A Demon's Horns: Vice College For Young Demons: Year One Read online

  A Demon’s Horns (Vice College For Young Demons: Year One)

  Copyright: Marie Mistry © 2019

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, brands, media and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademark owners of various products, brands and/or stores referenced in this work of fiction which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorised, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  The right of Marie Mistry to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  Dedication

  To you, who dared to take a risk on a new author. Thank you.

  Authors Note

  A Demon’s Horns is a Paranormal Reverse Harem novel containing sexual situations with multiple consenting partners over the age of 18. This book also contains foul language, descriptions of violence and alcohol, and is written in British English. It also ends on a cliff hanger and the series will have a happy ending in the fourth and final book.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Authors Note

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Cast of Characters

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I glanced up from my bowl of pasta and looked my mother straight in the eye from across the dining table. “You did what?”

  She sighed, gently brushing an escaped lock of blonde hair from where it was caught on the yellow crystal set into her forehead. “I enrolled you at Vice College last week, and your acceptance letter came today.” She gave me a satisfied pearly white smile which matched the gleam in her bright green eyes. Of course, she was smiling. She had just succinctly ended our three-year argument in one breath.

  I tossed my fork at the table and shoved my chair back.

  “Lilith,” my dad chided, from behind the book floating in the air in front of his bowl.

  “Please may I be excused?” I grated out.

  He gave a small nod, still not looking at me.

  I stood and kicked the chair away, heading out of the kitchen towards my room.

  “Definitely not Sloth,” he murmured from behind the pages of his book as I thundered up the stairs.

  “Well, we’ll know for sure soon enough.” My mother sounded smug. “She could still be a Pride.”

  I slammed my door on their discussion and flopped onto my bed. That same conversation had been going on since my birth and had irritated me since before I could remember.

  In theory, I got that all demons’ first twenty-five years of life followed the same path due to a strange combination of necessity and tradition. We slipped into the national school system at six, two years later than our human counterparts so that we were old enough not to mention our parents were demons. Then, when we finished our years of human education at twenty, we were supposed to just leave it all behind and attend the demonic version of college for four years. All our human friends, all our human lives just… abandoned and forgotten.

  The first autumnal equinox after a young demon turned twenty marked the point when our bodies naturally stopped ageing. This in turn triggered a phase known as the ‘awaiting’, a year-long period during which, at any time, they could go through the ‘showing’ and be sorted into one of the seven demonic castes.

  No one knew exactly why young demons went through the showing, but it was far more likely to happen if they were around other demons. Hence, seven demon colleges had been created in each country to increase our chances of becoming fully-fledged demons and salvage the constantly declining demonic population. There was also the terrifying possibility of a demon remaining un-shown, relegating them to a status that was little better than a human.

  My mother, a ninth generation Pride, had started going on about Vice College when I turned seventeen. The most elite of the seven colleges in Britain, it was hidden in the forested hills of the north of England and starred as the setting for most of my mother’s recollections of the ‘good old days’. It had taken me all of five seconds to decide it wasn’t the place for me and turn to my dad for backup. Since he was a Sloth, I should have known he would never bother with entering an argument, but still, I had tried and failed.

  My mum, though exasperated with him for not taking her side, had been grateful for his silence, since it meant she could hound me uninterrupted.

  The worst part was that I recognised that she literally couldn’t help it. Being a Pride demon, my accomplishments fuelled her powers, which in turn made her prouder for being more powerful. So her vicious cycle continued. Having her daughter accepted into Vice was just another source of satisfaction for her.

  If I really did turn out to be a Pride, she’d be glowing with power for weeks.

  I cringed just thinking about what my mother would have written on the Vice application form. The admissions people had probably read through a long-winded recital of my family tree and how excited I was to take my place in their world.

  Gag.

  A hesitant knock on my door broke me out of my angry reverie.

  “Yes?” I called.

  My dad’s voice called through the door. “Your mother said I should come speak to you.” He didn’t sound too bothered, but he was like that and, most of the time, I didn’t mind.

  I shifted off the bed and opened the door. As usual, my dad looked completely unruffled by my earlier anger, but he did manage a small smile for me as he came into my room and stretched out on the bed.

  Dad was a thin, well-dressed man, despite his caste. Mostly because he was as indifferent to food as he was to exercise. He would do something if told to do it and not care one way or the other. Mum chose his clothes and sent him to the gym three times a week so that he would never fall prey to the obesity that plagued both his caste, Sloth, and Greed. But even exercise couldn’t remove the permanently vacant look in his eyes.

  “Vice is a nice enough place,” he began, in his understated way. Coming from my dad, the word ‘nice’ really meant ‘spectacular’. “Some people were decent there. Most people will be too consumed by their own showings to care about yours.” He scratched slightly at the Sloth crystal set into the back of his neck.

  I smiled meekly. “What if I don
’t have a showing? If I’m at Vice it will be more humiliating than just being at human university. And, it’s going to hurt if I do have one...”

  He gave me an uninterested look. “Why wouldn’t you have a showing?” He was getting bored; I could tell because his eyes were literally beginning to glaze over. “Sure, the pain of growing a crystal is bad, I guess, but don’t be so worried. You’re not a Pride, Lily.”

  “What am I?” I asked, desperate to know his thoughts.

  He just looked at me blankly, and I knew he had just used up his communication points for the day. I sighed, took him by the hand and led him from my bedroom and into the sitting room to his favourite sofa so that he could space-out in peace.

  My mother took the opportunity presented by my reappearance to spring out of the kitchen with my bowl of unfinished pasta in one hand and a cup of juice in the other.

  Hungry, despite myself, I took them from her and didn’t complain as she followed me up to my room, leaning against my open door.

  “Don’t worry, Lilith, you’ll love Vice, I promise,” she reassured me, watching as I set the pasta on my desk and opened my laptop. “The first year is stressful with everyone panicking about their showings and their castes, but after that it gets really fun. Vice knows everything about preparing you for adult life. You get three years of learning to harness your powers and they’ll help you pick out the best career for your talents at the end, like they did for your father and me.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  My mum was a Pride, from the sub-caste Narcissism; and as a result, she worked in the fashion industry as a well-known celebrity designer. She used her position to chat up important people and feed information back to the demonic government. My dad was a Sloth of the Indifference sub-caste, meaning that he really didn’t care that he screwed everyone over as a solicitor. Both jobs were picked for them at Vice, and they did suit them well, but…

  “I wanted a choice.”

  My mother shook her head. “Don’t be delusional, you’re a demon. You live by the rules or you die.”

  “If I was a human…”

  She sighed. “It’s unfair, I know. I remember I felt the same way at your age. I hated the idea of being told what to do for the rest of my life because of something that was out of my control. Worse, I thought I might end up like my parents!” She suppressed a little shudder, and I sympathised slightly. My mother’s family was even worse than she was, and ten times as old fashioned. “You only have to worry about turning out like your father, and he’s not so bad, I did marry him after all.”

  “But what about my friends?”

  “They’ll forget you.” She brushed aside my concern with an airy wave of her hands. “Humans never remember us… don’t you remember that time we went on holiday to Milan for the summer and you had to introduce yourself to your whole class again because they’d forgotten you? It will be like that. They won’t even recognise you if you walk up to them in the street in a year. You’ll make better friends at Vice, ones that won’t die so quickly.”

  “You’re right, Mum. It was a stupid dream,” I muttered, because she loved it when people told her she was right.

  She gave a little smile. “I’m just saying, I understand. Your whole life has been spent around humans. It’s only natural to wonder why you can’t live the life they do when you’ve been pretending to be one for so long.” She straightened her already perfect posture and moved closer, sliding a large envelope I hadn’t noticed before onto my desk. “But, you’ve always been more than they could ever be. You’ll come to understand that at Vice when you get your Pride crystal, like I did.”

  She left me alone after that.

  With a last resentful look at the bedroom door and the meddling parent behind it, I pulled my laptop onto the bed and opened my emails. Now I had to write to my human school telling them I was no longer going to university before my mother did that too. If she did, then she would also probably find a way to remove me from school early. That way she could make sure I knew enough about demonic culture that I wouldn’t make her look bad when I got to Vice.

  Not that she had anything to worry about. I was determined to become the biggest demon geek that ever walked the earth, mostly because the alternative was socialising with other demons and I had no idea how to do that. Demonic society considered all demons who hadn’t entered their awaiting to be too immature to interact with anyone not of their immediate family. And because my mother and father were both only children, they and their parents were the only demons I had ever met.

  My father’s parents were quite forward thinking and had doted on me from a young age. Sending letters and gifts from their villa in the south of France multiple times a year. The same couldn’t be said of my mother’s family, the Braxions. Her father had died in a duel shortly after she was born, and my grandmother was ‘too busy’ to get to know her only grandchild when there was still a chance I might be unshown and disgrace the family.

  I absently wrote the email, explaining that I was excited to be taking up an unexpected opportunity to work in my father’s family business, and that I would be giving up my university application to do so. Still, my finger hesitated over the send button… I doubted the school would really care, it was a large academy with thousands of students, but if I hit send, I was saying goodbye to my human life forever.

  Instead, I traced my hand over the heavy paper of the envelope, then pulled out the acceptance letter, propping it up behind the keyboard to read the severe, embossed, black letters.

  VICE COLLEGE FOR YOUNG DEMONS

  Head Mistress: Aoife Saxon (Greed-Philomath, former Greed Int. Diplomat)

  Dear Miss Carazor,

  It is our pleasure to inform you that you have been granted a place at Vice College for Young Demons. Please find enclosed forms which must be completed by your parents and returned by the week’s end.

  The academic year begins on the 21st September, but students should arrive no later than 3pm the day before. It is our duty to remind all students that your attendance is government mandated and enforced.

  Yours sincerely,

  Pan Voiszus

  Assistant to Professor Saxon

  I read and re-read the line ‘government mandated and enforced’.

  The mouse button clicked with a grim finality.

  Chapter 2

  I got out of the car with a feeling of weighty dread. All around me, other students my age were unloading suitcases full of things from the backs of cars and minivans. Some chattered excitedly, looking completely at ease, while others looked around curiously, as I was, reluctantly pulling suitcases from their cars as their parents called encouragement.

  To my embarrassment, my mum actually got out of the car to say goodbye to me, dragging my dad with her. She was in high spirits today, as she usually was when I did something she considered to be following in her footsteps.

  “Now, remember to hold your head high, Lilith,” she instructed, adjusting the fashionably cut tweed suit she had designed for herself for the occasion. “You are the seventeenth generation of our family to go to Vice College, and you will conduct yourself accordingly.” She adjusted the collar of my shirt and tucked in the label with a quick efficiency that never failed to somehow also seem gentle.

  “Do you remember which is your dorm room? I made a special request of an old friend who now works in accommodation and managed to snag my old room for you when you go through your showing and become a Pride. It was my mother’s before it became mine, did you know? I could take you there. I remember this place like it was yesterday!” She scanned the crowd, looking for familiar faces, and then squealed like a fifteen-year-old girl when she saw someone she recognised. “Amber!” She suddenly charged through the crowd like a rampaging bull.

  My dad looked on, unobtrusively examining me as I checked over my bags. “Good luck, Lily,” he said quietly. “I’ll tell your mother you were excited to get going and asked me to pass on a goodbye.”

&
nbsp; I nodded, hiked my leather satchel up on my shoulder and dragged my suitcase across the gravel behind me, following the steady stream of other unsure looking first years towards the Gatehouse.

  Vice College was a medieval castle with seven flanking towers set into a heptagonal curtain wall surrounding it. In typical castle style, a huge moat surrounded the bailey, crossed in a single place by a large drawbridge leading into the impressively sized Gatehouse. My mother had told me that first years always had their rooms in the Gatehouse until their showing, after which they were moved to their caste tower.

  My mother had pestered my father to arrive early, but due to the traffic, we’d ended up just on time. Now, as I crossed the stone bridge towards the raised portcullis, I saw that the other first years were already in a line that disappeared behind the Gatehouse. I hurried to the end, wanting to be firmly in the queue before my mother stopped reminiscing and tried to drag me off to speak with one of her old school buddies.

  Mercifully, the line seemed to go down quickly, and I was soon at the front of the queue under the scrutiny of a portly woman, whose Envy crystal was displayed prominently by her low-cut blouse.