Bitter Demons (14 page)

Wednesday night, Mrs. Shadowford and Ella Mae left for the meeting of the Order of Shadows. Zara was left as a guardian and babysitter. I knew she normally wouldn’t let me out of her sight, so I had to come up with an excuse to get her out of my hair for a while.

“I fell at practice on Monday, and I just haven’t been feeling well ever since,” I said. This, of course, was a lie. My shoulder felt better than ever, thanks to Jackson and his mysterious new ability. Zara didn’t know that, though. For all she knew, it was the worst pain of my life. I certainly played the academy award winning part of a girl in pain, my face twisted in a grimace. “I just want to go lay down and be still for a while.”

“You poor thing,” she said. “Want me to bring you anything to drink?”

I shook my head. “No thanks, I’ll probably just grab an ice pack and go to sleep. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“If you need anything, I’ll be in the living room watching TV with Courtney,” she said. “She’s quite a pleasant girl to be around. I wonder why she isn’t on the cheerleading squad? She seems to have some real power.”

“That’s a good question,” I said. One I actually wanted to explore, but not tonight. Tonight was all about Mary Anne. “I’m sure she’d love to learn more. Where’s Mary Anne tonight? Is she watching TV too?”

Zara’s face darkened. “She’s a strange one,” she whispered, throwing a look up the stairs toward Mary Anne’s room. “She said she prefers to be in her room alone.”

“That’s pretty typical,” I said. “Well, good night then Zara. Sorry I’m not hanging out tonight.”

“I understand,” she said. “Hope you get some good rest.”

I sighed a huge sigh of relief when she disappeared into the TV room with Courtney. I disappeared into my room and with my new source of energy and focus, was able to quickly make myself invisible. Cautiously, I opened the door and checked to make sure Mary Anne wasn’t watching from her room. The coast was clear, so I tiptoed down the stairs and crept past the TV room.

Courtney and Zara were watching an episode of American Idol, and Zara was saying, “I wonder why you never see any good witches on this show. I know at least a dozen witches who can sing better than any of these people.”

“How can you tell when someone is a witch?” Courtney asked.

It sounded like they were going to be sitting there for a while, which gave me at least an hour to search Mrs. Shadowford’s suite. The lock on the door was surprisingly easy to open. It was exactly the same as my lock upstairs, and lord knows I’d practiced on that one enough to know how to unlock it.

I passed through the door and closed it tight behind me. I dropped my invisibility and was amazed how much energy I still had. Before the confirmation ceremony, being invisible for more than five minutes gave me the worst headache and made me feel sick to my stomach. Now, I didn’t even have the slightest twinge of an ache.

I didn’t want to raise too much suspicion by turning on the lights, so I conjured a tiny purple orb that gave off only a dim light. The light hovered near my shoulder and followed me as I made my way through the office. In the semi-darkness, the clutter of trinkets and statues in the room gave off hundreds of sinister shadows.

A tea cup sat on Mrs. Shadowford’s desk, a withered teabag sitting on the saucer. That woman and her tea. I moved around to the far side of her desk and felt a tingle of fear slip up my spine like a whisper. I did not want to find out what Mrs. Shadowford would do to me if she caught me going through her things. I had to be very careful not to disturb anything.

Her big wooden desk had a row of drawers across the right side. The top drawer was full of pens and rubber bands and paper clips. Nothing unusual. The middle drawer held a stack of letters addressed to someone named Millie and an old camera that looked like it was about fifty years old. The bottom drawer was exactly what I’d been looking for – rows of files.

The folders were arranged by last name in alphabetical order. I thumbed through until I came to Mary Anne’s folder. It wasn’t as thick as I expected. I pulled it out and looked for a place to sit while I studied it. Since Mrs. Shadowford was in a wheelchair, she didn’t have a desk chair or anything. I decided to sit down on the floor where I would be hidden by the desk if anyone came through the door unexpectedly.

Mary Anne Marsters’ file was suspiciously bare. No birth certificate or school records from her previous school. None of the paperwork said where she was born or where she lived prior to coming to Shadowford. The only interesting piece of paper in the whole file was a letter from a case worker somewhere in the state of Georgia. The letter said that Mary Anne seemed depressed and did not work well with her peers. Nothing new there. But it also said that on more than one occasion, her foster family had complained that she kept breaking the windows in her bedroom. The families believed she was smashing them on purpose, but they never saw any scratches on her hands or body from the glass and couldn’t figure out what she was using to smash the windows.

That was it. There was nothing more of note in Mary Anne’s entire file. Well, except for the fact that most of her information was missing. I placed her file back in the folder and searched for my own as a comparison. Mine was much thicker and looked exactly like I expected. A copy of my birth certificate, adoption papers, records of various foster homes I’d been placed in throughout the years, comments from Mrs. Meeks, my case worker, and school transcripts all the way back to Kindergarten. As tempted as I was to look through what my teachers and social worker had to say about me, I knew I was on borrowed time and didn’t want to push my luck.

Then my finger landed on a file labeled
Jackson Hunt
. I paused. Why would he have a file here in Mrs. Shadowford’s house? Most of the names were female, and I assumed they were records of the girls who had lived here at one time or another. But Jackson’s file was an unexpected temptation.

My hand hesitated over the folder. He’d been so reluctant to tell me the truth about his past. Almost everything I knew, I’d found out from Isaac that night at the old hospital. Jackson had only confided in me about his brother, but never about how he’d ended up coming to our world or why he was human now.

Maybe it was wrong, but I couldn’t resist. I needed to know.

I gripped the file and settled back down on the floor. My hands trembled as I opened the worn folder. Dust billowed out and floated across the room. I stifled a sneeze.

The first part of the file was information on Jackson’s school records. He’d apparently had more than seven different names since he first enrolled at Peachville High in 1965. I flipped past the list of names and the various information about subjects he’d studied. I wondered how it was that no one ever remembered him. Then, I saw the notes on the various memory spells cast around him so that when he graduated one year with one name and reentered school the next year as a freshman, he was completely forgotten by everyone and could start fresh.

God, that must have been so boring for him. I had a hard time imagining two more years at boring Peachville High, much less nearly fifty years. Why did he keep coming back to school? Why didn’t he just travel or leave town? The more I learned about Jackson, the more questions I had.

I moved past the school files and started getting into something a bit more interesting. My breath came in short, shallow bursts as I turned page after page, knowing I was close to finding something important about his past.

I stopped at a drawing of a shadow demon inside the ritual room. It was a charcoal drawing that was slightly smudged, but it looked like a scene from Dante. The room was in chaos. The shadow demon poured out of the portal on the floor and witches in full-length robes scattered. Several witches lay dead on the floor, blood pouring from their heads and bodies. Was this Jackson?

I struggled to remember Isaac’s words that night. He’d said something about Jackson coming through the portal and killing, but I hadn’t wanted to believe it could be true.

I turned the page.

A handwritten journal entry had been photocopied and added to the folder.

July 7, 1962

It has taken me hours to steady my hands to be able to write this account of today’s initiation ceremony. A young girl by the name of Maureen was scheduled to be initiated into the Order. She was a sweet girl. Full of promise and quite beautiful. She was the daughter of my good friend Kathryn, who has been a loyal member of Peachville’s Order since she turned eighteen more than twenty years ago.

The ceremony began as usual. I called forth the spirit of our contact in the shadow world, Yanora. She told us that she had indeed found a suitable demon for Maureen and that a spell had been affixed to him to bring him over. She gave no warning of this particular demon’s power, but as soon as I began the joining ritual, I could feel that something was different. This demon’s power was unbelievable. Almost overwhelming.

When he poured through the portal, we forced him into Maureen’s body, as the ritual commands. At first, we believed the ritual was a success. We waited for Maureen to wake and accept us as sisters, but her body began to tremble uncontrollably. Right away, the ritual room grew cold as ice, and a feeling of desperation fell over me.

The demon ripped free of Maureen’s body and she fell lifeless to the floor. Several of the members rushed forward to try to save her, but the demon lashed out with such ferocious anger, it filled the room with hatred and fear. Chaos erupted. Several loyal members of the Order were lost to us today. Maureen and her mother. Gladys, one of my mother’s friends from the old days. Penelope, a sweet young girl of only twenty-eight who had just been brought on as a member of our council. Jocelyn and her sister Jacie were both also killed at the hands of this beast.

I cannot find the words to express the full horror of today’s events. Seeing the blood run along the floor of the ritual room was the most disturbing and heart-breaking experience of my entire reign as Prima.

Once I gathered my wits and recognized what was happening, I knew we had to get the situation under control as quickly as possible or we might lose the whole of our membership to the demon’s anger. I joined hands with the surviving witches and somehow my training kicked in and I was able to remember the ritual to contain a demon. A stone statue in the corner of the room was perfect for containment.

As we started to chant, I felt a strange power coursing through me. Not a foreign power, exactly, but more powerful and more pure than anything I’d ever felt before. Once we joined together, we were able to subdue the demon quickly. We transformed him into a human male. We split his power from his body and stored it in the stone statue. With his power taken, he collapsed onto the floor of the cold ritual room.

I do not yet know what we are going to do with him. It is rare for a demon to overpower a girl of eighteen, so I know we have a very dangerous and powerful demon on our hands. We will call him Wrath. I will write tomorrow when the demon has awakened and I have the opportunity to question him. For now, he is held on the third floor in shackles and chains.

My hands were shaking so hard by the time I got to the bottom of the journal entry, I could hardly turn to the next page. Another entry, in the same handwriting as the first, detailed the Prima’s questioning of the demon. They called him Wrath because of his anger and thirst for blood. After days of questioning, they finally got him to talk. He told them that his brother, Aerden, had disappeared a long time ago.

It took him years to figure out where his brother had gone and who had taken him there. He discovered the Order’s servant in the shadow world and followed her, tracking her until he understood how she stole demons from his world and moved them to another one. He’d made sure he was the next one chosen for this particular gate, and when he had the chance, he came through, determined to kill anyone who stood in the way of him being reunited with his twin brother, Aerden.

Tears ran down my cheeks at the story that unfolded through the journal. Jackson came through the portal in demon form, looking for his brother. He’d killed six women before he was trapped in human form, his powers stripped from him.

The thought of Jackson killing all those people was hard to process. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking and my entire body was tense. The image of him as some dark shadow coming through with nothing but rage and hatred made me feel sick to my stomach.

But how could I blame him for what he’d done? If someone took my twin brother away and forced him into eternal slavery, I’d be angry too.

Only, why had they kept him alive all this time? Why not just bind him to human form and then kill him? Why was he forced to stay here in Peachville for all these years? It didn’t make sense. If the witches hated him so much and he was despised for what he’d done, why was he still alive at all?

I searched through the rest of his file, but couldn’t find an answer. The final page in the folder was a single note indicating that the stone statue that held Jackson’s demon power was still here in town.

In front of Peachville High School.

I sat on the floor of Mrs. Shadowford’s office for way longer than I intended.

I closed Jackson’s file and wiped away my tears. Outside, I could hear the tapping of rain against the roof. The clock on the wall said eight-fifty-eight. Mrs. Shadowford could be home at any minute. I carefully placed the file back where I’d found it and closed the drawer tight. I double-checked the floor to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything or left any papers flying free. Everything looked just right.

The door of the Shadowford van slammed closed outside and my heart rose up into my throat. They were home. I only had a few minutes to get out safely and get back up to my room. With my emotions going haywire, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to make myself invisible, but after a few failed starts, I finally disappeared and was able to slip out of the room and lock the door behind me.

I was only halfway up the steps when the front door opened and Ella Mae wheeled Mrs. Shadowford into the house. I froze in place and waited for them to unlock the door to her suite and go inside, then darted up the stairs and into my room.

Exhausted, I collapsed onto my bed. My search hadn’t gotten me any closer to finding Caroline’s attacker, but it had brought on a whole mess of new emotions I wasn’t prepared to deal with.

After reading the account of how Jackson came to this world, I understood better why he didn’t want me to know. It couldn’t exactly be a fond memory for him at this point. At the same time, how did he expect us to get closer and really learn to trust each other if we couldn’t be honest about where we came from? Did he think I would hate him for what he’d done?

I spent the next three hours sulking about the information in Jackson’s files. I went from being angry at him one minute for keeping it a secret from me this whole time, to feeling such sadness at his being trapped here for so long, unable to save his brother. I’d never felt like such a basket case in my entire life.

The rain wasn’t helping, either. It continued to pour like a waterfall outside my window. I sat in the windowsill, staring out at Jackson’s house and thinking about how it must be to be trapped so far away from home.

I didn’t even know how old he really was. He’d been here in our world for fifty years, but his brother was here fifty years before that, which put Jackson at least around a hundred. How could someone who’d lived so long and gone through so much really care about a sixteen-year-old girl like me? For the first time, I really started to understand the vast differences between us.

At midnight, I put on my only raincoat and a pair of faded and ripped jeans, then ventured out into the cold, rainy night. I floated down onto the ground from my window and trudged through the wet grass and mud to the barn. My mood was foul, to say the least. I had no idea what I was going to say to Jackson. Should I even tell him about the file?

I had so many questions firing through my brain, I wanted to scream and beat my head against the wall.

Inside the barn, there was no sign of Jackson. I sighed and crawled up onto the crate he’d sat on the other night. I pulled my legs up and sat criss-crossed with my head propped up on my hands. When he finally did walk through the door, he was different.

He looked exactly the same, but the way I suddenly saw him was different. I’d heard that guy call Jackson a demon and Jackson had even admitted it, but until tonight, it wasn’t this real. It was like having a suspicion you secretly hoped wasn’t true, then finding proof that it was true all along. This gorgeous guy that I’d totally fallen for wasn’t real. This wasn’t what he really looked like at all, and tonight it hit me for the first time that we’d never be the same.

Jackson was smiling, blissfully unaware of the emotional meltdown happening less than ten feet away inside my body. He shook the rain off his hair and laughed.

“Man, it’s really coming down out there,” he said. “I was afraid you weren’t going to make it.”

“I’m here,” I said. I was teetering on the edge of something very dangerous, and I struggled to keep myself in one piece. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“Did you find anything in the files? Were you able to get in?” He walked up beside the crate and leaned in to kiss my cheek.

I pulled away. Crap, I hadn’t meant to do that. It was a reflex, and it was too late to take it back. Worry creased Jackson’s forehead.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure what to say. I’m kind of freaking out.”

He ran a hand through his hair and paced a few steps. “Okay,” he said. “Do you want to talk about it? Can I help?”

Hysteria bubbled just under the surface. I could feel it pushing against my skin. I tried desperately to push it back under. To get a hold of myself and just deal with it. But finding out more about Jackson’s past had me rattled. I felt like my heart was being torn in a hundred different directions.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I really messed up.”

He stepped to me, put his hand on my knee. “Did you get caught? Did someone see you?”

“No.” I balled my hands into fists so hard my nails dug into my palms. “Nothing like that.”

“Harper, tell me what happened. Just spit it out. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”

Tears threatened to spill down my cheeks. Outside, the rain began to fall harder. “I found Mary Anne’s file,” I said. “There wasn’t anything special in there. Nothing about her family or where she’s from. Other than it being strangely empty, there was nothing to notice.”

“That doesn’t sound earth shattering,” he said.

I choked back a sob, took a deep breath and kept going. “So I looked for my own file. You know, as a comparison and just out of curiosity. Nothing new there, but then, when I started to close the drawer and leave, I saw another a name that caught my eye.”

Jackson leaned in toward me, waiting to hear if I’d found some new important information about the crow. Tears finally escaped and made a run for it, streaking down my cheeks. I lifted my hands to my face and wiped them away, but the tears kept falling.

“Whose?” he asked.

“Yours,” I said.

Jackson’s face went pale and he stepped away from me. “What do you mean? They have a file on me in that drawer?”

I nodded and sniffed.

His face twisted up and his lips grew tense. “Did you open it?”

I could hear the anger in his voice. I guessed it was probably a bad idea to piss off a guy the Order called Wrath, but the truth was too heavy to keep from him. I couldn’t hold it inside. I had to tell him.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Jackson stood there for a minute, not moving. Then, he kicked his boot hard against an old lawn mower near the door. I jumped at his burst of anger.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it was wrong to go snooping through your business like that, but it was right there in front of me and you’ve been so secretive since the day I met you. At the hospital, I found out just enough to torture me, and you wouldn’t give me anything else. What did you expect?”

“I told you about Aerden,” he said. “I opened up to you in ways I haven’t ever opened up to anyone.”

“I know,” I said. “But all you told me was that he’s your brother. You didn’t say you were twins or that you spent all those years wondering where he’d gone and trying to find a way to rescue him. You didn’t tell me you killed all those people. That’s the stuff that matters.”

“You want to know what matters?” he asked in a raised voice, his hands gesturing wildly. “Trust, that’s what matters. I thought I could trust you, Harper. I thought I could count on you to let me tell you in my own way, and in my own time. Not like this.”

The muscles in his arm tightened as his fists clenched tight.

“Look, I understand why you didn’t want me to know all those terrible things you did. I understand why that has to be a painful part of your life, but you have to understand that I am a part of your life now whether you like it or not. Our destinies, our lives are intertwined forever. Six months ago, I had nothing and no one in this world that I cared about. Then I come here and I meet you, and suddenly I have something that matters.”

I hopped down from the crate and took a few steps toward him. He held his hand up to keep me away, and I froze to the spot, my feet glued down with fear. Fear that I had just messed up the best friendship I’d ever had.

“Jackson,” I said, wringing my hands together. “I needed to know. My time in Peachville has been one secret or tragedy after the other, but you’re the one thing that’s kept me anchored. I needed to know who you really were, can’t you see that? The Order will always have their secrets. You told me that. But you and me? Why do there have to be secrets between us?”

“They were my secrets to keep or tell,” he said. “Not for you to steal away. I’ve had enough stolen from me in my life.”

“And I haven’t?” I said. A raindrop fell onto my cheek and I swiped at it. “You think things have been super easy for me all these years?”

“Sixteen years is nothing compared to the hundred years I’ve been separated from my brother and the fifty years I’ve been trapped in this human body without my soul, without my powers. My whole family is still back in the shadow world with no idea where we are or if we’re even still alive,” he said, his chest heaving with each breath. “That’s my reality, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So forgive me if I don’t want to talk about it all the time.”

“One time,” I said, jaw tightening. Lightning cracked outside, sending a bright flash of light into the barn. “That’s all it would have taken. Just once for you to tell me the truth about who you are and where you came from.”

“Even once is hard enough,” he said. “It’s like having old wounds ripped open again.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Jackson,” I said. “I just wanted to know the truth.”

“And now you do,” he said. “You know all the horrible things I’ve done. All the people I hurt. And I’d do it all over again if it could give me any chance of getting my brother back.”

“Do you think I’m going to judge you for that?” I asked. I felt the storm inside of me shift and strengthen. Another raindrop fell onto my forehead and another on my arm. “Is that the kind of person you think I am? Don’t you think if I was that kind of girl, I would have just left you there in that hospital to die? Do you think I still would have risked everything to keep you safe?”

As my voice grew louder, so did the storm. Drops began to fall from the ceiling, and I stepped aside, thinking I must be standing under a hole in the roof. But when I moved, the rain moved with me. Cool drops fell onto my face and the top of my head, dripping down to the ends of my hair.

“I’m so sick and tired of being pulled in a hundred different directions,” I said. “I just want to know that one thing in this town is true and real. If you’re going to turn your back on me for reading that file, then maybe what we have isn’t as real as I thought it was.”

“And what exactly do you think we have?” He glared at me, his jaw tight. I saw a raindrop slide down his cheek. “Do you think we have some kind of future together, Harper? You know as well as I do that as soon as the Order decides they want to take you through the initiation, everything changes for us. If my brother was your slave so that you could draw power from him and be a puppet for these witches, these slave merchants, I couldn’t bare to even look at you anymore.”

“So don’t let that happen,” I said. My tears were flowing again, cold against my flustered face. The rain was falling so hard around us now, we might as well have been outside. “Help me stop it. I can’t fight them all by myself.”

“You’re already half-way theirs,” he shouted through the rain.

“For someone called Wrath, you’re a coward,” I said, knowing I was going too far, but unable to stop the words from tumbling out of me. “What happened to you? When you came through that portal, you were brave and fierce. You were ready to fight for what you wanted. Aren’t those things still worth fighting for?”

Thunder sounded outside the door so loud, I could feel the vibrations in my feet.

Jackson turned and gave me a cold stare. “If you don’t know the answer to that question, then you don’t know me at all.”

With that, he turned and left the barn. I sat down in the rain and let the sorrow consume me. In the back of my mind, I knew there was no hole in the ceiling large enough to let this much rain through, but I didn’t understand then what it meant. Instead, I let the rain wash over me until I couldn’t cry another tear.