Rival Demons (19 page)

I don't know how I found the ability to walk,
but I knew I had to get out of there.

I broke away from the wall and took it one
painful step at a time. By the time Lea's voice sounded in the
room, I was halfway down the hall, finally finding the strength to
run.

I couldn't stay.

Whatever safety the Underground had provided was
gone now. There was nothing left for me here. No knowledge to gain,
no protection from hurt.

I burst through the door to the suite and ran
straight to my room. I picked up the backpack Essex had given me
and began stuffing it with clothes and anything I could think of
that I might need. Surprisingly, there were no tears, just the
knowledge that I had to go.

Mary Anne stepped through the doorway to my
room.

"What happened?" she asked. "What are you
doing?"

"I'm leaving," I said, testing the words on my
tongue. I disappeared into the bathroom to collect my toothbrush
and other toiletries that would fit into my bag.

Mary Anne followed me. "Leaving? You mean the
Underground? No, you can't leave. Where will you go?"

"I don't know yet," I said, storming back into
the bedroom. I didn't even want to stand still in any one place for
more than a few seconds, scared that if I stopped moving, I would
have to face what had just happened.

"Is it really that bad?" she asked, her face
twisted with worry.

"It's worse," I said. "He's going to marry
her."

Mary Anne gasped, her hand flying to her mouth.
"That can't be true."

"I heard it with my own ears," I said, a slight
tremble in my voice that only made me angry. "He's apparently been
promised to her since they were born."

I shoved the last of my things into the backpack
and zipped it up, having to squish it down to get it to close.

"You would think he might have mentioned that at
some point before he told me he loved me," I said. "I love you, but
oh by the way, here's yet another reason we can never be
together."

I picked up one of my notebooks and tore a page
from the back, then carried my backpack out to the living room and
set it on the table.

"I don't think you should go," Mary Anne said.
"You're not thinking clearly. It's not safe out there."

I thought of the hunter who was waiting for me.
She was absolutely right, I was not going to be safe out there. But
I wasn't safe in here either. At least out there, I knew who my
enemies were.

I sat down at the table and did my best to
steady my hand as I wrote. I didn't get any farther than his name
before I paused and felt the hot tears bubbling toward the surface.
What could I possibly say to him in a note that would let him feel
even a tenth of what I was feeling inside?

"I'll come with you," Mary Anne said. "Just give
me some time to get my things together.

I grabbed her arm before she had a chance to
walk away.

"No way," I said. "You can't come. You can't
even cast right now, and who knows how long before your injuries
totally heal. Plus, you can't leave Essex."

"Maybe he could come with us," she said. "We'll
stop by the marketplace before we go. He had to head back to the
shop to help his mom with something."

I shook my head. "You know as well as I do that
you can't come with me. It's way too dangerous."

Mary Anne slumped into the chair beside me,
tears in her eyes. "I don't want you to go either."

"I can't stay," I said.

My hand trembled as I turned back to the blank
page. I wanted to say that I hated him for what he'd done to me. I
wanted to say that I never wanted to see him again. But in my heart
neither of those things were true. The truth was that I loved him
and he had broken my heart with his lies.

So in the end, that's all I wrote.

I'd heard Lea once mention that she kept a spare
crystal to Jackson's room in her drawer. Thinking of it now made me
feel disgusted and sad, but I walked straight to the drawer of her
desk and reached in for the small stone that opened his room.

I wanted him to come back from his date with Lea
and find my note on his bed.

And I needed to hurry. He'd seen me there
despite the crowd of demons in the room. I knew he wouldn't be able
to get away from the party, but as soon as he had a chance, he
would probably come looking for me. He'd probably have some
explanation as to why he hadn't told me yet, but nothing he could
say could change the truth of it.

I wanted to be gone by the time he came looking
for me.

I hugged Mary Anne and promised her that I would
find a way to contact her when I got settled somewhere. To be
honest, I had no idea how I would get word to her or where I would
go, but if I managed to survive the hunter at the gate, I knew I
would find my way somehow.

The hallway was deserted when I left the suite,
and I ignored the fact that a shiver of disappointment jabbed
through me. So what if he hadn't rushed away from Lea's side to
come find me? This was how it was now, and I needed to find a way
to understand it.

I walked to the door of his small apartment and
pressed the stone into the symbol on the wall. The door clicked
open.

I'd never been inside his room before. As far as
I knew, he didn't spend a lot of time here except to sleep at
night. I expected to see a smaller, simpler version of our own
rooms with maybe a few of his clothes strewn about or something. I
flipped on the light and froze.

What I never expected in a million years was to
come face to face with myself.

Covering every inch of every wall in the entire
one-room apartment were drawings of me. Confused, I let my bag fall
to the floor. I stepped to the nearest wall and put my hand on one
of the pages. The scene was gruesome, yet beautiful. He'd put so
much time and detail into my face, I might as well have been
looking in a mirror.

I pulled several from the wall, only to realize
that underneath were more of the same. He'd drawn the scene from
every possible angle, from every distance. Some in pencil, but most
in horrifying color.

Each drawing was some version of the same story.
Me laying in a sea of white snow, bright red blood splattered in
random patterns against the white. My blonde hair was sprawled out
against the snow, my eyes closed as if I might just be sleeping.
The white strip of the ritual dress clung to my wrist, but there
was fresh blood staining it now.

Slowly, I walked around the apartment, pulling
several of the drawings from the wall to study them. In one, he'd
drawn a close-up of my hand, my fist closed around something I
couldn't quite make out. In another, he'd pulled back from the
scene as if he were hovering above me. There was so much blood,
much of it seeming to pour from a wound in my back as I lay against
the pure white snow.

Overwhelmed, I fell to the floor, spreading the
drawings out before me in a circle, trying to make sense of the
scene.

He must have seen this over and over in his
visions to have recreated it each time in such excruciating detail.
In some, I could almost count the number of eyelashes on my eyes.
What had he been looking for? Some clue he could use to protect me
from this fate?

Hadn't he learned anything in all the many years
of his immortal life?

Nothing he drew could be changed or
prevented.

My eyes filled with tears, blurring the pictures
before me into one unavoidable mass.

When the door to the apartment swung open a few
minutes later, I looked up, a single tear escaping down my cheek.
Jackson stood in the doorway and as our eyes met, all the walls
we'd been holding up since we'd come here crumbled swiftly to the
ground.

"Why didn't you tell me?" My voice cracked with
tears. I motioned to all of the hundreds of drawings spread around
the room.

Jackson moved to me, the door closing behind
him. He fell to the floor in front of me, the papers crackling
beneath the weight of his knees. "I wanted to find a way to make it
change," he said. "I won't let this be your end."

I shook my head. "You know better."

He gripped several papers up and crumbled them
into a ball. "No," he said, the green of his eyes stormy and dark
and wet. "I can change it. I just have to find the secret, the weak
spot. There's no way it ends like this. I can keep you safe here
until I find a way."

I placed my hand on his knee, touching him for
the first time in so long I'd almost forgotten his warmth. "There's
no escaping these things once you've seen them," I said. "And you
know it just as well as I do. Trying to protect me from it is only
going to pull us further apart. And I never wanted to feel this
apart from you."

He looked away, not meeting my eyes.

"I don't know what's been going on with you
since we got to the shadow world," I said, all the things I'd been
holding back rushing to the surface. "I don't understand what's
going on with you and Lea, but I thought you knew by now that
keeping secrets from people you care about only leads to sorrow and
loneliness. Why can't you just be honest with me?"

He looked down. "So you really were there
tonight?"

I nodded. "I had to know."

He threw the balled up papers across the room.
"I never wanted you to know about that," he said.

I laughed, then felt the sting of tears in my
nose. "Didn't you know I would eventually find out? What was your
plan? To see if I would help you free Aerden, then let me just
watch all of you disappear back through the portal, never to be
seen again? Were you just going to marry her and take your place by
her side on the throne and never tell me?"

Jackson studied my face, his eyebrows drawn
together. "How could you say that?" he asked. "How could you even
think that?"

"What am I supposed to think, Jackson? You've
done nothing but lock me out of your life for the past how many
weeks?" I said, standing. I walked toward the back of the
apartment. "You lied to me."

"I didn't lie," he said. He stood and moved a
few steps behind me. "I just didn't tell you everything."

"You did lie," I said, turning to face him.
"I've asked you before if there was more to your relationship with
Lea than just friendship and you said no."

"That's the truth," he said.

"The truth?" I shook my head, furious. "Then how
do you explain what I just saw back there? How do you explain the
fact that everyone down here believes you to be her future
king?"

Jackson ran a shaky hand through his hair and
turned around, pacing. "Yes, when I was born, I was promised to
Lea," he said. He paused as if trying to figure out what he wanted
to say. "My father is the king's most trusted adviser. He sits at
the head of the king's council, and apart from the king himself,
he's the most powerful man in the Northern Kingdom. My brother and
I were born before the king and his mate had any children. Twins
are extremely rare among my people, so when the king's daughter was
born, as a sign of loyalty, my father offered to give one of his
twins as husband to the princess."

"Why you?" I asked, my heart beating so hard in
my chest.

"Because technically I was first-born," he said.
"I had absolutely no choice in the matter. I was promised to her
before I even understood what that meant."

I sat down on the edge of his bed, taking it all
in. "You never tried to get out of it?"

"I never had a reason to try," he said. "I
understood it as my duty to the kingdom, and I didn't question it.
But when Aerden disappeared, I expected my father and the king to
go after him. To do something about it."

"But they didn't," I said.

He shook his head. "No, my parents mourned his
loss, but they accepted it. The kingdom is so full of fear when it
comes to the Order of Shadows. They would rather try to outlive the
Order and accept the sacrifices than fight them directly. The king
believes that if we wait another few hundred years, the Order will
die out on its own without violence."

I frowned. "But demons go missing nearly every
day, don't they even care about what's happening over in my
world?"

Jackson's jaw tensed and he continued to pace.
"A small price to pay in the long run, they say. The king believes
many more demons will lose their lives if we fight," he said. "I
couldn't just sit back and let my brother's memory fade away. I
didn't know exactly what they were doing to Aerden over there, but
I knew it was some form of torture. I couldn't live like that."

He sat down next to me, so close our legs almost
touched. I felt his closeness like an ache in the pit of my
stomach. I had no idea if I was losing him forever or finally
understanding him for the first time.

"Lea, she tried to talk me out of it at first,"
he said. "She cared for Aerden, but she did everything she could to
convince me that it would be better for me to wait until we became
rulers. She said that when we took over the kingdom, we could build
our own army."

"She was in love with you, wasn't she?" My voice
trembled.

Jackson paused. "She's always loved me," he
said. "She was terrified that if I went after Aerden, she would
lose me forever. So when I finally did cross over, she followed me.
Once she got over there and saw what was happening to the shadow
demons, she was ready to join me and fight back, but by then
anything there was between us was dead."

Silence filled the room as I let his words wash
over me.

I stared up at the drawings of my death and
wondered where that left us. He brought me here to protect me, but
had also stepped right back into his role as Lea's future king. Had
he traded his own future for my safety?