Chapter X
X
The eight levels of training proceed as follows:
Level One. The transport and structure of inanimate objects.
Level Two. The manipulation of waves carrying both light and sound.
Level Three. The use of complex conduits.
Level Four. The creation of original spells.
Level Five. The creation and disassembly of protective and defensive wards.
Level Six. The transport and structure of complex forms.
Level Seven. Mental defense.
Level Eight. Combat.
After the successful mastery of each of the levels (as determined by the Elder responsible for such level) recruits proceed to the final step: an induction trial overseen by the Elder Council. Only then can they become members of the Acheron Order.
—William Ruskin, A History of the Acheron Order (New York, 1935)
Vic kicked the door to apartment 481. Then, for good measure, she kicked it again.
It looked just like all the other doors in the castle. Hardwood, carved to perfection, and adorned with a knob of blood-red glass.
In the three days since her conversation with Max, Vic had visited Meredith’s apartment no fewer than seven times.
Each visit followed the same structure: Vic found the door, exasperated at the end of countless meandering hallways.
She put the key Max had given her into the lock and twisted, her heart beating loud in her ears.
Each time Vic felt the click of the inner mechanism as the lock disengaged.
Each time Vic pushed hard against the door, and each time it rebuffed her.
She’d taken to sitting in front of it, staring at the wooden face of her mother’s secrets.
Vic’s patience wore thin. She’d stopped by the locked door for the third consecutive morning on the way to class. She was running exceptionally late, but she couldn’t resist the thought that this time the door would change its mind and admit her.
It did not.
And so she kicked it.
Vic made no attempt to quiet her swearing as she stormed away from the door. She marched toward the training wing, trying not to obsess over what might lie inside Meredith’s apartment.
Halfway down the empty hall, Vic stopped.
She could feel someone watching her. A gaze stuck on her spine like the push of a finger. She turned.
But the abandoned hall was as empty as it always had been. The doors to long-vacant apartments stood still and silent around her, and the hallway stretched too far for anyone to be watching around a corner.
There was nothing in the hall but a few haggard portraits and long shadows between windows.
Vic kept walking, though she couldn’t shake the sense that she was not alone.
Breathing hard from the walk and the frustration, Vic flung open the door to the lecture hall where she’d spent the last week listening to Elder Thompson drone on and stopped dead in her tracks.
“Shit,” Vic said aloud, and heads spun toward her.
“Ms. Wood,” Nathaniel said from the podium Elder Thompson typically occupied, looking as dull and proper as always, his expression punctuated by a slight frown. “How nice of you to join us.”
His face made clear that he found nothing about Vic’s arrival nice.
“And I see you’ve brought your manners.”
Vic slid into the open seat beside Sarah without replying. She could see Henry, sitting in the front, slump down in his seat as if fearful of being associated with his tardy, swearing sister.
Things had been frosty between the siblings.
When Henry found out Vic was training with the Sentinels, he disapproved.
He told her to back out; he worried that she would get hurt.
When she insisted on doing it anyway, he opted for the silent treatment, and had been pointedly avoiding Vic for three days.
She’d considered telling him about the key Max had given her, but the thought of Henry being able to open the door that denied her made Vic inexplicably sad.
Still, she wished he would grow up and have a conversation with her.
She stared at the back of his head and contemplated throwing something at it. That would force him to talk to her.
“As I was saying before Ms. Wood’s interruption,” Nathaniel went on, “your lesson today will deviate from the traditional Level One curriculum. I believe, and several of my fellow Elders agree with me, that you are owed a special lesson on consequences.”
Vic turned to Sarah and whispered, “Why is he teaching?”
Sarah shrugged. “Maybe Thompson’s got the flu.”
“Today we shall focus on the Acheron Order’s role in society,” Nathaniel was saying, “and what shall befall us if the Order can no longer perform its duties.”
“I hope he dies,” Sarah added.
Vic choked on a shocked laugh, and Nathaniel stopped talking.
“Did I say something amusing, Ms. Wood?” Nathaniel asked.
Vic shook her head. The first time she’d seen Nathaniel, he had frightened her, casting his magic over her with questions and scorning her answers. Now she was expected to sit in respectful silence and listen to his wisdom. It chafed.
“The risk of Orcans overtaking the human world—is that funny to you?”
“No,” Vic said.
Nathaniel cocked an eyebrow.
“No, sir,” Vic said. She stared at the wrinkles on his neck as if she could will them to wind tighter and choke him. Mean eyes met hers, and Vic looked down, remembering the cold sweat of his mind invading her own.
“It would behoove you to pay attention,” he said with a malignant smile. “You need to learn, after all.” He said it with a hint of mockery, like there was nothing he could teach that Vic deserved to know.
He returned his focus to the room at large.
“We shall begin our demonstration earlier today than usual. Convene in fifteen minutes in Limbo.”
He shut his notebook with a slap and marched out of the room.
“Limbo?” Vic asked Sarah, who stared at the spot Nathaniel had vacated with her mouth ajar. Sounds of surprised curiosity and excitement filled the space as the recruits gathered their belongings.
“What is he thinking?” Sarah said under her breath.
Vic waved a hand in front of Sarah’s face. “What’s Limbo?”
“Another training room,” Sarah said absentmindedly. “Level Eight.”
“We’re skipping ahead?”
“I have no idea.” Sarah shook her head, eyes wide.
Vic could not complain about spending the day doing anything other than staring at stones, but nerves swirled in her stomach as she followed the crowd of recruits into the hallway and down a staircase, spiraling deep under the castle.
Each time Vic thought they must have met the bottom, they kept going, until the group finally peeled away into a windowless landing lit by two flaring torches.
Through a doorway they found a classroom, and Sarah pulled Vic to the side to watch the other students file in and gather behind them. The confused concern on Sarah’s face made Vic’s palms slick with anxiety. She wiped them on her jeans.
The other recruits had grown accustomed to Vic’s presence, though some still threw antagonistic glances over their shoulders at her, and the group as a whole settled a few feet away from Sarah and Vic. There were no Mades in this class of recruits, Sarah had told her with a meaningful look.
A male recruit sneered at Vic and Sarah as he passed, but Vic was too distracted by the space around her to respond.
If she hadn’t known it was a classroom, Vic might have called it a dungeon.
The room was lit by torches, and condensation coated the rough stone walls, every inch covered in scratch marks.
Stone ceilings loomed high overhead. On one side of the room was an immense metal doorframe, beyond which the ground fell away, revealing a pit like an old mining shaft.
Vic couldn’t see the bottom of the chute, and the hair on her arms rose.
“Today’s task is to observe,” Nathaniel said. He stood beside the yawning doorway and faced the students. “You won’t see this room again until you’ve proved your ability to face what lies beneath us. Many of you will never see it again.”
“No way,” Sarah breathed.
“There are those among our community who have lost faith in the mission that has been the Order’s central focus for centuries. These individuals would jeopardize our Order’s ability to maintain control, all because of some lofty ideas about the treatment of those beneath us.”
Vic felt Sarah grab hold of her arm.
“Though some of my fellow Elders disagree with me, I believe all of us—especially those new to our ranks—ought to be reminded of why we are here, and what is at stake.” His eyes met Vic’s. “We must understand what we risk when we disrupt the established order.”
He faced an inscription beside the door and spoke to it in the Universal Language Vic did not speak. The hand around Vic’s arm tightened.
The marks on the walls flared red, and the noise began.
Metal moved beneath the floor. The whirring of a machine far past its prime was loud and low in Vic’s ears.
It clanked along, growing louder as it grew closer, until Vic saw movement from the pit beside Nathaniel.
A massive cage reared out of the earth and slammed into stillness when it met the opening. The crowd took a step back.
Everything went quiet.
It was an Orcan.
It stood on bony knuckles, foot-long claws curled out from humanoid hands, its front two legs longer and more muscular than the back pair. Its skin was a bloodless white, covered in rigid spikes along its spine.
The creature watched the students through milky, unblinking eyes. It was taller than any of them, almost as tall as the doorway itself.
“This specimen is a laetite,” Nathaniel said. “The Sentinels captured it in Greenland last year.”
He picked up a thin metal stick.
“The laetite, like most Orcans, is carnivorous and feeds on the flesh of humans. The Sentinels were alerted to the existence of this particular creature by the disappearance of a number of hunters. The laetite is most content in less populated areas and travels long distances to acquire prey.”
Nathaniel struck the bars of the cage with the rod he held, and electricity sparked through the metal.
The creature stumbled in pain. Its face opened like a blooming flower, four sides of its mouth lined with rows of pointed teeth.
The sound it made was unnatural and far too loud.
Many of the students clapped their hands over their ears.
“See that?” Shouting over the sound, Nathaniel struck the cage again, and the creature shrieked in pain once more. The inside of its mouth was a brilliant black. “The laetite has more than two hundred teeth, each as sharp as a razor.”
The creature lifted onto its back legs and grabbed the bars, snapping its jaws at Nathaniel.
Vic saw what happened next in stunning detail.
The front panel of the cage wasn’t closed properly. It rattled for an instant, and it snapped.
In a heartbeat, the creature ripped away the cage door and hurled it across the room. Students screamed as the jagged metal hit the back wall.
The creature leaped from the cage with disturbing grace and lunged right for Nathaniel.
With a shout, he sent another jet of electricity at the creature’s chest, and it reared back on its hind legs before lashing out, swiping Nathaniel to the side.
He fell backward, hitting his head with a loud smack, and lay still on the floor.
The room erupted into pandemonium as the creature advanced on the figure closest to it.
Vic’s heart stopped.
No.
Henry.
The creature lunged toward her brother, who stared up at it with wordless terror.
Vic did not think. She didn’t give herself even a moment to consider what she was doing.
Throwing herself forward, Vic sprinted toward Henry and hit him with her outstretched hands, sending him splaying onto the floor beside her.
But she’d done what she needed to do.
The creature turned on Vic without a pause.
Its face split wide, countless blackened teeth like daggers, and it roared down at her, the sound blocking out everything else in the room.
Vic stared at the black hole of its throat and wondered if it would be the last thing she’d see.
If this was her life, Vic thought, she hadn’t done a half-bad job.
She’d saved her brother, like her mother had told her to, and that should be enough for Vic—shouldn’t it?
As the laetite reared up, Vic caught its eye. A thin membrane under its eyelid swept up to cover the opaque white, as endless as snow blanketing an ocean.
And then a flash of iron and a sound like a bedsheet being torn in half, and black fluid sprayed from the creature’s throat as it fell forward, its neck opened like a spout. Dark blood pooled on the stone in front of Vic.
Sarah stood over the dying creature with a weapon she must have conjured from thin air. A sword the length of her arm glowed ghostly silver as she lowered it, and Vic was entranced.
She thought of her mother, imagined Meredith in Sarah’s place, wielding a weapon against a creature inhumanly strong and vital, and Vic felt something new thrumming through her veins.
Jealousy.
Want.
Vic wanted to do that. She wanted to learn how.
She caught Sarah’s eye and returned the Sentinel’s cautious smile, which grew wider and wider until she and Sarah were beaming at each other.
Vic looked away when Henry called for her and saw he’d pulled himself to his knees a few feet away. When he saw the smile on Vic’s face, he frowned.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Never better,” Vic replied.