Demon Hunter (The Collegium Book 1) (3 page)

Until now.

She refused to play to the gallery. She ignored the curious stares and murmur of speculation that ran behind her. But the internal tremors were worsening. She would not fall apart in the Collegium.

She hit the outer doors at a near run. Despite herself, she looked for Steve.

“Stupid.” She’d made herself clear and what man would wade through rejection for her? She was a bad risk.

“No.” She widened her eyes, defying the rare tears to fall. One spilled. “Hell.”

She ran down the steps. Her apartment was close by, but it was a Collegium rental and the thought of staying there sent a shiver along her spine. She took it as a warning and instead plunged downtown. Her father’s revenge would be unpredictable. Without her, his position in the Collegium might be challenged. Despite his repudiation of their relationship, he’d send someone after her.

Training made it instinctive to use the confusion of public transport to avoid pursuit. She moved carelessly through the subway crowd, her bag making her just another traveler and one uncertain of her direction. A pickpocket veered towards her, mistaking her for a tourist.

She caught the teenager’s wrist and her fingers curved around unexpected fragility. She could break the thin bones without magic.

He stared at her, frozen, as predator became prey.

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

God, it tore her heart.

He used her momentary distraction to pull away. He ran through the crowd, the slap of his sneakers lost in the noise of a train’s arrival.

Fay rubbed her eyes. So many kids out there, lost, homeless, victims in waiting. What would she have done if she hadn’t lost the kid? Bought him a meal? Given money? Walked on and forgotten him?

She sighed, spine slumping, as she boarded a train. At least she had money, experience and the dubious advantage of adulthood. Whatever happened, she’d survive. But she and the boy had something in common: if they survived, they survived alone.

By the time she reached one of the cramped, down-at-heels hotels that accepted cash and asked no questions, she was out on her feet. The bed had clean sheets and she crashed, letting the tiredness of the journey from Africa carry her beyond thought and into welcome darkness.

She had found the source of her fear and it wore her father’s face.

Fay stared at the ceiling. A crazed plaster crack ran across the left corner.

You’re no longer my daughter
.

She needed—craved—sleep to restore the energy she’d lost in Africa, but the relentless clamor of New York rasped against her nerves like an enemy bombardment, growing louder as evening turned to night. And deeper, within her, was a vibrating rawness where she’d torn away her binding to the Collegium. She had been its creature all her life.

Now she was her own.

“I do not serve.”

Panic spiked through her and she flung herself out of bed. Her isolation in the Collegium had been underpinned by the bedrock of duty. Without it she had nothing. No purpose, no direction, no structure to her life. Hell, she had no life.

She couldn’t lie there any longer, trying to sleep. Instead, she stripped and showered, tilting her face to the sting of cold water, smelling the rust in it. She rinsed her hair and braided it wet, tightly confining the strands.

The hollow feeling in her stomach could be ascribed to hunger and she welcomed the physical need. It was something she could deal with, something to get her out of the room and away from her thoughts. She laced her boots, checking the steel-sharp ironwood knife tucked in the ankle sheath.

Her hand hesitated on the haft. But Collegium training held. Habit was strong when you felt vulnerable, so she faced the world armed.

The hotel corridor smelled of bathroom cleaner and room deodorizer. The elevator stunk of cigarettes. Fay held her breath, exhaling as the elevator doors opened at the first floor. She took a deep breath of the cleaner air, itself heavy with city fumes.

“Faith?” A small, blonde woman rose from the stained sofa in the hotel’s foyer.

Blood pounded against Fay’s temples. Blackness sparked with lightning darkened the edge of her vision. She stopped, afraid she’d fall or vomit.

The stranger rushed forward, hands out to help.

Fay retreated. Her ungraceful stagger bumped her into a wall and she stayed there, letting its support steady her as the world reeled.

“Faith, I’m sorry.” The woman’s hands gripped and twisted each other. “I didn’t think you’d recognize me. I thought Richard would have destroyed all the photos.”

“He did.”

Richard had a way of disowning his failures.
You’re no longer my daughter.

Fay looked into her mother’s face and couldn’t say how she recognized her. They looked nothing alike. Fay’s oval face was strong-boned, a match to her body, while the older woman was rounded, snub nosed and frankly plain. Only their tawny blonde hair suggested a likeness, and her mother’s was silvering

Perhaps it was the tentative eagerness of the woman’s expression that had sparked Fay’s instincts. The fact that this stranger truly looked at her, as if Fay and not her magic, was important. As if there were no ulterior motives in this meeting.

“But you know me?” Strain drew deep lines from the woman’s nose to her mouth. Her make up stood out clownish as the blood receded from her face and left her pale. “Richard would say blood called to blood. He was obsessed with bloodlines.”

“Yes.” Fay had pieced together the story of her parents’ ill-fated marriage from chance-heard gossip and Nancy’s spite. She knew Richard’s obsession wasn’t with bloodlines. It was with power.

Magic increased and dropped away in four generations. A strong grandmother had a weak daughter, a slightly stronger granddaughter and a powerful great-granddaughter. It didn’t always happen that way, but often enough to be a general rule.

Arguably the inheritance effect protected the world from a magical family’s dictatorship.

Richard Olwen married Yolanthe Cage because her grandparents had been powerful mages, founding and presiding over the Collegium. Richard’s ambition outstripped his powers, but he had the intelligence and arrogance to push beyond those limits. And what he couldn’t be, his child would achieve.

Yolanthe was the weakest generation of her family, raising the odds that her child would be powerful. Richard gambled with fate and won. Fay was born with all the magic of her mother’s family and something all of her own.

However, at Fay’s birth, Yolanthe discovered why Richard had married her. Perhaps if she hadn’t loved him, the betrayal would have been less. As it was, she ran. She would not grant him another child by her.

But he kept Fay.

“Why now?” The question burst from Fay. Her chest ached. She flattened her hands against the wall, ignoring the desk clerk’s interested stare. Much more pressure and she’d break apart. She had lived years without as much emotion as this one day held.

“Because the warding against me broke a few hours ago. Suddenly, I could sense where you were. I could make contact. Faith, I came as soon as I could.”

“Why?”

Yolanthe flinched.

“Lady, get outta the way.” A burly man brushed past them, his work clothes stained with sweat and stinking. A tired woman walked resignedly after him. Client and prostitute.

“We can’t talk, here.” Fay looked around the dingy foyer and met the desk clerk’s eyes. He turned away. “I have to eat.” Hunger was undoubtedly contributing to her spacey feeling. It was twenty four hours since she’d eaten anything but airline food.

“I think I walked past an Italian restaurant on the corner.”

“That’ll do,” Fay said.

They walked fast since Yolanthe’s blue sweater wasn’t a match for New York’s cold. She shivered and crossed her arms.

“You don’t live here?” It could have been small talk, but it wasn’t. Fay was curious, part of her needing to know who this woman, her mother, was.

“I live in Fremantle, Western Australia. We’ve just had a long, hot summer. To me, this is freezing.”

“Africa was hot.” Fay spoke without thinking. Australia was as far from the Collegium as it was possible for Yolanthe to run.

“You lived in Africa?”

“No. I just did a job. A demon binding.”

Despite the cold, Yolanthe stopped. “You bound a demon?”

“Collegium business.” She shouldn’t have mentioned it.

“The Collegium banishes demons. It doesn’t bind them,” Yolanthe said definitely. “Demons don’t belong in this world.”

“They’ve been coming through.” Fay frowned as her mother shivered again. “Let’s get inside.”

The restaurant was warm and filled with cooking smells. Plastic table cloths hung limply in the narrow, crowded space. A teenage waitress seated them and scribbled their order for lasagna and chicken tortellini. She dumped a basket of herb bread between them.

Fay ate a piece of bread, aware of how closely Yolanthe watched her. It made it difficult to study her in return, unless she outstared her. It didn’t seem worth the effort.

“You’re beautiful.”

“Hardly.” Fay wiped her buttery fingers on a paper napkin.

“You are. Beautiful strong bones. And tall. I always wanted to be tall.” Yolanthe sighed. “You’re not really like Richard or me. Grandmother’s grandmother was an ex-slave.”

Fay blinked.

“Grandmother said she walked so tall. She was proud of who she was—free—and what she’d survived. Courage made her beautiful. I will always remember Grandmother saying that. The lives we lead, every decision, it shows on our faces.”

“Not with Botox, it doesn’t.” The conversation and its direction confused Fay. Where were the apologies, the explanations, the reasons for Yolanthe’s appearance? From Australia to New York was no small journey.

“Here are our meals.” Yolanthe looked beyond Fay to the kitchen and sat back in her chair.

The waitress thumped down their plates and retreated.

Fay picked up her fork. The tortellini was good, flavored with basil. It filled and warmed her.

Yolanthe was slower to start eating. “I’ve spent years thinking of all the things I’d say to you when we finally met, and now, they don’t seem important. My daughter is sitting across the table from me.”

The open emotion that set Yolanthe searching for the paper napkin to blot her tears sat awkwardly with Fay. She swallowed a mouthful of tortellini, found it suddenly dry and drank some water.

“I never thought of you at all.” She winced at the baldness of the statement, the cruelty of it as a response to Yolanthe’s tears.

“I know.” Yolanthe wadded the paper napkin. “That was Richard’s warding, keeping me away.”

“Are you saying Dad bound me not to think of you?” It was just possible that a warding begun in infancy and reinforced every year could constrain her greater power. Until she blasted all ties this morning. “Oh my God, he kept me from you.”

The deep internal shudders of the morning returned. He’d isolated her on purpose—even from her mother, and she hadn’t known. “How much of my life has he twisted?”

Yolanthe shook her head, distressed. “In the beginning, Richard was right to keep me from you. When I learned why he’d married me.” She broke off. “Have you heard the gossip?”

“That he married you for your bloodline, gambling on a baby like me, a new tool for his ambition.”

“I don’t think he meant to use you.” Yolanthe abandoned even the pretense of interest in her meal and pushed aside the plate of lasagna. “I was too young to see how much he resented those with more power than him. He wanted a child who couldn’t be patronized or sidelined. All his discipline and effort couldn’t narrow the gap against a stronger magic user. Richard wanted you to have that effortless mastery.”

“Effortless.” Fay stabbed a piece of pasta. “I can’t remember a time when Dad wasn’t training me in magic, in fighting, in Collegium knowledge. He wouldn’t allow me friendships with mundane school friends because they might distract me from learning to be a guardian. Other Collegium guardians begin training at eighteen. By eighteen, I could defeat any master at the Collegium. My formal training was short and brutal as they all tried to take me down.”

“Faith.” Yolanthe looked sick.

Fay struggled to force back the volcano of emotion. Anger and pain ran through her like lava, deep and scarring.

“Do you know my reputation is for detached control?” Fay abandoned her meal. Her stomach was too knotted to eat. “Today, I’ve accepted and rejected a lover, rejected my father and my job, which is the only identity I’ve ever had, and met you. I don’t think I can claim emotional detachment anymore.”

“Why would you want to?” Yolanthe put her hand out. “You’re a living, breathing, hurting person. You’re allowed to show that hurt. I’m desperately sorry for my part in it. I should have been braver.”

“Can we leave?” Fay pushed back her chair.

“Of course.”

Fay dropped enough money and over to cover the meal and headed for the door. The walls of the restaurant were falling in on her and the other diners had grown sly-eyed and threatening. “I can’t do this. I can’t hear your excuses or face anything more about Dad, about who I am.”

“It’s okay.” Yolanthe’s hand on her arm stopped Fay in the street. “We don’t have to talk, but you’re not returning to that hotel. I’m not much of a mom, but a friend wouldn’t leave you there. Come home with me.”

“Australia. I can’t.” It was more than the official papers required. The thought of the long flight daunted Fay physically and psychically. She couldn’t stay locked in a tin can that long. “I can’t.”

“I have a portal.”

The simple statement broke through Fay’s panic. She stared at Yolanthe.

“Actually, it’s not mine. It’s my husband’s. Jim traded travel with Cynthia here in New York. She’ll send us home. If you’re willing?”

“You married again?”

“It took me a couple of decades. After Richard, I went self-destructive. Jim taught me to trust again.”

Fay shook her head. The world wasn’t making sense. “But you said Jim owns a portal?”

“Oh, he’s crazy.” Yolanthe readily picked up Fay’s doubt. “All portal managers are mad. But Jim’s madness is the good kind.”

Fay sagged against a grimy wall. She really needed time to process this horrible day with its twists and turns.

“Come home,” Yolanthe said simply.

Home. All Fay had ever had was the Collegium. “All right.” At this point, any direction would do. Home? “I need to get my bag.”