most powerful witch is a young male who can talk to computers. Have you thought about how valuable that makes you? To witches, to supernatural groups, to entire governments? We want you trained and educated to be able to protect yourself. We also are dead set on winning you to our team. I… we feel that the future holds other dangers that are just as nasty as demons, maybe more so. We think you might hold some of the answers to them.”
“Oh,” was all I could come back with. “What is it you fear?”
“A number of things, most of them for another time. But one thing is we think that ritual murder in New York involved Sorrow.”
It took me a second to realize he meant the book and not the emotion.
‘Sos’s wolf head popped out from under our table, massive and furry, and lay on the vinyl seat beside me. Huge brown eyes implored me and my hand automatically grabbed three strips of bacon from the side order and dropped them into his mouth.
“He’s marked you as a soft touch, you know?” Chris commented.
“He is alarmingly large and toothy and I want him to think friendly thoughts about me,” I said. “Why do you think Sorrow is involved?”
“Stacia’s witch friend said the spell traces we found were written in old German. As far as we know, the suspect witch doesn’t know German of any kind.”
“You think the book is controlling the witch?” I asked.
“Could it?”
I thought back to my brief exposure to the Book of Darkest Sorrow. I couldn’t stop a shudder. “Yeah. Yeah, I think it could.”
“So that’s one small item. The Garth Administration is another. Also, I don’t trust the Fae, there are wacko organizations popping up all over, and the Coven has been extraordinarily quiet. So there’s plenty to consider,” he said.
He wouldn’t talk about his other fears but steered the conversation to the school and our classes. Finally, when the media arrived, we hit the car and they dropped me off at Arcane, promising to be back soon and I, in turn, promised to have the drawings for the anti-restraint tattoos done.
My friends and I did venture out on the mean streets of Burlington both Friday and Saturday night. Despite failing at crashing any parties Friday, we persevered and got into a party for a couple of hours on Saturday. It was pretty much a letdown. The frat guys running it had been hammered by the time we got there and were happy to let four pretty girls into their domain. They weren’t as excited about letting Mack, T.J., Justin, or myself in. It was Jetta who rescued us, sliding into a very surprising persona, effortlessly distracting the upperclassmen by flirting at a professional level. I hadn’t seen her put on sex appeal before—none of us had. It was… effective. Till Mack leaned over and whispered in my ear, “How do you think we lured all those werewolves away from their pack?”
Instantly, the allure was gone, replaced by a healthy respect for her lethal abilities. She really was the perfect roommate for Caeco… who was studying her performance a little too closely. Uh oh.
After discovering that the party was a bunch of drunken fools, we left.
I returned to Jenks’s class on Monday morning, coming back as he began to introduce knife techniques. He ignored me, I worked with Mack, and Delwood stayed away. But now it was Wytchwar time and while my aunt was teaching the other kids how to control their spanking new golems, the witch girls were putting me through a hell of a rematch.
“Flank him!” someone shouted, the high pitch of the voice making me think it was Michelle. The odd thing about running avatars is the double echo of senses: both your own and your avatar’s.
The witch pack had me on the run, climbing as fast as I could for the top of the concrete ridge. They were way more threatening with their new dirt girls.
Double D made it to the top of the concrete and I spun him around. Below me, the feminoid forms the witches had chosen scrambled after me, two pairs spreading out to either side to follow Michelle’s suggestion.
I dropped a rock from my vine vest, but the dirt girls split apart and let it fall past them. Good tactic, but when their blank dirt faces peered upward, most likely feeling good about avoiding the spelled rock, they found another stone already in their midst. This one took