Chapter 17: Questions for the Defendant

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story in which a headmaster apologizes, a bully reforms, and everyone hugs before lunch, close this book now. Dear Reader, Headmaster Voss loved exactly one thing in this world, and it was currently folded in half in a parking lot.

His office smelled like cedar, cold tea, and, faintly, from the guest chair, a very ruined set of sinuses.

Blod Sac sat there with a wet cloth pressed to his face. His eyes were pink and swollen. The chair had been built for an ordinary adult, so he filled it the way a bear fills a lawn chair, with the arms creaking and the legs begging for mercy.

Arthur sat on a stool by the window, bandaged to the eyebrows, with his feet not quite reaching the floor. He glanced at the clock above the door. Forty minutes since the parking lot.

On the desk, a phone leaned against a teacup, replaying the same video for the twelfth time.

Crunch.

"Beatrice," Voss said quietly, to nobody.

Arthur leaned toward the guest chair. "Who’s Beatrice?"

"The car," Sac whispered. "He named the car."

"I can hear you both."

Voss switched off the video. It was a mercy, and nobody mistook it for one.

"Eleven vehicles," he said. "Four belonging to faculty. One belonging to me, my beloved Beatrice. And a recording that every phone in this Academy has now watched, several of them twice, one of them with commentary, as you posted it on the supernatural social network."

"Yeah, it’s way more fun than the normal social network, where everything is fake," Arthur said.

"That’s why I hate social networks," Sac grumbled, annoyed that his rampage was about to go viral.

"Mr. Specter." The Headmaster looked stressed and frustrated. "You might have brought your concerns to me."

"I did."

"When?"

"Tuesday. In this office, on this stool. I was the one covered in bandages. You said it was training."

"It was training."

"And you said it was proper education."

"It was proper education. Is that why all of this happened?"

"Yes, and I took it as a lesson." Arthur spread his hands. "Training says use what you have. I had a flashlight. I’m a very fast learner, sir."

Voss’s eye twitched, very slightly, like a man who is losing an argument to a child.

"You might have gone to your parents and cried it out, like a normal child would."

"I’d have loved to!" Arthur said warmly. "Except they can’t reach Nowhere. You told me yourself. Without permission, they get lost, and the road forgets them by supper. And even if somebody drew them a map, I’ve heard what happened to the last Awakened parents who came to defend their kid."

"Oh, here we go," said Voss.

"They got their asses kicked too."

Silence.

Sac lifted his head, and a terrible, simple pride crossed his face.

"That was me."

"I know it was you, Blod," Voss said, with anger in his voice.

"They did not follow the visitor’s code."

"They brought a petition."

"It had a threatening tone," Sac defended himself.

Arthur made a small, sad note on the back of his hand. Confirmed: Sac is abusive even to adults. Make sure he never gets near my parents.

"Fine," said Voss. "What about the other adults?"

"Honestly, I haven’t met many adults here," Arthur said, in a confident voice, "and the ones I did meet felt like they couldn’t give a shit about me."

Voss opened his mouth. Closed it.

"Fair," he said.

"Question two." Voss folded his hands. "Nurse Wren is a Silver Tier healer. She can mend a snapped femur in four minutes, and she offered to heal you completely on Tuesday. You refused. I received her report that same night."

"I did," said Arthur, dismissively.

"If you hated being hurt that badly, you could simply have let her heal you. This whole thing is stupid."

"I had Carter."

"Mr. Carter is Iron Tier. He closes cuts. He does not rebuild ribs."

"He healed enough that I could move," said Arthur. "That’s all I asked. I left the rest on purpose. Anything under a long sleeve, my parents will never see. And anything I could feel when I sat down..."

He lowered himself carefully onto the stool and winced for effect.

"...reminded me to make sure he paid."

He turned his head and smiled at Sac.

"And he did."

The guest chair gave a terrible, final creak.

Sac rose. All six and a half feet of him, red-eyed, trembling, a mountain with a headache and a grudge, and the office got visibly smaller.

"I am going to end him."

"Sit," said Voss.

"One punch—"

"Blod. Sit."

Sac did not sit. But he did stop, with one scarred fist raised to the ceiling like a man hailing a very slow taxi.

Voss stood, walked around the desk, and placed himself, thin and dark-coated, between them.

"Allow me to explain something," he said, "because Blod will not work it out himself."

"I heard that."

"You were meant to." Voss kept his eyes on Arthur. "Mr. Specter is a time bomb. A small one. A noisy one. He has no Tier worth mentioning and no business surviving a fight with you, and yet here we are. Provoking him further is the quickest way to shorten the fuse."

"He’s twelve," Sac growled.

"He blinded you with a flashlight, burned out your nose, and filmed you leveling a parking lot, which has made you the most hated man in this Academy. I stopped asking how. I am only trying to keep him on our side."

Sac stared at him with the beautiful blankness of a man who had followed none of that.

"So... no hitting?"

"No hitting."

"Can I yell?"

"Briefly."

Sac took a deep breath and turned to Arthur. "Apologize," he roared. "On your knees. Submit."

The windows rattled. A teacup slid an inch across the desk.

Arthur looked at him for a long, calm moment. Then he slid off the stool, stood as straight as his ribs would let him, and tilted his chin up at a man two feet taller.

"I belong to myself," he said.

"What?"

"I don’t kneel. I don’t bend. I don’t submit. I will take your class, and your Academy, and one day this entire planet, and when I do, I will do it on my own terms." He raised one bandaged finger. "First, though, I’m going to need a chair with a back."

Silence.

"He’s very small," Sac said uncertainly.

"He is," said Voss.

"He’s terrifying."

"That is not the word I would use."

"Sir, he’s on a stool."

"He got down off the stool, Blod. It’s a speech."

A thing that kneels may rise again;

a thing that bends was never plain.

"One final matter." Voss returned to his desk and opened a drawer. "Your schedule."

"I have one."

"You have attended one class." Voss took out a folder. "Combat 101, which, as I told you, is not even a real class."

"Right. You said he made it up."

"He did. It was the only thing he could teach."

"But the paper you gave me said Combat 101 was first."

"I handed you that folder without checking it," Voss said, in a tone that was bone-dry and tired. "Someone with access to the office printer had swapped the first page."

Sac studied the ceiling with great interest.

Arthur turned his head, slowly. "Fine. But there’s no way you would have started me off with the worst class."

"I did not. The first class I set you up with was the easiest one in the building. It is run by Mr. Fred, the Friendly Ghost."

"A ghost?" said Arthur. "A friendly ghost?"

At the name, Sac scowled. "Man, I hate that ghost."

"The schedule I actually prepared," Voss went on, "began on Monday with Introduction to the Most Powerful Supernatural Creatures: Ghosts, taught by Mr. Fred, who brings muffins. Yes, he is a real, friendly ghost. On Wednesday, you would have had Dr. Nox Elor, who teaches the real history of the unseen. Have you ever read history and thought it sounded like liars telling bedtime stories? Well, you are right. They are. The real stories are far more interesting, and Dr. Nox Elor lived them. He is also a mummy, so do not be surprised."

"A mummy," Arthur repeated faintly.

"On Thursday, our resident goth witch. She is a bit mean, but she does not care if you skip her class, and she might not even show herself. Honestly, most of our teachers are hunters who go on hunting trips, so you may not see them at all. A few, like Mr. Frank Abernathy Jr., are always available. He teaches how to get a job."

"Do I get a muffin from the mummy?"

"No. The muffins are from the ghost." Voss closed the folder. "And you skipped it. Every one. You walked straight past the muffins, Mr. Specter, into the single room where a man had invented a class so he could beat people up."

Arthur stared at the folder.

"There were muffins?"

"Blueberry."

"You should have told me sooner," Arthur said, in a very small voice. "I can’t believe my first class was with that sociopath."

"It was not meant to be your first."

A road laid soft gets skipped by those

who’ve learned the hard way’s where it goes.

For a moment, nobody spoke. It was almost a nice moment. Arthur had a bruise, Sac had a headache, Voss had a dead car, and all three of them seemed, for once, to be breathing at the same speed.

Arthur glanced at the clock. An hour and ten minutes.

Then Sac coughed.

It was a small, damp cough, and he covered it with his fist like he was embarrassed. He looked at his palm.

Gray-green foam.

"Huh," he said.

"Blod?"

"My fingers. They’re not working."

He flexed them. They wouldn’t close. The veins along the back of his hand had gone a dull, sickly gray, spreading up the wrist like ink through a glass of water.

"I can’t feel anything."

"You never do," said Arthur.

"That," Voss said sharply, "is the problem."

He crossed the room in two strides and gripped Sac’s wrist, and the look on his face made Arthur sit up a little straighter. The Headmaster of the Academy, the calmest man he had ever met, had gone pale.

"This isn’t a kitchen toxin. This has been in his blood for the better part of an hour." He swung around. "What did you give him?"

"Water."

"That is not water!"

"It was in a water bottle." Arthur shrugged. "I left it by a tire."

"What was in it?"

Arthur considered lying. He thought about it for almost a full second.

"Rat poison," he said. "From under the sink in my house kitchen. It was expired."

Voss stared at him.

"Does the expiry make it," he said, very carefully, "more effective, or less?"

"Probably less."

"Probably."

"Probably less," Arthur agreed, cheerfully. "And I don’t care if I’m wrong. I hate him."

Sac swayed. His knees went. The guest chair gave one last, heroic groan as two hundred and forty pounds of berserker slid out of it and onto the rug, wheezing, eyes rolling toward the ceiling.

"Nurse!" Voss shouted. "Nurse Wren!"

The Headmaster had never raised his voice before. Arthur noted it for later, with satisfaction.

Then he looked at the fallen man, and at the bandages on his own arm, and a slow, bright, completely merciless smile spread across his face.

"Sir," he said. "Thank you for helping me stall for time. This was a great training session."

TO BE CONTINUED...