Demon (The Faery Chronicles Book 2)

by Leslie Claire Walker

  “No offense, man,” Kev said.

  “Not much taken. What’re you going to do?”

  “I can get the river water.”

  “I could be wrong,” I said, “but there’s no rivers in the city limits.”

  “There are bayous.”

  They served the same purpose as a river would. Catching water from rainfall, streams, and creeks. Carrying it out to sea.

  Kevin reached for Amy’s hand. “Wanna go with?”

  She nodded. And she got that nervous look again.

  “Which,” Stacy said with a heaping helping of false cheer, “leaves the living fire. Who’s up for getting some of that with me?”

  Burns and Reid raised their hands. Of course they did. There wasn’t anybody else.

  Mr. Landon took the last pull from his mug. “I’m the fort. The fort.”

  We’d covered all the angles. So why did I feel like I was missing something? “Hey, Malek?”

  He glanced at me.

  “You’re staying with Melody, yeah? You and the Singer?”

  As long as I can.

  “What does that mean?”

  Means as long as I can.

  Kevin touched my shoulder. Amy fidgeted at his side. “We leaving in the dark?” he asked. “Or do we got time for an hour of shut-eye?”

  In spite of the caffeine racing through my veins, the thought of sleep was a siren’s song of oh God, please. The room and everyone in it flickered. First they were there, then not there, then back again.

  My heart stuttered in my chest. I forced words out of my mouth. Forced them to sound as close to normal as I could get them. “I’m worried that if I take the time to do that, I’ll wish I hadn’t later. I’d rather be early with everything than late. You know?”

  He nodded. “That’s one side of the coin.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “The thing you’re not telling me. You worried that if you fall asleep, you’ll wake up all Destroyer?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “What’re the odds?” he asked.

  “Have you seen what’s going down everywhere? Would you want to be playing the odds right now?”

  Kevin hesitated a beat. “Just saying, Rude.”

  Sure. Just saying. I glanced at Scott as he made his way over to us. “Hey, can you drive?”

  Scott blinked at me. “You want me to drive the Explorer? You never let anyone else drive.”

  “I can’t see straight.”

  Scott nodded. “S.l.e.e.p.”

  “No,” I said. “I literally can’t see straight.”

  I felt like I’d had too much to drink and been put to bed only to watch the ceiling spin and wonder whether I’d boot any minute.

  The room spun slowly now. The flickering sped up. Instead of people in flesh-and-blood bodies, I saw only the colors. Only the light and darkness. The ones I’d noticed before, and the newer ones.

  Malek, black and moody. The cops, green like growing things—the kind with thorns. Stacy was a kaleidoscope, a patchwork of every color in the book. And Scott. Brown. Solid, got-my-back brown.

  “The change?” he asked.

  Such a harmless word. Six letters. One syllable. One monster.

  “Can’t be anything else,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that my operating a motor vehicle isn’t in anybody’s best interests right now.”

  Kevin—white light radiated from him—leaned in close. “The thing about this spell? I think whatever’s changing about us, it’ll be over and done with by the time the spell’s finished. That’s my theory.”

  “I hate your theory, dude.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  “Also, I think you’re right.”

  He nodded. “Scott, you keep tabs on him. You might not have powers, but you’ve got common sense. Your gut tells you something’s about to happen, you listen to it. You figure this guy’s about to lose his shit, you shut him down.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that, Kevin? Is there like a secret formula for controlling faery seers-slash-destroyers?”

  Kevin’s wings shuffled behind his back. A scritch-scratch of feathers. “I were you, I’d clock him in the head. Knock him out.”

  “Hey—standing right here.”

  Scott talked over me. “Then what? Throw him over my shoulder? Lock him in the trunk—oh, wait, the Explorer doesn’t have one of those. Drive him where before he wakes up?”

  “Here,” Kevin said.

  “Your dad will be able to do what, exactly?”

  The Singer stepped in, resting both hands on Kevin’s shoulders. I expected him to tense up, but he relaxed at her touch.

  “Leave the problem to me,” she said.

  Kevin turned his head to glance at her. “You have to sing.”

  “I can multitask. Don’t worry.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

  I followed his gaze to where Melody sat on the floor, still picking at the tile. “She can’t be trusted,” I said. “We can’t forget that.”

  “If you’re going to talk about me, I’m stepping out,” she said.

  Amy raised a brow. “Me, too.”

  “Watching me?” Melody asked.

  Amy’s arched her other brow. “Duh.”

  We watched them head into the living room, Melody’s shoulders stiff and Amy’s hands fisted at her side.

  Kevin sighed. “I don’t think anyone’s in danger of forgetting. All Melody’s done is double- and triple-cross us.”

  “Mostly before she knew there was an us,” I said.

  “Who cares?”

  I gave him the point. “It’s just a reminder, that’s all. She can be convincing.”

  “Only to you,” Kevin said.

  “What are you talking about? You said before you believed her. That she was telling the truth.”

  “No, man,” he said. “What I said was that she believes she’s telling the truth. Crucial difference. It makes her harder to read ‘cause she’s not lying to us. To herself, yeah, but not to us. If you can’t tell with your intuition and whatever else you’ve got going on now, and the Singer can’t tell with the way she reads emotions in people’s voices, I don’t know how the rest of us will be able to.”

  Right again. “We’re gonna have to trust her to act in her own self-interest. Like, she doesn’t want to get dead, so she’s not gonna do anything else to jeopardize things. If she does, Malek will take her head off.”

  Kevin shook his head. “That girl knows we need her to the very end. We have to complete the spell. She’s the one who started it. She’s gonna have to give her blood for the summoning. She has to help build the gate. She has to explain to us about the blood of the guilty, because she’s got somebody in mind. I can tell you that right now, just looking at her. She can do whatever she wants and maybe she gets a slap on the wrist, but we can’t end her until it’s all over. The idea that we have any kind of leverage is dangerous, Rude.”

  Dead on. “I hate this.”

  “I know.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He looked at Scott again. “Be careful.”

  We weren’t the only ones making plans. The noise level in the kitchen had gone up some decibels with small side conversations. Everybody had one going on except Mr. Landon. Who stepped into the middle of the room, stuck two fingers in his mouth, and whistled. The conversations fell away.

  “No one,” he said, “is going anywhere without breakfast.”

  I started to protest that we didn’t have time to eat. Then I realized that I had a hollow where my stomach used to be.

  Mr. Landon set down his mug. “Scott, make another pot. Kevin, get the eggs and bacon from the fridge. Everybody else, out.”

  We stared at him.

  He stared back. Waved his arms. “Now.”

  I walked with everyone else into the living room and then slipped down the hall to the bathroom. I locked the door behind me and leaned on it for a few minutes in
the dark.

  The room had one window, high up on the far wall, the bottom frosted and the top clear. I could see the moon through the clear glass, huge and round and bright and not quite full. It would be tomorrow night, though. Full moon on a hot night. Made people crazy, they said.

  I reached up to my left and flipped on the light. The overhead flickered on. And the Hollywood bulbs around the mirror over the vanity counter and the sink. Kevin and his dad had their ocean blue thing going on. Shower curtain, floor mat, tile, towels. Even the squirt bottle for the antibacterial soap. The toilet seat had been left in the no-women-live-here position. The room smelled like mint toothpaste and spray deodorant and old farts.

  I did not want to look in the mirror.

  I willed my feet to move that direction. Braced my hands on the edge of the counter and gazed at my reflection.

  People had been telling me the truth about my looks. Black eyes, including the used-to-be-whites—that, I’d already seen for myself. But the color of my skin. How pale it was. The way my orange hair had bleached white. I looked like a vampire, and not the romantic movie star kind.

  I glanced down at my hands. What next? Long, sharp nails? Death rays that shot out of my fingertips?

  I looked myself in the eye. Checked around my head for the same colors I’d seen in and around everyone else. There was nothing there. Not good news nothing. More like extremely bad news. In my case, we were talking empty space where there should be something. A void. A giant sucking sound.

  Destroyer.

  What did it mean to become one? Would I leave a wreckage in my wake? The city already had plenty of that. Given how many people had disappeared when Melody flash-banged, I was more than a little surprised that the whole place hadn’t disappeared with them.

  Maybe that was my job.

  Instead of smashing up what she’d left, I made it vanish. Like it’d never been in the first place. Millions of lives snuffed out. Miles and miles of houses and offices and stores and parks gone in a puff of smoke. The only things left? Melody and her demon.

  I’d started working with Oscar what felt like a million years ago. He never asked me to take any oaths. Never made me promise anything. He’d taught me what he knew. I studied. He handed out orders. I followed them. Most of the time, stuff went the way he said it would. Occasionally, everything went pear-shaped and I had to improvise. I did okay. Sometimes I came out bloody, but the job always got done. I always saved the day. Or at least I helped.

  The stuff Melody said to me about being a hero? I could pretend it was bullshit. Who did I think I was fooling? I’d done the hero thing for years. I did it like I did breathing and walking and talking and brushing my teeth. It was part of me.

  Now, the change she’d brought had turned me into something else. I could still hero on, but for how long? When would the tide turn? Would I go blind? Would I stop feeling love for my friends? Would I stop knowing the right thing to do? Or would I know it, but not care? Would I know right and do wrong in spite of it?

  If I did, I’d really be a monster.

  The thought of it made my balls shrink to the size of raisins. My skin felt paper thin. Raw. Like all my nerves had clawed their way to the surface.

  My stomach rolled over. Acid rushed into my throat. I bent over the sink and threw up the coffee I’d swallowed and then some bile after that. I gave myself a couple of minutes to see if my stomach had anything else to vomit. Turned on the tap to clean the sink and splashed cold water on my face. Rinsed out my mouth.

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  I pulled myself together. “I’ll be right out.”

  “I just want to come in.” Melody.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Turned the lock and opened the door. “I’m not sure you want to be around me.”

  “Because I fucked up your life?”

  “You don’t think that’s a good reason?” I asked.

  “No, it’s great,” she said. “I just need to talk to you. Please.”

  I had a deep-seated feeling I’d regret it, but I stepped out of her way. She slipped past me, closed the toilet seat and the cover, and plopped down on it. “You’ve got to keep Malek away from me.”

  I had an easy answer for that one. “No.”

  “But—”

  “No, Melody. You’re way over the line with him already. Nothing I could say to him will change that. Not to mention that you’re way over the line with me.”

  She shifted on her seat. “I know I’ve played a little fast and loose with the truth.”

  I nodded. “That’s all it takes.”

  “No second chance?”

  “You’re delusional.”

  She sighed. “What did you come in here for anyway? Couldn’t be the ambience.”

  “Time alone. And you know, to pee.”

  “Yeah, this is probably the only room in the house where you’ll find it the alone time. And, like, the toilet. But you can’t stay in here all night, you know. Other people will have to pee.”

  I leaned against the wall. “This is why you wanted to talk to me?”

  “I just suck at getting to the point.”

  I waited.

  She pushed to her feet. “It’s bad, isn’t it? I wish it didn’t have to be that way for you.”

  A roundhouse full of pity. “What are you talking about?”

  “Discovering you’re evil.”

  “Who’re you talking about, Melody? I’m not evil.”

  “You, Rude Davies. You’re a good guy turning bad from the inside out.”

  “This is happening to me because of your spell. You did this.”

  She shoved her hands into the pockets of her overalls. “True. But I didn’t plan how the magic would affect people. You know what Kevin told me a minute ago? He said you thought your eyes turned because of all the darkness you witness as a faery seer. He said you thought his wings grew because of how he’s a go-between for faeries and humans. You were right.”

  “The Singer said—” I bit off what I’d been planning to say, that the Singer squashed that idea out of the gate. She’d told us how bad it could get and that we were all affected, but she’d never said I was wrong about the why. “Go on.”

  “What’s happening to you, it’s because of who you are on the inside. The parts of yourself you don’t let anyone see. The parts you hide, even from yourself. It’s not just about your job, Rude. It’s about you. Who you are.”

  More punches, this time to the gut. “Impossible.”

  She took a step toward me. “That’s what it’s like, my magic. I know because that’s how it happened with me. The super hot flashes and melting down trash cans and car parts. Finding the stuff in my mom’s diary about my dad and finally understanding why. I fought it, Rude. Teeth, claws—everything.”

  I didn’t know how to fight—not this. The change got worse every time I used my powers as a seer. I had to use them, or we weren’t going to make it through. Didn’t I?

  Not using them didn’t necessarily mean sitting out. It meant my normal, regular Joe self would have to be smart enough, strong enough, psychic enough to get the job done. I felt all right about the first two. Abysmal about number three.

  It was my job, being a seer. But it was more than that. It was part of me.

  I slammed the back of my head into the wall. I wish I understood what it all meant. “It didn’t work, did it? Fighting.”

  “Nothing I did made any difference. Not even a little. I finally had to give in.”

  “What did that feel like?”

  “A lot better,” she said. “Like a weight lifted off me. I started to notice small things. The way things made me angry. The raw deal I’d gotten from people who were supposed to be my family. The whispers at school. The way people trip me in the halls. How much they hate me. I figured out how to use all that. How to be myself and stop pretending to be someone else. I stopped pretending to be better.”

  “What are you trying to say, Melody?”r />
  “That this hero thing you’ve got going on doesn’t make up for the way your parents don’t notice you or how you’re carrying a responsibility on your shoulders that’s way too big. It doesn’t make up for all your frustration and how you’re pissed off and you have no life besides what your teacher tells you to have.”

  “Thanks for pointing all that out. Nice touch about my parents.”

  She took another step toward me. One more foot forward and she’d be on top of me. “You think that’s a secret?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “It’s not hard to see if you have eyes. Especially for people like us.”

  People with what?—unsatisfactory home lives? Mine had its share of awful, but Melody’s won by a mile in the crap category. So she noticed. So what?

  “You really think I’ve got all this potential for destruction in me. That it goes deep enough to change my outside, too. That I should give into it.”

  She shook her head. “I’m just saying I know what it feels like to become the thing you’ve always feared.”

  I looked at her. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to help in her own strange way. “How can you fear becoming something you didn’t even believe existed? You didn’t know about demons before.”

  “Sure I did,” she said. “I knew my stepfather.”

  No sulfur or fire or brimstone involved. Except in every other way, it was completely the same.

  “Thanks,” I said. This time, I meant it.

  She took that last step. I smelled the coffee on her breath. Felt a charge coming off her like some kind of electricity. The hairs on my arms stood tall. She rose up on her toes and wrapped her arms around my neck. I froze like an idiot. I half-hugged her back.

  The curve of her breasts pressed against my chest sent all my senses into high gear. Especially the new ones that told me the color around her heart had softened to a rosy pink.

  “You’re welcome.” She kissed my cheek. Pulled away with a shy smile on her lips.

  I didn’t want to believe that she could be shy. Or tender. But I did. I watched her open the door and head out. She threw a glance over her shoulder with a question written on her face.

  You coming?

  I looked in the mirror. Saw nothing in my reflection that wasn’t already inside of me. Nothing I could do anything about. No reason to stay.