White Heart of Justice (2 page)

Chapter 1

G
lashia calls Noon the ballista.” Waldron Seknecus' low voice rumbled through the Gridiron, a deep, cavernous underground space used by the upper years at St. Lucifer's for sparring. “Because of how she fights now. Watch.”

He was speaking to three other spectators: my father, Karanos Onyx, executive of the Demon Council and the man who would ultimately employ all of the magic users who trained here at St. Luck's; Friedrich Vanderlin, an Archangel who was the dean of Guardians over at the Joshua School, the Angel academy we shared a campus with; and a woman who looked unsettlingly familiar to me, though I couldn't remember when we'd met or who she was. I cleared my mind and concentrated on my opponent, Ludovicus Mischmetal, who preferred the moniker “Vicious” for short. He was a second year Maegester-in-Training at Euryale University. We were competing against one another in the New Babylon MIT rank matches, which St. Luck's was hosting this year.

All second-year MITs were required to compete. The top-ranked MITs from each school would then be eligible to compete in the Laurel Crown Race. The object of the race was to bring back an assigned target. Targets were either
rogare
demons or priceless artifacts that needed to be recovered. Participation in the Laurel Crown Race was voluntary, but the MIT who returned to New Babylon with his (or in my case, her) target before any of the others, won the coveted Laurel Crown. Winning the Laurel Crown often set a future Maegester up for life because winners could choose where they wanted to spend their fourth-semester residency. And ofttimes, those residencies turned into permanent positions. Everyone else would receive offers, but it would be the Council that decided which of those residency positions they accepted.

Last semester, we'd been given our first field assignment. It was an assignment that had been full of
rogare
demon attacks and other lethal situations. That assignment had lasted a mere three months and I'd barely survived it. My residency would last for twice as long, so I was well aware of how important the residency venue would be. Winning the right to choose
where
I spent next semester, not to mention
who
I would be working for, would go far in preserving not just my happiness, but also my life. The Maegester who was judging the match, a middle-aged man with thinning, ginger-colored hair and a near-permanent frown, called out for us to begin.

I'd watched Vicious spar with other MITs. He was smart.His infliction of pain would be very calculated, very precise.There was nothing personal about his desire to beat me. He just wanted to win the match so that he could retain his current
Primoris
ranking at Euryale and compete for the Laurel Crown. Of course, I was similarly motivated.

Vicious gave me a curt bow, his long, black, razor-cut bangs briefly falling forward before he shook them back and used his waning magic to fire up a weapon, a flaming broadsword. It hissed and spit with fury in the damp air of the Gridiron as Vicious raised it toward me in an opening invitation to spar.

As a sparring partner, Vicious looked fairly intimidating. His front teeth were shiny, silver, and sharply pointed (likely, his real ones had been knocked out in fights) and he was much larger than me. He wore the usual black leather training pants and vest, but he'd elected to go shirtless underneath the vest. I guessed it was an intentional show of muscle, literally. He flexed his forearms and grinned at me, his message clear: I might be a woman playing a man's game, but he wasn't going to spare me any blows.

That suited me fine. Sparing me blows wouldn't win me the match.

I unhooked the cloak I'd worn to keep warm until the match started and let it drop to the floor. I faced Vicious in similar black leather training pants, but I wore a black leather bustier instead of a vest. Since my hair had been singed to shoulder length, my demon mark—that splotchy, dark, discolored spot of skin above my heart—was now prominently displayed. Like Vicious' muscle flexing, my decision to bare my mark was calculated. Last year at this time only my parents had ever seen the mark. Now I exposed it intentionally. It never failed. Even though my opponents knew I had waning magic, the sight of a demon mark on a woman's bosom always gave them pause. And a single second was all it took for the judge to award a point to me for their hesitation. Of course, most of them realized their mistake soon after and then redoubled their efforts and aggression toward me, but no matter. As expected, Vicious' gaze swept to my left breast and his eyes widened.
Score: Onyx, one.
He narrowed his eyes and advanced, clenching the end of his broadsword. The judge wouldn't take away points, but Vicious wasn't going to win any by gripping his weapon so tightly. It was made of fire and magic and points were awarded to students who exhibited magic mastery by wielding their weapons effortlessly, with finesse and style.

I fired up my own weapon, a poleax. Shaping the weapon with magic took less than a second, but really it had taken over a year. When I first came to St. Luck's I'd been conflicted, inexperienced, and—let's face it—completely inept. But over the last twelve months I'd gone from the girl who had never met a demon before, didn't know how to fight or use her magic, to a woman who had battled countless
rogare
demons, meted out punishment to a select few, and even executed one in cold blood. That had been exceedingly difficult, but I hadn't shied away from what had to be done. The demon had killed innocent Hyrkes—humans with no magic—and would have continued doing so if I hadn't executed him. So when I coolly shaped a fiery poleax out of thin air and twirled it around in my hand as if it were no more than a kid's baton, it looked impressively easy only because for so long it hadn't been.

I kept my eyes averted from my weapon. In the dark underground space of the Gridiron, fire was blinding. Surrounding me were three stories of blackness, interspersed with an occasional stone column. Two thousand years ago, St. Lucifer's used to be a fort. Not many of the original buildings remained, but this lower level had survived. The Gridiron that we fought in now had likely been used for the same purpose for millennia—training Maegesters to fight. It looked like a miniature coliseum, one that had been buried by time. The light from our weapons flickered against the stone columns and our breath puffed out in small gray bursts as Vicious and I circled each other.

Our signatures—the magical aura that waning magic users have and can sense in one another—flared with
expectation
. It was a battle response I was used to.

I waited for Vicious to make the first move. I almost always let my opponent make the first move. I knew from my training that smaller fighters could sometimes make up for their lack of size through speed, but I'd been born touched by Luck's heavy hand. I didn't need speed; I had strength—the strength of my magic.

Vicious made the first move, but instead of stepping toward me or slashing at my neck as I'd anticipated, he waved his sword in front of my face. Instinctively my gaze locked on it for the briefest moment, but a second was all it took. Blinded to anything but Vicious' magic, I was unaware of where his left hand was until I felt the ringing slap of his palm on my right cheek. My head snapped toward my shoulder. That side of my face now stung as if a hundred hornets had landed there. But anger quickly displaced pain.
He'd slapped me.
Not punched me, as he would have done with every other opponent he'd been paired with, but slapped me, like the girl he obviously thought I still was. My signature flared. Damn, I'd misjudged Vicious. I'd thought he wouldn't spare me any blows but he had. And now he was likely at least two points ahead because he'd managed to briefly blind and stun me. Livid, I threw a spray of blistery waning magic at his face. He easily deflected it and laughed, the low rumble infinitely irritating due to the almost never-ending echo down here.

“I heard you're St. Luck's
Primoris
,” Vicious said. “You know you wouldn't have advanced this far with your ranking if Ari Carmine were still a student here. Pity he
disappeared
during your last assignment.”

Vicious' emphasis on the word
disappeared
was because he, and mostly everyone else, thought that Ari had been killed during our last assignment, and Vicious, like many of the other MITs, had heard that Ari and I were close. He just didn't know how close. His words were an attempt to unsettle me emotionally. Unfortunately, his wide unaimed verbal shot was working.
Score: Vicious, three; Onyx, one.

Everything Vicious said was true. I probably couldn't have beaten Ari in a sparring match, and he
had
disappeared during our last assignment. But what Vicious didn't know was that Ari hadn't disappeared because he was dead; he'd disappeared because he'd been hiding a bigger secret than I'd been when we'd first enrolled at St. Luck's. Ari didn't just have a drop of demon blood like the rest of us future Maegesters, he had an entire body full of it. He'd been a demon masquerading as a human with waning magic. Lamentably, Ari Carmine had also been my lover—and the man I'd loved with all my demon-marked heart. So even the mention of his name still hurt . . . and infuriated me.

I gritted my teeth and hurled the poleax directly at Vicious' head.
Onyx, two.
I knew Vicious' reflexes were good enough to avoid a direct hit. Sure enough, he dodged the shot by lunging to his right and falling to the floor while swinging his broadsword in an arc toward my middle as he fell. By the time he landed, the sword would have slashed through both my ankles—
Vicious, four
—if I hadn't leapt to avoid the amputating burn. My poleax exploded in a shower of sparks as it collided with one of the columns on the far side of the room and Vicious let go of his sword. It lay harmlessly spitting on the Gridiron's stone floor until it went out, plunging us into darkness.

Both Vicious and I, and every other Maegester in this room, could easily have lit a fire to restore our sight. But no one did. Vicious and I didn't need light to “see” one another. We could sense each other through our signatures. Vicious' signature felt like some sort of rock aggregate. There were some hard bits like nickel and then there was a whole lot of what felt like sand and grit to me. Dense filler. Formidable, but something I could probably withstand, even if he came at me directly from the front. I stood still, waiting. Vicious could feel me too, but signatures just gave us a sense of where the other was, like heat coming from a fire pit.

Vicious threw a volley of fireballs toward me. One after the other their fiery blasts lit up the room in increasingly shallow arcs, culminating in two final, furious, straight shots directed right at my head and chest. I blocked them all almost without thinking and redirected them into the darkness beyond the stone pillars surrounding us. After that, Vicious charged. It was inevitable. They all did. It was what we were here for after all. He rushed toward me, the fiery broadsword reformed. This time I fired up a similar weapon and we began the match in earnest, circling each other, dodging, lunging, thrusting, pivoting, feigning near misses so that the next moves would be direct hits. In a matter of minutes we were both winded, injured, and burned. Vicious had dislocated my kneecap and given me a black eye, and my sword had cut a two-inch gash on his forehead, a ten-inch slash down his inner thigh, and a slight nick on his neck. If I'd pressed harder with my blade or if I hadn't allowed my magic to cauterize the cuts, it was possible that Vicious would be dead by now. He knew it and I could feel in his signature that it pissed him off.
Probable score: Vicious, seven; Onyx, ten.
The match was far from over.

“Let's have a go without fire, Onyx,” he said.

I barked out a laugh. “Why would I agree to that? I'm winning.”

Without warning, Vicious punched me. I should have seen it coming, what with his request to do away with our magic and start scrapping like beasts. Problem was I'd expected it earlier and my reflexes were a fraction too slow. His fist connected with my mouth, knocked my head backward, leaving a sharp, searing pain in my upper lip that quickly morphed into a mind-numbing ache. I tasted blood and spit something hard onto the stone floor of the Gridiron.

My tooth.
No wonder Vicious wanted to “have a go without fire.” He knocked my tooth out and he hadn't even used his magic to do it. My signature heated up. Had this been last year, I would have started getting scared. Scared that I couldn't control my magic. Scared that my fire might burn something unintended. Scared I'd be bullied, lose, hurt someone . . . or worse. No more. Now my rising temper only meant this match would soon be over.

I looked up at Vicious and grinned at him. In my current condition, my smile was likely the ghastliest and bloodiest it had ever been. Vicious shook his head in mock sympathy and tsked.