Cauterize

1. The Pinch

It starts like this: three days left of summer vacation, a bone and a book. The bone is mine, an extra rib I had removed as a child; the book, though, is a Grim. It's my gram's, every page filled in with her magic and her words and her perfect summoning diagrams. Each one is dated, labeled with the same fearful precision that embodies everything about my grandma.

I splay my fingers across pages seventy-seven and seventy-eight: a basic summoning for the demon vaporeon. It's a homemade one, nothing less than pure genius, as all of my gram's personal, hand-drawn diagrams are; my Grim is nothing but textbook circles, traced with protractors and compasses. I adjust the bone and mutter the words. My gram can do it without saying a thing, but she's what you might call a prodigy (it says so on at least three of the seven framed certificates on the wall).

The salty scent of the ocean fills my gram's sitting room and the temperature drops to near freezing. Clear, icy water spills from the book and onto the blonde hardwood floors, pooling around my bare feet. It's so cold it hurts.

"Shit!" I hiss, shoving the Grim away from me.

The flow stops abruptly and the book skitters through the puddle. Even though the pages stay dry and the ink doesn't run, my gram still crosses the room with long strides and smacks me upside the head. Grendel, a honchkrow and one of my gram's many contracted beasties, makes a smug noise like: I told you she couldn't do it.

"Idiot," snaps my gram, whacking me again for good measure, harder this time. "You were doing well."

"It caught me off guard," I say defensively. "I wasn't expecting it."

"Expect everything!" spits Gram. "Demons aren't going to coddle you – in fact, they expect you to take care of them." Every line of her body is relaxed, but her words are cutting and her eyes are like steel. I shrink away from her rage; I can't help it. I keep my eyes trained on her Chanel pumps and blink back tears (of embarrassment or pain or frustration, I don't know). She's quiet for a minute, looking down on me as Grendel flutters to her shoulder. Then she waves her hand and grunts, "Clean this up, before the salt ruins my floor."

I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes, so hard I see stars. "Yes. Sorry."

I listen to her leave. I clean and clean, until the joints in my fingers ache. I don't cry.

xxx

Mornings are an isolated hell. It is the time when my gram and I sit across from each other at the kitchen table and eat identical breakfasts of porridge with apple slices and brown sugar. Gram watches me over her morning cocoa without blinking, made triply intimidating with Grendel looming over her, and I try not to look her in the eye. There has never been a breakfast where we have had a proper conversation.

Today, Gram's already dressed (Burberry, Valentino shoes), legs crossed at the ankle. She hasn't got Grendel with her and that worries me. There's a mountain of whipped cream on her hot chocolate, but it hasn't been touched.

"Augustine," she says crisply, "sit down."

Oh, there, she's done it: she's used the forbidden full first name. Oh, my death nears. This is how doctors tell the relatives that their family member just didn't make it, and my condolences. I slump into the seat opposite her, dreading. Maybe she'll comment on yesterday's failure, and burn my Grim, the whole thing, to ash. She'd do it, too, without a second thought, and then have me make a new one, with new diagrams, until everything was perfect.

Instead, she passes me a pamphlet from her handbag. It's glossy and professional, with Bonnie's Academy for the Troubled emblazoned on the front. I blank for a second, just one second, because there isn't a single person who doesn't know about Bonnie's – it's the school for, as advertised, the troubled. The students range from sickeningly good to disastrously terrible in terms of summoning, but every single one of them is a complete psycho.

"I'm not troubled," I say immediately. Defend, says my brain, says my gut. Defend against this injustice, this wrong against you.

"And yet," replies Gram coolly, "here you are: the worst summoner this family has seen in four decades."

She's so impartial, so unaffected by me, and while part of me thinks that this should make me angry, it really does nothing but drain me. My head feels heavy, my neck weak. I want to look her right in the face and challenge her, challenge the decision that's already been made, but I can't muster up the courage.

Pathetically, I flip open the pamphlet: a pair of boys with straight white teeth and uniforms with the creases ironed into razor edges. The text praises Bonnie's, how it whips young men and women into shape, changes them for the absolute better and turns them into fine, functioning members of society.

"Sending me to a fancy school won't make me a better summoner. Maybe I'm a black sheep," I try.

Defend, defend.

My gram smiles thinly, without humor. "Your parents were ideal summoners. Your grandfather developed the Seventeen-point Star theory. I am beyond ideal." She leans forward, almost sneering now. "It is genetically impossible for you to be a black sheep."

The horrible thing about my gram is that she does not lie. She hurts and hits and dresses in designer clothing, but she does not lie.

The horrible thing about me is that I don't lie, either, but my honesty is of the weakest sort. It's the sort of truthfulness that is born of an inability to fib; everything about me pales in comparison to my gram, from our truths to our crocodile tears to the way we wear our Westwood.

For this reason, I accept the inevitably of my situation and bend, as always, under Gram's will. I bow my head and she nods in approval of my placidity.

"Get dressed, then," says Gram, standing. "We shall set off immediately."

"You've enrolled me already." Not even a question. I doubt that there is a person in the world whom my gram does not know. She could probably get me in to any school, any where in less than three phone calls.

"Certainly," she says primly.

"What should I wear?" One might think that at my age I could dress myself, but whatever I choose on my own will be critiqued into oblivion; may as well get Gram's opinion now.

For the first time in a long while, Gram looks at me with something akin to affection, an emotion she has had trouble expressing since Grampy died. She glances from my face, takes in the line of my shoulders, the angle of my fringe. "McQueen," she decides. "And be quick about it. We're on a tight schedule. I have a hair appointment at four."

And for some reason that makes me laugh, even though I feel sick to my stomach.

xxx

When I was small, I used to sit on my grandpa's lap while he described his theories to me. He came up with a lot of them (which can be found on page 227-256 in Summoning Level 2, and The Theoretical Summoner pages 302-319), but the most famous one he ever devised was the Seventeen-point Star. It categorized recorded demons into seventeen types, and it was later expanded to include dual-type demons. It revolutionized how demons were viewed and inspired Romulus Luther's law of battle (Luther's Law, page 44-45, The Complete Demonic Battle System).

I read over Grampy's notes in the car. Bonnie's is two hours out of the city, in farm country where land is cheap and the administrators have a legitimate reason to turn Bonnie's into a boarding school. My bags are packed hastily with everything that would fit, but I keep my grampy's things and my Grim close.

Gram is sitting next to me, occasionally barking orders at the cabbie, who can't seem to decide whether he wants to be dismayed by my gram's brutality, or pleased that he's going to up nearly four-hundred quid after this trip.

I get lost in my grampy's neat, spidery print until my gram pinches my arm. I jerk away from her. She doesn't say anything, just points out the window, where the roof of the school is visible past the fields of corn and still fruitless apple orchards. Far past the school, a little town sits on the crest of a hill.

"I won't be going in with you," says Gram.

"I know. You'll be late for your hair appointment."

Gram snorts and snatches my Grim; my whole body tenses. She flips through the first dozen pages, the ones with my textbook diagrams, and tears them all out. She rolls down the window and lets the pages loose. I nearly punch her right then, because those stupid, useless circles are my best effort and damn, damn, damn. I bite my tongue to hold back my curses.

"Forget the texts," says Gram haughtily. "Make up your own." She snaps my Grim closed and hands it back. I cradle it to my chest like a wounded kitten. She pauses, and, blasé: "You can come home for winter break, if you're not failing."

We pull up, and Gram looks like she might pat my hand or wish me good luck or something, but she doesn't. She just shoos me out of the car and instructs me to not fuck up. I try to tell her I won't, but the words get stuck by my teeth. I watch the car leave and, predictably, Gram does not spare me a backwards glance.

The gates: tall, painted white, rusting at the hinges but sturdy. A brick wall surrounds the property, overrun by creeping green vines and lined with shrubbery. The school itself is a jarring mix of buildings both new in old, glass in some places and wraparound porches in others. I hate it already.

My stomach hurts like hell.

And so, with as much composure as I can muster, I set my bags down and vomit into a bush, my heart pounding in my chest like a lion beating its head against the bars of a cage.

1. Cheerio, all; most sincere apologies for dropping off the face of the earth. I do hope you enjoyed Ch.1 of Cauterize, which I swear upon my soul will be finished. An academy fic it is, though you've never seen one quite like this (and if you have, I will happily commit seppuku). Below you may find an Original Character form, which must to the power of a billion be sent to me by PM, filled out to the best of your ability.

Name:
Age: 15-ish+ (high school age)
Appearance:

Personality: Be detailed; cram as much as you can in here.
Talents:
Sucks at:

Summoning Ability: 1=shitty (min), 5=BAMF (max)
Top 3 Favorite Beasties: For reference.

History: You may keep it brief; include, at least, why they were sent to Bonnie's. I don't give a fig where they're from, but include whatever you perceive as pertinent.

+Note, children, that by sending me thine character, you are granting me permission to make any adjustments I see fit and to do as I please with them.