The Demon's Game (29 page)

I pulled him against me and wrapped my arms around
him. “Let’s get you home and clean.” Ron hated being dirty, and if he were in
his right mind, he would have been freaking out about the blood. When I flashed
us home, I was both surprised and relieved that we were in the bathroom.
Slowly, I let him go, turned to the tub, and started the water. I considered
giving him a shower, but as he stood there with no awareness, I knew it was too
dangerous. He was dripping blood all over the gray micro-fiber bathmat.

I pulled his clothes off and he made it more
difficult by not standing still. He clutched something small in his hand, but I
couldn’t find out what it was without prying his hand open. Finally, I detached
the shower head, picked him up, and sat him in the bathtub. He shivered and let
me move him however I needed to clean him, but he didn’t look at me or speak. I
tilted his head back and ran the shower spray over his hair. Unfortunately, he
opened his mouth wide as the blood started to run down his face. I pushed his
mouth closed and wiped my hand over his face to clear the blood off. He bit my
wrist, not hard enough to tear my skin but hard enough to startle me. He
released my flesh and panted harshly.

“Ron, stop it.”

Ignoring me, he opened his mouth wide again. I was
careful to keep the blood and water from running over his face. I tried to send
my calming thoughts to him, but I might as well have been talking to a wall.
Actually, it was very much like that.

“What happened to you? What did you do?” I realized
as I was running my fingers through his wet hair that he was staring at me,
still panting. “Why are you breathing like that? Are you hurt?”

He slowly held up his clinched fist and looked at it
as if it were the first time he ever saw it. I tried to gently open his fist,
but he wouldn’t reveal what he held. Instead, he stared vacantly at me for the
rest of his bath. To my relief, he reached for me to pull him out of the tub.
Unfortunately, he fell against me and when I pushed him back, he immediately
leaned forward and bit me on my collar bone.

“Hey! Stop that!”

Startled, I pushed him back harder until he fell.
Since he made absolutely no move to steady himself, he hit the wall hard and
slid down, then started to cry. Terrified I hurt him, I searched his head for
bumps. He wasn’t injured, but he still cried. I grabbed a towel out of the
cabinet and dried him off. If he were injured, my energy would heal him; no
mental block could stop my magic from fixing his wounds.

As reality slowly came back to Ron, he tried to reach
around me for the bathtub. I picked him up, brought him into the bedroom, and
laid him on my bed. He whimpered, but I didn’t have a clue why.

“You have to talk to me.” I remembered as I said it
that Ron spent the first four years of his life without saying a word aloud. “I
love you, Ron. I need you to be okay.” I crawled into bed, covered us both with
the covers, and held him close. He was still shaking when it dawned on me ten
minutes later that I was slow.
“I’m an idiot,”
I told him. He wasn’t
trying to drink the damn blood in the bathtub; he was trying to drink the
water. He bit me twice, but both times were when my skin was wet. He was dehydrated.

I got out of bed and started for the door, but he let
out a panicked sound like a choked scream. I went back and took his face in my
hands. “It’s okay, I’m just getting you some water. I’ll be right back.” He
said nothing in response so I moved to leave again. This time there was no
scream or grunt; instead, the lamp beside my bed exploded into bits of plastic
and glass.

“Don’t go,” he said quietly.

I picked him up, brought him to the kitchen, and set
him in a chair before getting a bottle of water out of the fridge. I loosened
the cap and handed it to him, but he just stared at it until I took the cap of
and put it to his lips. He drank greedily then and I let him drink two more
bottles before taking him back to the room. Then I covered us back up and held
him close. We fell asleep to the sound of the rain on the window.

*          *          *

My dreams were full of blood and cold and darkness.
The cold was lonely and depressing. I felt lost and nothing was familiar. There
were people I recognized, but it was like I couldn’t place them. There were two
locations in my dream and one was the school. I woke from Ron’s fear.

He was shaking again, but it was with tears instead
of cold. I pulled him closer. “You’re alright now.”

“I’m not alright. I don’t know what happened last
night.”

“You snuck out while I was in the shower. You left me
a letter telling me not to follow you.”

He smacked me on the chest, trying to push himself
away from me. I didn’t let him. “And you listened to me?! You’re an idiot!
There is no reason ever for me to tell you not to follow me! I don’t remember
writing a letter.” The fight left him and he slumped against me. “I don’t know
what happened last night.”

“I found you this morning at the school, covered in
blood.”

“It was the darkness. That’s why I can’t get warm.
It’s doing it again, Hail. It’s too strong for us.”

“It just took us by surprise. This will never happen
again. We’ll be safe.”

“This is the second time, and we couldn’t stop it.
It’s playing with us; it could take over at any time.”

“We should tell Dad.”

He sat up. “We can’t tell Dad. He’ll try to take the
balance into himself. Dad and Mordon aren’t like us, Hail; they’re still
learning what they can do together. Mom will try to make Vretial take it
himself, and he can’t control it.”

“We don’t have a lot of choices. We either learn how
to control it or we ask Mom and Dad for help.” I reached down and took his
hand. He opened his still-clinched fist to reveal a necklace. It was a cat
pendant on a gold chain with a silver back and black jewels on the front. “Do
you know who it belongs to?” I asked. He shook his head.

There was a knocking on our door. “Time to get ready
for school,” Mordon said through the door. We looked at each other and agreed
without words that we would hide this from Mordon, because we couldn’t let
Mordon believe we were a threat to Dad.

We were very good at acting normal for breakfast and
luckily, Mordon didn’t rat us out. He could smell that we were hiding
something, but couldn’t have known what. Finally, we piled into the Charger
with Xul and waited in silence for Drake to join us. It was an awkward silence
so I took Ron’s hand.

The morning was uneventful and Ron gave me cookies
for lunch. Drake, Taper, Tatum, Luca, and Logan joined us as I had expected.
Taper obviously had something to report by the way his eyes kept darting to
Drake, but we weren’t going to drive our friend off. Ron gave each of them a
cookie and then gave me the tray.

“I’m gonna get a milk,” Drake said before he got up
and left.

“Can you help him feel better?” Ron asked.

Luca nodded and opened his mouth to say something.

“I found something,” Taper interrupted. “I was
following one of the cops and he was kidnapped. I followed them to the
warehouse.”

“What warehouse?” I asked.

He opened his mouth, but his eyes darted to Ron and
he snapped his mouth shut. He looked down. “You know…
the
warehouse.”

“What did you see at this warehouse?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he answered too quickly.

“He’s afraid of me. He must have seen me at the warehouse
last night and is afraid of ratting me out,”
Ron said.
“Whatever the
darkness made me do, it obviously wasn’t good. We have to know, so I’m going to
leave the room. Get it out of him. Beat it out of him if you have to. Make him
more afraid of you than me.”
He stood. “I’m going early to history. I want
to talk to Mrs. Sharp about a paper we have to do.”

He left quickly and Taper looked even more awkward.
His sister was obviously clueless by the confused frown on her face. “Taper,
what did you see at the warehouse?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I growled. “Nobody will hurt you for telling me. If
you know where the missing people are, you need to tell me.”

“Answer his questions,” Drake said, startling me. He
returned a lot quieter than he had left and sat in Ron’s vacant seat.

“Demons… they kidnapped the cop and brought him to a
warehouse,” Taper said suddenly with rushed words as if he couldn’t keep them
in. “There are a bunch of demons hiding out there. Ron was there, too. He spoke
with a demon woman, real quiet and close like they knew each other. Ron gave
the demons something they were happy about. I couldn’t see or hear enough to
know what.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tatum asked her brother.

“That doesn’t matter right now,” I said. “We need to
meet up tonight and find this place. We need to save everyone, including the
cop.” Most likely, the “demon woman” Taper spoke of was Divina. If that were
the case, she would already know about Ron’s condition. Still, it hadn’t
escaped my notice that it was taking her too long. Mom should have been home by
now.

“Absolutely not! Ron is going to kill me for telling
you.”

“Listen, whatever you saw Ron do, he is not a bad
guy. My brother is good and more than that, he would never betray me.”

“There’s something wrong here. The sub from the
first day Mr. Cardigan went missing is here. I don’t like her, Hail. Her magic
makes my skin crawl.”

“Is it the darkness?”

“I don’t know. I want to come back.”

“Taper told me what he saw. Come back now.”
I
didn’t hear back from him and every second that passed was like a fist
squeezing my heart tighter. Finally, Ron entered the cafeteria, spotted me
instantly, and sighed with relief.

“Whatever the demons are doing, they keep gaining
ground,” I said to our friends. “With every minute we waste, they seem to be
getting deeper and deeper into the school. If they’re confident enough to
kidnap a cop, we have to stop them now. Where is the warehouse?”

“Right outside town.”

“Show me,” I said as Ron sat.

“At four-thirty?” Taper asked.

“Now,” my brother demanded. “They could be killing
their prisoners as we speak. I’m done wasting time. We’re all skipping and
you’ll show us where the warehouse is.”

“I can go too?” Drake asked excitedly.

“You need to recover.”

“I’m fine! I’m not sick anymore, but everyone keeps
treating me like I am! Everyone acts like I’m about to die!” He gave me a
desperate look as if pleading for me to understand. “I’m not weak,” he said.

I nodded.
“He needs to come with us. Even if we
have to spend the entire time protecting him, I think he needs to be a part of
this.”

“If you think so, we’ll let him come with us,”
Ron said to me. “Alright, you can come, but you have to be careful and if you
feel sick, you need to tell us. Ron put his hand on Drake’s shoulder and to
anyone else it would have looked like a simple friendly gesture. I knew that he
was actually healing Drake in tiny doses at a time.

“How do we get there? We don’t have a car,” Luca
asked.

“We could fly,” Tater suggested. Everyone, including
her brother, looked at her.

“How?” Ron asked.

“I don’t know. Or we could steal a car.”

“Oh my god, woman, you’re nuts,” Logan said.

Taper glared at the fae. “Don’t talk to my sister
like that! Only I’m allowed to call her nuts!”

Taper was ready to throw a punch at Logan and it was
obvious that Logan would retaliate. I moved between them and Ron, just in case.
It didn’t matter to me if they fought as long as they didn’t accidentally hurt
my brother.

“Hey, I have a car,” Ron said, instantly defusing the
tension with confusion. Part of that confusion was mine.

“Since when?” I asked. “We can’t hotwire the
Charger.”

“Why would we do that? Hotwiring would be stupid when
we have a key.” My brother held up a fob-key.

“How did you get that?”

“
Zeb
gave it to me.”

“Mr. Carter, the substitute teacher, gave that to
you?” Luca asked with shock.

Ron shrugged. “He’s not really a teacher; he’s here
as our bodyguard. And he didn’t really give it to me so much as he put it in
his pocket. But he belongs to Dad, so it’s okay. Dad will understand when we
save the others.”

“Why don’t we call your dad to save them? That way we
won’t get in trouble,” Logan suggested.

“My dad has enough work to do. He’s the best doctor
at the hospital and he saves people during his free time. We should be able to
do this without making more work for him. Now, we’ll wait for the bell to ring
and---” He was cut off by the sound of the bell.

Sneaking out of school was way too easy. Nobody cared
that we went to the parking lot instead of the classrooms. Luca got in the
driver’s seat and adjusted the seat, steering wheel, and mirrors. Taper sat in
the passenger seat to tell him where to go. Ron sat in my lap in the back seat
with Drake squished beside us, Tatum beside him, and Logan beside her. Once
Luca pulled out onto the street, everyone fell silent in shock that we were
actually getting away with this.

Ron crossed his arms with a smirk and leaned back
against me. My brother would be unstoppable now and talking him out of anything
would be impossible.

The drive was long as Luca was the slowest, most
cautious driver I ever met. Of course, the only people I ever saw driving was
the demon, our goddess mother, and our father in his Jaguar. On the way, Taper
described several of the demons he saw to Logan. Logan drew them in his
notebook and held them up for Taper to compare without letting the rest of us
see them. Once they were satisfied with the likeness, the artist closed his
sketchbook in his lap.