Forbidden Craving

by Gena Showalter

  I fell on the food like a starving animal. A candy bar and a small bag of peanuts had been all I’d eaten over the past two days. Getting yelled at by multiple gas station attendants after Adrian broke their mirrors hadn’t made me want to browse for more substantial fare. After I finished, I quickly put on new clothes, not wanting Adrian to come out while I was half-naked. Things were strange enough between us already.

  My necklace snagged on my sweater as I yanked it over my head, reminding me there was one mirror Adrian hadn’t smashed yet. Since the shower was still running, I opened the locket, a pang hitting me when I saw my sister’s picture on one side and a small mirror on the other.

  This way, we’ll always be together, Jasmine had said when she’d given it to me the night before I left for college. She’d cried a little then, and I never admitted it, but when I was alone in my room that night, I did, too. Sure, we fought like mad sometimes, but no one was closer to me than Jasmine. With everyone else, I had to keep faking so they’d believe everything was fine. For my parents, it was so they wouldn’t worry about me. For my psychologist, it was to avoid more tests or inpatient stays. For my friends and the occasional boyfriend, it was so I wouldn’t have to explain things they probably didn’t want to understand. With Jaz, I could be myself because whoever that was, she was okay with it.

  “Nuts, normal, doesn’t matter,” she’d said years ago when I was upset after my psychologist told me I might never be cured. “You’re my sister, Ives, so no matter what, we’re stuck with each other.”

  As I stared at her picture next to my own reflection, her loss hit me all over again. It took everything I had to hold the tears back. After several hard blinks, her image became less blurry. As I looked at her, I silently made her a promise. No matter what, I will find you. She’d never given up on me. I sure as hell wouldn’t give up on her.

  Vow made, I could look at her picture without tearing up again. We didn’t resemble each other, of course. Jasmine was a blue-eyed blonde like my adoptive parents, and I had hazel eyes and brown hair. My greenish-brown eyes, light skin tone and other markers had caused my pediatrician to speculate that one of my parents had been Caucasian. We guessed the other was Hispanic because that was the nationality of the immigrants who’d been unable to flee the tractor-trailer accident, but who knew?

  Thinking about my biological parents made Zach’s words steal through my mind, though I’d done my best to forget them. Your real mother didn’t leave you because she was running from the police...she did it to save you, just as your dreams revealed...

  “Good, you’re up.”

  Adrian’s curt voice made me jump. I snapped the locket shut, glad my back was to him so he couldn’t see what I tucked under my sweater. He was not smashing the last gift my sister gave to me, mirror phobia or not. With the locket safely hidden, I turned around.

  “Thanks for...breakfast.”

  I couldn’t help my pause. Some things should come with a warning label, and seeing Adrian stalk through the room wearing only a towel was definitely one of them. I hadn’t known ab definition like that existed without airbrushing, and the network of muscles on his arms, back and chest rippled as though dancing to a song that reverberated beneath his flesh.

  Michelangelo had it wrong, I thought, tearing my gaze away. With that body, Adrian was the one who needed a marble statue made in his image. Good thing he was so fixated on shoving his things into his duffel bag, he didn’t notice my admiration.

  “We’re leaving in ten minutes,” he stated, still in that brusque tone.

  After he’d stormed out last night, I told myself it didn’t matter if Adrian was still attracted to me. I needed to rescue my sister, not start something with a guy who’d warned me he wasn’t trustworthy, let alone all the other reasons why Adrian was off-limits. No matter the dazzling packaging, he was six feet six inches of undetermined supernatural bad news, so his coldness now suited my purposes.

  His barked orders, however, didn’t. We needed to get a few things straight before we went any further.

  “Just because you’re pissed about our little road trip doesn’t mean you get to keep taking it out on me,” I said. “For whatever reason, you chose to come, and we don’t need to be friends, but you do need to quit acting like my boss. So we’re not leaving in ten minutes, Adrian. We’re leaving in twenty because I’m taking a shower, too.”

  He swung around, arms crossing over that muscled chest in obvious annoyance. I continued on as if I didn’t notice.

  “It’s not my fault if you’ve never had a serious girlfriend, but believe me when I tell you that it’s impossible for a girl to get ready in less than twenty minutes.”

  “Fine,” he said, his tone only slightly less rude.

  “You may want to wait until I’m in the bathroom to get dressed, too,” I said airily. “If you drop that towel now, I’ll think it’s your way of telling me you still want that date.”

  I didn’t wait for his response before disappearing into the bathroom. All jokes aside, if he did drop that towel, I might forget all the many reasons why I should stay away from him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER—OKAY, twenty-five, but close enough—we climbed into his car. I wasn’t much for old muscle cars, but I had to admit that his Challenger was in great shape. Still, I’d kill for a satellite radio. This only had AM and FM.

  “You don’t need to drive the whole way. We can take turns,” I offered.

  “No,” he replied at once.

  “So you’re one of those,” I muttered.

  His brow went up. “One of what?”

  “Guys who think a girl can’t handle their precious metal babies,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  At that, he laughed. “I rebuilt this car from the axle up, so yeah, you can call it my baby. But no one, male or female, drives it except me.”

  “So you’re an equal-opportunity control freak?” I replied without missing a beat.

  “You have no idea,” he said, voice lowering while his blue eyes slid over me in a phantom caress.

  My breath caught. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized he’d avoided looking at me since he stormed out last night. Now, his gaze moved over me as if he already knew which parts to touch first and which parts to leave until I was breathless and begging. My heart began to beat faster. How could he affect me so much when we barely knew each other?

  Then, like a switch had been flipped, he looked away as though the sight of me had burned his eyes. His whole demeanor changed, too, as if he were angry for revealing something that was supposed to remain hidden.

  “When should we arrive in Oregon?” I asked, needing something, anything, to break up the tense moment.

  He revved up the car and glanced at the clock. “Three a.m., if we don’t get caught in traffic.”

  Nineteen hours until I crossed into one of the places that countless doctors had sworn were merely figments of my imbalanced mind. Once again, I had so many questions, I hardly knew where to begin.

  “Have you been to this particular ‘realm door’ before?”

  “Yes.”

  One tightly spoken word that warned me to drop the subject, if I didn’t want another round of the silent treatment. I stifled a frustrated sigh. I needed more information, and he was moodier than a tween girl with her first PMS attack.

  “How did you know minions were trying to kidnap me the other night?” There. Total change of subject, and something I’d been wondering about, anyway.

  Adrian didn’t look at me as he pulled out onto the road. “Zach told me. He’s the one who sent me to retrieve you.”

  I’d have to drag everything out of him, wouldn’t I? “Okay, how did Zach know?”

  He grunted. “Archons get information about future events. Every so often, they interfere to change the outcome.�
��

  “Every so often?” I repeated with angry disbelief, thinking of Jasmine’s kidnapping and my parents’ deaths. “Why not every time? Or do Archons have days where they’re just not in the mood to save people from harm and death?”

  Nothing changed in his expression, but his tone hardened with what I thought might be remembered pain. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I don’t have an answer, and when I asked Zach the same thing, all he said was something about ‘orders.’”

  “That’s such bullshit,” I muttered.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Adrian said dryly.

  Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Not strained silence like before, but silent, shared reflection while both of us thought of things that we wished had turned out different.

  “So that’s what you do?” I finally said. “Rescue people for Zach after he tells you that minions are after them?”

  He shrugged. “Gives me a chance to piss off demons.”

  “Most people would avoid doing that,” I pointed out, suppressing a shudder. If not for Jasmine, you wouldn’t catch me near a demon, minion, realm or anything freakily supernatural. Why did Adrian run toward the danger instead?

  “You and I aren’t most people, Ivy,” he said softly. “Because of what we see, we don’t get to pretend the world is a beautiful place where monsters don’t exist.”

  I was the one who looked away that time, unable to handle the truth of his statement or the intensity in his stare. Until a few days ago, I had been doing that. Even as a child, as soon as I’d realized no one else saw the things I did, I’d wanted it to stop. I hated feeling like something was wrong with me, so after I’d jumped through almost a decade of medical hoops looking for a cure, I started pretending that I’d found one.

  I told my parents, the doctors and even eventually Jasmine that I no longer saw the strange, dark worlds hanging like nightmares over regular places. I certainly never told Delia or my other friends about them. I said the pills I took were for a hormonal imbalance, and all my doctor appointments were for that, too.

  Lies, lies, lies, all because I wanted to pretend I was normal. According to the gorgeous stranger across from me, I wasn’t then and never would be.

  “What happened with you?” I asked, my voice low as if we were sharing secrets. “I hid from what I saw, but you started hunting down the things everyone told me couldn’t exist. You must’ve had proof that they were real, so what was it?”

  He closed off so fast I was surprised I didn’t hear a sonic boom. I shut my eyes, letting out a sigh as I tried to settle myself more comfortably into my seat. Looked like the question-and-answer segment of our time was over.

  Eventually, as afternoon slid into evening during the long drive, the late hour and boredom lulled me into drifting off.

  A thunderous boom woke the black-haired woman. Her baby began to wail at the multiple crashing noises. She left the baby in the backseat, walking through the brush that hid her car.

  On the nearby highway, a tractor-trailer was on its side, multiple cars piled up around it. Each passing second brought a new screech of tires and, more faintly, screams. Then the back of the trailer opened, and people stumbled out, some disappearing into the tall grass that lined the road, others limping a few feet before collapsing onto the road.

  The black-haired woman hurried back to her car, but as she began to strap her baby in the car seat, she paused. Then she turned around and stared. Sunlight broke through the clouds, streaming down to the side of the road about fifty yards from the accident. The woman began to shake.

  “No. No, I can’t leave her,” she whispered.

  The light grew brighter, and another sunbeam appeared, illuminating the same spot. Tears streamed down her face, but after a minute, she picked up her child and walked toward it.

  “Promise me she’ll be safe,” she choked out, setting the baby in the grass. Then she kissed the child, whispering, “Mommy loves you. Always,” before running to her car and driving away—

  “What is that?”

  Adrian’s voice startled me. For a second, I was disoriented, the dream clinging to me as it always did. Yes, I was in a car, but I wasn’t the unknown woman driving away from her baby. That wasn’t real. The glare Adrian leveled at my chest was, though.

  “Is that a mirror?” He sounded horrified.

  I looked down. My locket was open, the mirrored side facing me. At some point while I was sleeping, I must’ve opened it. Adrian’s hand shot out, but this time, I was too fast for him.

  “Don’t you dare,” I snapped, holding it out of his reach. “It’s the only picture I have of my sister after you left everything I own back at that hotel in Bennington!”

  He lunged again, actually letting go of the steering wheel to reach the side of the car where I held it. With a sharp yank, he wrested the locket from my hands. I tried to snatch it back, but he shoved me into my seat with one hand, finally grabbing the steering wheel with the other.

  “Are you crazy?” I shrieked. “You could’ve gotten us killed!” If this hadn’t been a lonely stretch of desert road, our careening into the next lane might’ve had permanent consequences.

  “You’re going to get yourself killed,” was his chilling response. Then, still pinning me to my chair with that single hand, he held my locket up.

  I gasped. Something dark poked out of the small mirror, like a snake made of blackest smoke. It disappeared when Adrian smashed the mirror against the steering wheel, but an eerie wind whistled through the car, ruffling my hair and stinging my nostrils with its acrid scent.

  Adrian muttered a word in that unknown language, and I didn’t need a translator to tell me it was a curse.

  “What was that?” My voice was hoarse.

  He threw me a pitying glance, which frightened me even more. If he wasn’t angry, we must really be screwed.

  His next words proved that. “Brace yourself, Ivy. You’re about to meet a demon.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I DIDN’T CONSIDER myself religious. My parents used to take Jasmine and me to church on Christmas, but it was more a social event than a pious one. Hearing we were about to be attacked by a demon, however, made me pray like I’d never done before. I just wished I knew if anyone was listening.

  Adrian wasn’t praying. He was cursing up a storm, if I correctly translated the spate of words coming from his mouth. He’d also lost that pitying expression, because the looks he shot me now were distinctly grim. It wasn’t the right time, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking the obvious.

  “How did it find us?”

  Adrian stomped on the accelerator, and the muscle car shot forward like it had rockets in the engine.

  “Through the mirror,” he said shortly. “For stronger demons, mirrors act as portals, and you’ve been number one on their Most Wanted list since you escaped them in Bennington.”

  I gaped at him. “Maybe you should have told me that?”

  “You think I smash every mirror near you because I don’t want you to get conceited?” Then his tone softened. “You’re barely holding it together with what you do know, Ivy. I’m not about to tell you what you can’t handle yet.”

  Anger flared, which felt better than the fear that made my blood seem like it had been replaced by ice water.

  “No, I wasn’t ready to know that demons used mirrors as portals. I also wasn’t ready to know demons existed, or had kidnapped my sister, or that my parents were dead, or any of the horrible things I’ve dealt with in the past two weeks. But that didn’t stop them from happening, so quit protecting me from the truth, Adrian! It doesn’t help a damn bit!”

  Adrian glanced at me, a gauntlet of emotions flitting across his features.

  “You’re right. If we survive, I’ll apologize.”

  My laught
er was bleak. “You? Say you’re sorry? Now I really want to live.”

  To my surprise, he laughed as well, though it was colored with dark expectancy.

  “Hold that thought. You’ll need it.”

  Before I could respond, something filled the road in front of us. I would’ve said it was storm clouds, except clouds don’t sweep along the ground like a heavy fog rolling in.

  “Shut your vents,” Adrian said, flipping the tiny levers on his side. I did the same, more apprehension filling me as he turned the entire air-conditioning system off. No, those weren’t low-hanging clouds. They were something far more ominous.

  “Turn around,” I said, my voice suddenly breathy.

  “It wouldn’t matter” was Adrian’s chilling reply. “He’d only follow us. I need you to find hallowed ground, Ivy.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes away from the billowing clouds in front of us. They were so dark, they seemed to devour the beams that came from Adrian’s headlights.

  “All right,” I mumbled. “Give me your phone, I’ll look up the nearest church or cemetery.”

  “It’s too late for that,” he said, stunning me. “You need to find it yourself.”

  “How?” I burst out. We were almost at the line of black clouds. The temperature in the car plummeted, making my skin feel like it had turned to ice.

  “It’s in your bloodline,” Adrian said, swinging off the road so sharply that the back end began to fishtail. “You can sense hallowed ground, so find some, Ivy. Now.”

  “I don’t know how!” I shouted.

  The car shuddered over the uneven terrain, bouncing so much I almost hit my head on the roof, but I didn’t tell Adrian to slow down. That wall of darkness filled up the rear window of the Challenger until I couldn’t see the glow of our taillights anymore.

  “Yes, you do.” A growl that sounded comforting compared to the horrible hissing noises coming from outside the car.

  “I don’t!” What was that flash of white on my side of the car? Or that new, ripping sound? Oh God, were those teeth scraping away at the metal on my door?