Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) (7 page)

“Harlot!” The man—a human—spit on the ground at Thea’s feet.

Slut
, she was used to. Occasionally,
whore
. But
harlot
was new. There was fire and brimstone in the word that made her break out in a sweat.

His eyes were bloodshot, his chin dark with stubble, and he smelled of cheap beer. Thea wasn’t fond of confrontation of any sort, but this one especially would be best avoided. Without making eye contact, she tried again to pass him. Again he put himself between her and the door.

“And now you’re serving the demons, are you? You just get them demons out here, then. Get them out here to face me!”

Thea wished she had some mace on her. Barring that, she wasn’t sure what to do. She opened her mouth to insist, as calmly as possible, that he let her pass. But she was spared the necessity by a large fury who came through the doors and grabbed the man by the arm, twisting it around before the drunkard even knew what was going on.

“Get off me, demon!” he shouted, too late. The fury had already picked him up.

The fury spread his wings and flew off without a word. He hadn’t so much as glanced at Thea. As she stared after them, she was startled by a voice at her side.

“Like it’s not bad enough to have to work on a Saturday, right? I have to deal with Mr. Fanatic.”

It was a female fury, dressed in pants and a silk blouse with her hair in a tight bun. Her breath smelled of coffee. She must have come outside with the security guard, but Thea, distracted by the spectacle, hadn’t noticed her until she spoke.

“Who is he?” Thea asked.

“Nobody knows. He’s been coming around once in a while the last few months, screaming about demons and evil. Seems like he wants something, but we don’t know what.”

“How is that possible?” Thea remembered what Graves had told her when he brought her onto campus the day before. “He shouldn’t be able to get in here. And even if he found a way, it’s just supposed to look ruined to him, right?”

The fury looked at Thea, as if taking her in for the first time. “Who are you?”

“I’m Thea.” She held out a hand that she hoped wouldn’t be noticeably damp. “I’m a new hire.”

“The human transformation! I heard about you.”

Did you hear I’m a harlot?

“I’m Mirabella,” the fury went on. She shook hands and smiled, then gestured in the direction the security guard had flown off in. “To answer your question, that only works if they’ve never been here before. Once they see it on an authorized visit, they can always see it. Facilities has been looking for a weak spot in the fence, but so far they haven’t figured out how he’s getting in.”

“So he was authorized to be here once?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? We haven’t tracked down any files on him. We don’t even know his name. Hence Mr. Fanatic. What are you doing here, by the way?”

At first Thea thought she meant at Hexing House in general, and for one sickening moment thought Mirabella had seen her sins (
harlot
), and knew she was there under false pretenses.

“Did you need to see someone specific? Because I’m the only one in today,” Mirabella said.

Thea realized she just meant the building. “This isn’t FR?”

“No, this is HRI. Human Relations and Investigation. FR is the building behind this one.” She gestured for Thea to follow her to the walkway, and pointed to the building in question, which looked exactly like the building in front of them. Thea wondered if she could ask somebody for a map.

With a quick thanks to Mirabella, she hurried off. The last thing she needed was to be late for her first day of training. She was already in enough trouble around this place, and her second day here wasn’t exactly starting well.

Serving the demons, are you?

No, sir, not anymore. The demon paid me twenty-seven million dollars and let me out of my contract.

Things didn’t get better when she reported to a training room in FR to find that Philip, the hostile fury she’d met at dinner the night before, and two of his friends were the other new hires. A quick glance told her that one of the others was male, the other female, before Thea shifted her eyes downward. She didn’t look at them again, but she could feel them looking at her.

The instructor glared at her with obvious distaste, before finally introducing himself as Stefan and telling her he supposed she ought to take a seat. He was big but soft and running to fat, with thinning yellow hair. For some reason it struck Thea as funny, that furies went bald, too. She quickly converted the mocking smile that came unbidden into what she hoped was the expression of an enthusiastic pupil, and chose a seat at the end of the table, next to an empty chair. There was a notebook and a pen in front of her, and a bottle of water.

“I’ll be up front with you, Thea.” Stefan’s voice was slightly shrill and bound to become annoying. “You’ve got a long way to go to prove yourself. We haven’t had a human transformation in over half a century.”

Thea nodded. She’d heard that repeated plenty of times already.

“But more importantly, you are not an authorized hire.” Stefan narrowed his eyes at her. “As the head of FR, I do the recruiting here. Graves went entirely outside of protocol.”

Thea wasn’t sure whether he was expecting her to apologize for Graves’s overstepping his boundaries, but she didn’t say anything.

“Very well then, what do you already know?” Stefan asked.

“Nothing,” said Thea, and ignored the snickers of Philip and his friends. “I just got hired yesterday. I only know a little about what the company does. They gave me a month to pass training.”

Stefan burst out laughing. Thea kept her face neutral as he explained to her, with great relish, that the average student took three months, and the exceptional ones, two. And that was for people who were born to it. He didn’t know how long the last human transformation had taken, but he was willing to wager it was a lot more time than Thea had.

“And they didn’t even go over the basics of the transformation process with you?” he asked.

“No.”

He narrowed his eyes again, down to slits that made him look reptilian. “Yet you accepted the job anyway, without knowing what you were in for? I wonder why you wanted to join the colony so badly?”

“Probably because nobody in her own world had a job opening for a slut,” said Philip.

His friend—the male one—laughed. “Nah, always room for sluts.”

For once, Thea didn’t resent the teasing; she was glad they’d deflected attention from Stefan’s question.

“Well, you’ll want to take notes, because I’m only going to say this once, and quickly,” Stefan said. “We won’t be wasting our time in here with things the others learned before they were ten. The transformation happens in three stages. The mental, physical, and spiritual components of each phase are aligned, so that as you master the concepts of each, a corresponding physical change will happen. In your case, your skin will also change, and that will happen gradually throughout the process. The scope of stage one is virtues and claws, and we’re beginning it immediately.”

Thea was scribbling in her notebook as he finished, and spoke without looking up. “So none of these guys have claws yet either?”

“No, nor wings, as you can see,” Stefan said. “Their blood is already purple, unlike yours, but it thickens when they complete stage two.”

Without waiting for more questions, Stefan turned to the white board behind him. “Virtues,” he said as he wrote the word, then underlined it, “are the easiest characteristics to identify in humans. They don’t try to hide them, you see? But that doesn’t mean working with them is without subtlety. Sometimes it’s possible to confuse a virtue for a vice, or vice versa. Who can give me an example?”

The others looked blank, but Thea raised her hand.

Stefan rolled his eyes. “This isn’t school, Thea, it’s training. We’re all civilized adults here. I’m sure we can be trusted not to talk over one another without having to enforce hand raising.”

She ignored the needling in favor of answering the question. “I once saw shame and confused it for the sin the person was ashamed of,” she said. “But Graves tells me what I was actually seeing was a virtue.”

“Ah, so good of
Graves
to answer the question, then.”

The other female student, a tiny, dark-haired thing with a pixie cut and several tattoos on her purple skin, tittered.

“Yes, contrition is a virtue,” Stefan went on. “Of course, atonement is better, but humans rarely make it that far.”

Thea spoke quickly, before she could stop herself. “You seem to have an awful lot of contempt for humans. Isn’t that kind of unfair?”

Stefan smiled at the other three students. “I’m sure we don’t think it is. How so?”

“Well, I’ve heard some of you say you’re third generation, or something like that. Which would suggest you weren’t always furies. Everyone here comes from a human transformation somewhere along the line, right?”

“As I said, this is training, not school,” said Stefan. “If you need answers to such basic questions, see me after class and I’ll direct you to some of our elementary schoolbooks.”

His nastiness was having its desired effect, but Thea would never let him see it. When it came to putting on a smile for the world and making them believe it, few were as expert as a Baird Frost girl. She gave Stefan the very sweetest version of that smile and said, “Thank you, that’s wonderful.”

Without acknowledging that, Stefan tapped the word virtue on the white board again. “As I was saying.”

The rest of that day was far more boring than Thea had imagined a magical transformation into a mythical being would be. She took notes as Stefan lectured them about courage, purity, humility, honesty, diligence, charity, fidelity, temperance, and contrition. Later he talked about identifying those virtues in humans.

“Different furies find different visualization methods useful. But the most common way to think of vices and virtues is as a deck of cards. As a fury you can see a person’s deck, but only the top few cards, at most. Sometimes you might misinterpret what you see. Or sometimes what you’re looking for won’t be on top, so you’ll have to shuffle them a bit. Seeing the virtue cards and learning to shuffle them is the focus of stage one of the transformation.”

“And the other stages?” It was the pixie cut girl—Florence turned out to be her name—who asked. Stefan didn’t seem at all impatient with the question, although Thea was sure he would have been if she’d asked it.

“In stage two, we add the vice cards to the deck. Stage three is where the excitement happens. That’s when you learn to flip the cards over.” Stefan packed his laptop back into his leather briefcase, a cue to the others to close their notebooks and gather their things as well. “Stage two, sins and blood. Stage three, hexing and wings. But you’ve got virtues and claws to contend with first. I want you to spend the rest of the weekend reviewing your virtues. We begin hands-on training with them on Monday.”

He didn’t go into just what that would entail, but Thea didn’t worry about it. Virtues, according to Graves, were the part of all this she had a natural aptitude for. And most of her worrying energy was already being spent on Alecto’s threat to have her watched. Thea hadn’t seen anyone following her, or any obvious signs of being tracked, but she didn’t have a good sense of what could be accomplished with magic, either. She decided it would be best to play the model trainee for the rest of the weekend, which meant the search for Flannery would require a patience she did not feel.

Thea ate dinner with Cora and Nero again, grateful that they seemed so willing to take her under their wings (figuratively, in this case). She told them about her hostile classmates, and even more hostile instructor, over two glasses of wine and some delicious ribs. She’d learned to view food as a friend again since This Unfortunate Incident had freed her from the requirements of being always thin and always beautiful, and the food at Hexing House was surprisingly good.

“Stefan’s a joke,” said Cora. “You can’t let him get you down.”

“You know why he’s head of FR, right?” Nero asked.

Thea shook her head.

“Because he’s the only one in the department.” Nero laughed.

“You’re kidding me.”