Bitter Demons

by Sarra Cannon

  I closed my eyes and let all the clutter of my mind fall away. I concentrated on a single image - a blue butterfly like Zara taught me - until there was nothing else in my mind. When I felt the pulse of electric energy flowing through me, I opened my eyes and pushed away from my window. The feeling of being suspended so high above the ground was such a crazy rush.

  I let myself down slowly, floating to the ground without banging my knee this time. I looked around to make sure no one was around, then slipped around the house and into the barn.

  Jackson was already there. I could see the glow of his cigarette in the far corner as he tossed it to the ground and stomped it out.

  “Hey,” I said, smiling. There was something about meeting him here like this, in the dark after midnight, that felt so exciting. My pulse quickened.

  “Have any trouble getting out?” Jackson passed through the moonlit cracks between boards. His face appeared, then disappeared as he walked closer.

  “Not at all,” I said. Then I thought about the movement in the woods. “I saw a bird and almost chickened out.”

  Jackson laughed and ran his hand down my arm. “Understandable, but I won’t let anything happen to you Harper. I promise.”

  “I might still make you walk me back to my window,” I said. “Just in case.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. He jumped up on a wooden crate, his boots dangling just above the dirt floor. “I went to both florists in town and found out that the box was definitely one from Alice’s Florist on Broad Street. I talked to the owner. She was out front arranging some flowers, so I just asked her if she knew who’d sent black roses to a girl at Shadowford.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She said she had no idea what I was talking about. She said black roses would be a special order and she would have known if something like that had come through her shop.”

  “Crap,” I said. I kicked at the crate. “But if the flowers came in a box from her store, she had to have placed the order.”

  “I know,” he said. “I got the feeling she was hiding something from me. So I went around back and talked to this guy Aaron I know from school. He works there after school, so I thought he might know something. He said they had this one weird lady come in a few days ago. She was dressed in all black and had jet-black hair.”

  I shivered. “Like a crow?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Aaron said he didn’t know what the lady ordered, because Alice sent him out of the room when the weird lady came in. He also said that he’s the one who delivered the box to Shadowford. Alice asked him to do it first thing when he got there Saturday morning.”

  “Do you think Alice is the crow?”

  “I doubt it,” he said with a laugh. “More like a cow than a crow, really.”

  I rolled my eyes and slapped his leg. “Don’t be mean.”

  “What? I’m just saying I don’t think it’s her. But she definitely didn’t want me to know about the roses. I think it’s possible she knows who the crow is.”

  “Did she have blue eyes?” I asked, thinking of the way Mary Anne’s eyes had looked earlier in Caroline’s room.

  “No, brown,” he said. “But she did give off a magical sort of energy. And she’s not a member of the Order of Shadows.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know everyone in the Order,” he said. “And she’s not one of them. I did some digging around town and found out that she moved here about three years ago. No family. Nothing. And apparently she never talks about her life before Peachville. The guy at the barber shop said that he’s been having lunch with her for months and whenever he asks about her past, she closes up like a clam.”

  I chewed on a fingernail, thinking.

  “Do you think this lady, Alice, could have some connection to Mary Anne?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that you told me I should be suspicious of everyone, right? Well, Mary Anne’s been acting strange lately.”

  “And you think she could be connected to this whole thing?” he said. “Mary Anne is a sweet girl. She’s not the type to torture someone or try to kill them.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I thought Agnes was a sweet girl, too. She was my first friend here, remember? And Tori’s dead because of her. I almost died because of her.”

  “Mary Anne isn’t Agnes.”

  “I know that, but what I’m saying is that you can’t ever really know someone as much as you think you do. Everyone has secrets,” I said softly. “Even you.”

  Jackson grabbed my hand. “Come here,” he said. He slipped down from the crate and pulled me into his arms. “You know I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to you. If it will make you feel better, we can look into Mary Anne’s past. But how?”

  I relaxed and leaned against his chest, safe in his arms. “I need to get into Mrs. Shadowford’s office,” I said. “She keeps the files on us in her desk. I saw her put mine in there when I first got to Shadowford. If I can get ahold of Mary Anne’s file, maybe I can find some kind of clue.”

  “Do you really think Mary Anne could be the crow?” he asked.

  “It’s her eyes, Jackson,” I said. “There’s just something about them that seems so similar to that crow. It’s eerie.”

  He sighed. “Then we need to keep an eye on her at all times,” he said. “I’ll follow her around a bit at school over the next few days and see if she has any weird routines or talks to anyone strange.”

  “Any ideas about how I can get into Mrs. Shadowford’s room?” I said, pulling away slightly but keeping my fingers entwined in his. “She’s in there every minute of every day.”

  “Not this Wednesday,” he said. “The Order called a special meeting of all local members to discuss the use of dark magic in this town.”

  I cocked my head to the side, studying him. “How do you know all these things?”

  “I’m just good that way,” he said, laughing.

  I smiled. He had no idea how good I thought he really was. Just being close to him made my insides tingle. I trailed my fingers down his chest. “So meet back up here Wednesday night? Same time?”

  “Sounds good,” he said.

  The barn grew quiet except for the sound of the wind in the trees outside. We both knew it was time to say goodnight, but I didn’t want to leave. I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed the tips of his fingers. Our eyes locked in the moonlight and he leaned down, sweeping me into a kiss that turned my knees weak.

  Jackson put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me closer, but my injured shoulder protested. I pulled away with a sharp intake of breath.

  “What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?”

  “It’s not you,” I said. “I fell on my shoulder at practice today. It hurts like a bitch.”

  Jackson’s eyebrows came together, questioning. “You fell?”

  “Mrs. King moved me to the top of the pyramid for this routine we’re working on,” I said. I explained about how the shoes worked and that someone had tampered with my shoes at practice. “I think it might have been Brooke.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?” he asked. “Brooke could be the crow, Harper.”

  “I meant to tell you, but then we got to talking about the crow and I forgot,” I said. “And Brooke’s not the crow. She’s just jealous and wants her spot back at the top of the pyramid.”

  He paced the space in front of me. “Take your shirt off,” he said finally.

  My stomach did a back-flip. “What?”

  “I won’t look,” he said with a smile, “but I want to see your shoulder.”

  A blush crept up my neck. “Turn around,” I said.

  He turned around, and I quickly pulled my black long-sleeve shirt over my head. I did my best to wrap the shirt around my body, leaving my shoulder exposed.

  “Okay,” I said, a thousand butterfly wings beating inside my chest.

  Jackson came to me and ran hi
s finger along the scar on my shoulder. I trembled at his touch. The scar had never healed well. It was still an ugly, puffy knot of a scar where the dagger had pierced my skin.

  “Close your eyes,” he whispered.

  I stared into his green eyes. They told me I could trust him, so I closed my eyes. He pressed his palm hard against the sorest point, and I winced, but didn’t pull away. An icy cold poured into my shoulder and a bright light shone through my closed eyelids. I gasped as the pain disappeared completely. My eyes flew open and I stared at the scar on my shoulder. It wasn’t completely healed, but the scar was noticeably smaller. More importantly, that constant ache I’d felt for weeks was gone.

  “How did you do that?” I asked. “I thought drawing was your only gift.”

  “I have a lot of gifts,” he said. “It’s just been a while since I had access to any of them.”

  “So what changed?” I asked. I thought about the way Aerden’s shadow had disappeared into Jackson’s body.

  He shook his head. “Let’s not talk about it tonight,” he said. “Tonight, you should rest.”

  I pulled my shirt back on and he walked me to my window. He leaned forward and kissed my neck, just to the side of my scar. I inhaled sharply at the feel of his warm lips against my skin.

  “I’ll see you here Wednesday night,” he said, then disappeared into the night.

  I stayed awake the rest of the night, thinking about Jackson and all his secrets.

  Mrs. Shadowford’s Desk

  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.

  Wrath

  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 Jacks
on’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.