Page 85 of Demon of Dreams

I stared at the jacket in my hands, holding it as far from my body as I could manage.

You’re being an idiot. It’s ajacket.It’s not contagious.

I humphed softly, looking out at the trees that surrounded the cabin. Against the flames of the campfire, the blackness of the pines was impenetrable. Mouse was out there somewhere, but she hadn’t come to my door when I’d arrived home.

For a moment, I wondered if Isaac had spooked her. But she couldn’t have known he was coming. She was a cat, not a psychic.

Regardless, I really should go inside. My knife was plenty sharp by now, and Isaac was right about the cold.

All I had to do was give the kid his jacket back. I didn’t have to explain. We didn’t even have to talk.

I needed Cory out of my life, but if that couldn’t happen yet, the least I could do was keep him out of my head.

I’d give him his jacket and be done with it.

That was all.

My determination carried me through the next morning.

I woke up, stretched, and ran through my morning exercises, limbering up for the day’s classes. I did my best to empty my mind, focusing solely on my breath and the forms as I moved through them. One stance flowed into the next, and heat rose within me, warming me from the inside out.

After five minutes, I’d built up enough heat to step outside into the frozen clearing on the far side of my cabin. My breath misted in the morning air. I grabbed a staff leaning against a tree and incorporated it into my movements, jabbing, blocking, parrying, using it as leverage, swinging it under and over imagined opponents.

The wound on my chest protested as I stretched it. Was it growing worse? I couldn’t be sure. I wondered if it would kill me, if I gave it enough time. I’d never planned on staying alive long enough to find out.

After half an hour, I’d worked up a sweat and my lungs were full of the scent of the forest in winter, white spruce and cedar, fir and pine. The sun had just risen above the horizon and was slanting through a stand of birches like a flight of arrows. Pleasantly tired, I went back inside to take a shower.

A handful of blueberries and a cup of black coffee sufficed for breakfast. I brushed my teeth and donned the clothing I wore when teaching—snapped joggers, a T-shirt, and running shoes—slipping the knives I always carried into place. I looked around the cabin. Everything was in its place—except for the bundle Isaac had dropped off last night.

My mood soured instantly. I had half a mind to leave it where it sat, to ‘forget’ to bring it, but that seemed cowardly. So I grabbed the jacket and set out.

My cabin was set well into Vesperwood’s grounds, not far from the ice-fringed waters of Lake Superior. The lake was calm today. I could barely hear it as I headed towards the gym, and the sound was soon lost in the murmuring of the trees.

It had snowed again last night, lightly. A dusting of white flakes covered the trail I took through the woods, winding around old-growth pines, reaching for the sky. A huge tree had fallen in a storm three years ago, exposing half its roots to the air, but the other half remained under the soil, which was enough to keep it alive. New shoots now grew upright from the trunk like the bristles of a gigantic toothbrush.

The path took me around the tree, through a thicket of maples, and deposited me at the back of the gym. I undid the lock and slipped inside, flicking on the lights as I walked from the office in the back to the main exercise room up front. I dropped the jacket on a stack of mats in the corner and did my best to forget about it for the rest of the day.

My first class was a group of sophomores, old enough to have joined their respective havens but young enough that the Hunters still took general combat with all the other students. Maybe my morning exercises hadn’t calmed me as much as I thought, or maybe the Hunters were being particularly annoying, chafing at having to work with students they believed they outclassed.

Halfway through the class, I stopped the routines we’d been running and put them through a punishing core workout instead. Nothing to do with combat, just pure conditioning. My patience was thin today.

It got worse with my second class—junior witches. God, I hated juniors. They were finally competent enough to do damage, but low on the humility that would keep them alive. Every single one of the Hexers wanted to use spells to attack, forgetting they also needed to defend themselves—from physical attacks as well as metaphysical ones.

“What the hell was that?” I barked at Mo Kirmani, a Hexer who’d launched a sparkling swirl of silver light at his opponent, Kelly Anselm. She blocked it with her wooden practice sword, which exploded in a shower of sparks. When the smoke cleared, the wooden blade was a foot shorter than it had been.

“What do you mean?” Mo demanded. “It worked. Look at her sword.”

“Wonderful. Now if we can just get all of your opponents to agree to stop, mid-fight, while you spend thirty seconds casting that spell, you’ll be all set.”

“It wasn’t thirty seconds,” Mo muttered. “It was more like twenty.”

“And that’s twenty seconds for your enemy to shoot you with an arrow, stab you with a dagger, or cut you apart with a sword, all while you sit there mumbling to yourself,” I said with disgust. “Just because you can use magic now doesn’t mean you can neglect the fundamentals. Plain old steel can kill you just as effectively as a spell.”

My Third Hour class was the worst yet. A group of senior Hunters, all weapon-bonded, and all sick of taking orders from someone who wasn’t a Hunter himself. They had individual tutorials with Leon Zi, the head of Hunt, but they still had to come to class with me too. They were big on grumbling when they thought I wouldn’t notice, and the mere sound of their blades clashing set my teeth on edge.

“Watch your wrists,” I snapped at Beth Wong. “You’ll need quicker reactions than that if you want to pass this semester.”

Beth nodded and firmed up her grip. She deftly met her opponent’s blade and flicked his sword wide as she advanced, putting my note into immediate practice. It did nothing to improve my mood.

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