to do your bidding even if you only had enough power to do it with the animal-like ones. If you didn’t think they deserved free will anyway.
I rubbed my mouth, straining my brain for anything else I should ask and coming up empty. “I think that covers everything then,” I said. “Thank you.”
Rollick appeared next to us an instant later, abruptly enough that the sorcerer startled in his chair. It appeared he didn’t have any questions of his own, because he simply motioned the man to his feet. “You’ve served your purpose. Good man. Let’s get you out of here.”
I stood up too with a hitch of my pulse. The guy hadn’t been especially helpful, and I had pretty iffy feelings about sorcerers in general, but he had tried to help. And it didn’t sound as if he was personally doing anything all that horrendous.
“What’s going to happen to him now?” I asked Rollick pointedly. I didn’t think the demon would want a sorcerer running around able to say that a demon had brought him to this specific hotel so he could talk to a woman with my description.
Rollick chuckled. “No need to worry about this pipsqueak.” He patted the slight man in the head with a patronizing air. “I have a succubus on staff who can compel him into not even thinking about, let alone speaking of, what went on here. As far as he’ll know, he went on a little day trip to the next town over.”
Okay, so the guy definitely wasn’t getting murdered. He looked relieved even as he tensed up at the demon’s words. “You’re going to mess with my?—”
Rollick shot him a firm look. “Would you rather I messed up the rest of you? How many shadowkind minds have you addled over the years, hmm?”
The man’s mouth snapped shut. Apparently he couldn’t come up with a very good counterargument to that point.
I shifted my weight, resisting the urge to hug myself. “What about the other sorcerers out there? He said they’re being targeted—murdered. Wouldn’t we want to stop that? I mean, I know you don’t like them, but it does mean the murderers are getting more power.”
Rollick waved off my concerns dismissively. “Not much, from what I’ve gathered. I’m not extending my resources guarding all of those pricks. They knew the risks they were taking when they decided to start enslaving our kind.”
“It could be a chance to find out more about the beings we’re up against,” I pointed out.
Rollick gave me an amused look. “Why do I think that’s hardly the real reason you’re concerned? Such a bleeding heart, mortal. I can add keeping an eye on the more powerful sorcerer families I’m aware of to your favorite trio’s duties, though only because it serves my purposes.”
He nudged the sorcerer toward the door and called one last remark over his shoulder. “You’ve got the rest of the day to work on listening to those whispers, sweet sorcerer. We’re going to begin target practice tomorrow.”