“Go back to your post,” she hissed, letting him go with enough force that his head bounced off the ground twice. Gordon got up and disappeared into the darkness. Without missing a beat, Emma’s face became a mask of flirtatious smiles and she took my hand, leading me back to where she had been sitting by the bonfire, motioning for one of her cheerleader friends to get up and make room for me. Before I could protest, she pulled me down and positioned herself in a way that was half in my lap and half pinning me down.
“So, Jem,” she whispered, giggling into my ear in a way that sent a not unpleasant chill down my spine. “Now that I have you, what am I going to do with you?”
“Huh? Oh… um…” I swallowed hard. I’d been so wrapped up in trying to figure out what I had just witnessed that Emma’s obvious come on took me off guard. But now that my brain had caught up with my body, I was in something of a tight spot. Emma was lost. Everyone at the party was, to be honest, and the fact that the pixies had already begun to bring out their pixie dust was alarming, yet I was not in a position where I could do anything. The jar of Nutella had fallen out of my pocket in the scuffle and was on the other side of the fire.
“I was hoping for something a little more committal than an um,” she teased, tracing her finger down my chest in a most distracting way. I thought for a moment about what Nai would say, but shrugged it off. Nai was happily spending time with a guy that she obviously liked and obviously didn’t care to get my opinion on the subject first. Why should I care what she thinks just because I knew that Emma didn’t like her?
“Okay then,” I said, slipping my arms around her waist. “How about whatever you’d like?”
“That is the correct answer.”
With an almost predatory smile, she stood and held out her hand, indicating that I should get up too. Taking my hand, she led me away from the fire, down close to the water and through a small break in the underbrush that took us deeper into the darkness of the wooded bank. The hammering of my heart in my chest seemed like it should have been a warning, but I ignored it, chalking my panic up to anticipatory nervousness.
But then a dark, yet familiar energy began to creep into my consciousness. There was no way what I was feeling was just nerves. I stopped, pulling my hand from Emma’s, but as I stepped back, I was caught from behind. Two of the larger guys on the team had each grabbed one of my arms and prevented me from going back the way I came.
“Guys? What the heck?”
“Relax, Jem,” I heard Emma giggle in the darkness. “We’re just going to play a game.” She stepped closer and pulled a thin black scarf from somewhere within her low cut top.
“Um…”
Under any other circumstance, the hottest girl in the school putting a blindfold on me might have been a dream come true, but I had a bad feeling that the situation I found myself in wasn’t going to end well. I twisted my hand and reached into my pocket, feeling the slightest bit of relief when it closed around my phone.
“Leave it off, for now.” A faint voice in the distance commanded in a sharp rasp.
Emma looked almost dejected as her hand came down, away from my face.
“Bring him closer,” it commanded and I was pushed forward until my shins banged painfully into something solid in front of me. I looked down to see a flat, smooth stone slab that shone white in the sliver of moonlight that cut through the cover of the trees.
The uneasy feeling that had ebbed at the edge of my conscious began to take form and I froze as the familiar tendrils of dark energy snaked through the clearing. My hand gripped tighter around my phone when I saw the iron chains lying next to the flat, smooth stone and noticed the cloaked figure hovering in the darkness just beyond.
“Good evening, Mr. Hawthorne.”
“No,” I whispered and pulled the phone from my pocket. I had just enough time to dash off what I hoped was a comprehensible text to Desmond before it was yanked from my hand and smashed against a nearby tree.
“Oh but I’m afraid so, dear boy,” came the familiar nasal voice. “Did I not warn you what would happen if you meddled in that which does not concern you?”
“What do you want from me?” I asked, surprised that I had managed to hold my voice steady.
“Why, your soul, of course,” he said with a barking laugh before turning to the guys who held me in place. “Secure the sacrifice.”
I was pushed roughly onto the stone slab, but managed to not smack my head as they wrapped the rusty chains around my arms and legs. I looked up to see Emma standing behind me. The sneer she wore twisted her normally attractive features into something right out of my nightmares. Cutting through the fear that fogged my brain, I let my gaze fall on Mr. Marsden’s face just as she slipped the blindfold over my eyes.
It had been enough. I whispered the incantation Bogie had taught me and suddenly my mind was ablaze with images. Not just of the man he had been. Not just of the spectral nightmare that controlled him like a puppet. I saw everything. Every lost and broken mind who had fallen victim to the wraith as a means to end their suffering, including the last victim. The one whose premature end brought the demon into Blackbird, searching for another method by which to fulfill what it began exactly eighteen years ago.
Chapter 12
The Living Vessel
Jem’s newfound fear of me was getting old fast. Thanks to Harry’s theory, my brother was terrified that I was going to use my powers to turn him into a Discordant doorway. I mean, admittedly, the image that thought conjured up was rather amusing, but I really couldn’t see any benefit in unleashing more Discordant on this place. If anything, it would make my life a living hell since I’d be the only Guardian left.
Thursday morning, though, I noticed a change. Instead of hanging back and making me walk ahead of him, Jem sauntered out the door with more enthusiasm than I’d seen all week. I followed him down the block and rolled my eyes. He didn’t say anything, but every so often he would look back to see if I was still following. It was pretty obvious that he wanted me to ask him what was going on, so I ignored him. When we got to within a block of school, it was too much for Jem.
“So… I had an interesting lesson last night.”
“I’m sure you did,” I said in a bored voice. The stew they’d made was really good. At least, it had been until I found out it was made with rabbit. There are some lines that not even the embodiment of evil will cross.
“I learned something that will make you jealous,” Jem said, hoping to get a rise out of me.
“Whatever,” I shrugged. “Hippie magic is no match for the supreme power of a super-agent like myself.”
“Perhaps not,” Jem said, feigning a casual shrug. “But Discordant magic might be.”
“Whatever, Jem.” I stopped walking and rounded on my brother. “The stuff Donna’s teaching you might be stronger because she’s part Discord… Oh.” All of the sudden I remembered exactly who was over last night and I began to laugh. “Oh my god! Really?”
“Oh you think it’s funny?”
“Okay, okay,” I gasped. “This I have to hear. What did Bogie teach you?”
“Oh, no. You can just keep laughing, sister dear,” Jem said, rising to my bait. “And I can reach into your head and pull out all of the embarrassing crap you don’t want anyone to know about.”
I stopped laughing. “You cannot!”
“I can too!” Jem crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows. “I mean, you’d know if I tried, being an agent, but don’t think that will stop me if you decide to do something.”
In an instant, my rising panic turned into frustration.
“Jem, for the last damned time, I am not interested in turning your soulless husk of a body into a portal to the Chaotic realm!”
“Well, just in case you get any ideas,” he said, holding himself with forced casualness.
“I give up!” I huffed and turned around, filing into the school with the rest of the morning zombies.
I’d really wanted to skip, but
I made myself go to class, realizing that if I failed anything, Desmond would totally make me take the whole year again just to spite me. But when I walked into the classroom, it was all I could do not to walk right out again. I’d forgotten that the reason I skipped first period was all the stupid cheerleaders. When they saw me, their conversation stopped. Good. I didn’t want to hear their inane chatter about which guy on the football team was going to give them their next venereal disease anyway.
“Of course, only the right element are invited.”
I rolled my eyes as the head cheerleader’s voice carried over to me. I couldn’t remember her name. I just called her Vampire Bait because she was always the first to go throwing herself at the nasty wannabes whenever they showed up.
“Hawthorne will be there. But I have a sack and some heavy rocks if his ugly ass sister shows up,” she said a little louder, as if it wasn’t obvious she was trying to goad me. “We’ll tie her up and drown her in the river like the unwanted runt she is.”
Ugh! What’s the point of being the most powerful agent of Order when I don’t have the power to do things like give this bitch explosive diarrhea or cystic acne? She was lost, of course, but peeking into her brain revealed that her personality was rubbish under the best of circumstances. I was half-tempted to show up at her little party just to call her bluff and maybe give her a black eye on general principle.
By the time the final bell rang, my brain was numb. I was completely over high school. Well, okay, I’d pretty much been over high school since the first day of freshman year. But I was extra pissed off when I thought about the fact that tomorrow would have been my eighteenth birthday. If it wasn’t for Desmond’s stupid meddling, I would have been one day away from legal adult status and no one could have done anything if I decided to quit school. I had to wonder if that was part of the reason why Desmond chose to give us such a stupid new birthday. By the time I was legally old enough to quit, all I’d have left was a week of finals.
As if to add insult to injury, I couldn’t get to my locker because someone was on a ladder right in front of it, putting up stupid pep banners for the next day’s football game. I didn’t even have to look up to see who it was. I was able to recognize her purely by her pathetic lost soul these days.
“Kayla, do you know why you’ll never be popular?” At this point, I wasn’t even trying to save her soul. I was just being mean. “It’s because of things like this. This is supposed to be the cheerleaders’ job, but they’ve all left already because they know your dumb ass will stay here all night putting up the stupid banners. You’re a doormat, Kayla. Keep it up and you’ll end up in the abusive relationship of your dreams someday.”
“At least I’ll have a relationship,” she sniffed, climbing down the ladder. “Unlike you, because nobody likes you!”
“Maybe I like it that way,” I growled and pushed her ladder away from my locker and right into Jem, who happened to pick the very wrong time to walk over. I cracked my first smile of the day.
“Ow! That was uncalled for!”
“Oh my gosh! Are you okay?”
Of course Kayla the doormat fawned all over Jem. He was popular. I ignored them, grabbed what I needed out of my locker, and left, leaving Jem to sort out the hot mess that was Kayla’s pathetic soul.
* * *
“Okay, what’s different?”
“Not you because you’re still an idiot.”
“Nai, I’m serious. Something’s weird today.”
I looked over at Jem to ask what the hell he was talking about when I felt it too. All morning I’d been in my own funk over our non-existent birthday and hadn’t even noticed that we had just reached the edge of the school grounds. The ever-present oppressiveness that clung to the building seemed lighter. Not gone, but definitely not as bad as it had been.
“Could just be Friday,” I muttered, but when we got inside, I noticed something. “It’s coming from the office. Well, it’s not coming from the office, actually,” I said, nudging Jem in the ribs.
“Can you make sense?” he asked, giving me a dirty look and rubbing his side where I’d gently nudged him. Wuss.
“Are you that dumb?” I smacked him in the arm. “Can’t you feel that? I think Gary took a sick day.”
“Oh my gosh! You’re right!” Jem’s eyes widened. “Do you think Harry got the corpus vessel last night?”
“I doubt it. I mean, don’t you think Desmond would have told us? This could be bad news.”
“What? How?”
I rolled my eyes. “Because! What if the wraith escaped?”
“He can’t,” Jem countered. “You heard them. He’s stuck in Gary’s body until he’s exorcized. “Maybe he wandered off again.”
“Maybe, but I have a bad feeling he didn’t wander off by accident. Keep your eyes open.”
“Duh,” Jem rolled his eyes at me. “I mean, it’s not like I’m going to get bored and skip most of the day.”
“Aw, thanks for taking one for the team,” I smiled and patted my brother on the cheek. “That’s so sweet of you.”
But by mid-morning, the familiar oppression was back. Even worse, I really had been planning on leaving the school right after lunch, but I was caught before the bell rang and told to go to the guidance office. Considering that I hadn’t done anything to get myself in trouble all week, I felt as if I was being led into a trap. I took the notice and ducked around the corner, waiting for the aide who gave it to me to go back to the office so I could leave. But curiosity got the better of me. Instead of taking the now clear path to freedom, I turned around and entered the demon’s lair.
Mr. Marsden sat at his desk. He didn’t even bother looking up as I entered.
“Nai, Nai, Nai,” he said, shaking his head and ending on a tsk followed by an exaggerated sigh. “Are you incapable of behaving for even one single day?”
“Apparently not,” I said with a sigh of my own. “Seeing as I’ve done nothing wrong all week and I still got a notice. That’s fine though. The reason I’m incapable of behaving is because I’m the evil half of a split soul. Did you know that? I have a nagging suspicion that you already do know that.”
There it was, the truth. I was tired of playing a game and decided to speak directly to the demon.
“We’re not here to be your adversary, Nai. We in administration only want to see you grow. We want what is best for all of our students.”
Apparently, our demon was playing possum. “Well of course you do,” I barreled onward. “But what you think is best is a student body made entirely of lost souls. I happen to disagree on grounds that saving this group of pathetic losers is something of a waste of my time. So I’m going to leave the soul saving to my dippy brother and just cut to the chase, okay? Can we be honest here, Beelzebub? Or is it Belial? Pazuzu? I can’t keep all you demons straight. Look, you know who I am and you know what I am capable of. Likewise, I know what you are and that you can’t do squat while you’re stuck in that miserable form. You want out? Come at me, bro.”
Gary’s blank face barely registered that I’d even spoken, but the nauseating energy the demon was putting out swelled in acknowledgement.
“I’m sorry, Nai,” Gary prattled on unaware. “I know you think our punishments harsh, but I expect great things from you.”
A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature crawled up my spine. “You what?”
“Come now, Nai,” he said, but this time in a low, menacing voice that definitely didn’t belong to our guidance counselor. “And here I thought you were the smart one.”
“It’s not fair! Why doesn’t Jem have to study?”
“Jem’s talents lie elsewhere. You are the smart one, Nai. You have been chosen. Someday soon, you will know what this means. Until then, just know that I expect greatness from you.”
The memories came flooding back. While my brother ran around and played in the back yard, I was stuck up in my father’s study, reading books on mythology and studying ancient rituals.
I brushed aside the implications, unwilling to allow the thought to take hold.
“Don’t you dare try to use my father’s words against me,” I hissed.
The demon laughed and the temperature in the room plunged until I could no longer comfortably breathe. Just before I thought I would pass out, it stopped, and the glassy emptiness returned to Gary’s eyes.
“Another week of detention, I’m afraid,” he said, back to his own voice, handing me a citation form. It was blank.
“Of course,” I said, snatching the paper from his hands before running as far as I could from the school. Detention or not, I wasn’t going to hang out any longer than I had to.
I went immediately up to my workroom in the attic and ran through every note I’d made since discovering that something was different, coming down only to grab a bit of dinner and to rag on Jem. He’d tried so hard to hide the fact that he was going to the jock party from me that tormenting him was almost anti-climactic. That he worried about my feelings was almost as sweet as it was stupid.
I knew that the demon had pulled my father’s words from my mind to use them against me, but it still shook me way more than it should have. Funny, I’d never questioned my father’s odd phrasing. Mother had always been somewhat distant. Of course, I now knew that was because she knew I was the dark half of a split soul, but as a child, I was jealous that she favored Jem. I always thought that father’s insistence that I shared his passion for history was to somehow balance the favor. Now I wasn’t so sure and that nagged at me. Mother was the mystic. As far as I knew, father was hardly religious. If he even suspected his wife of having mystical powers, he would have likely had himself committed for believing in fairytales.
* * *
“It’s almost ten.”
I nearly jumped at the sound of Desmond’s voice. I had come downstairs to find my boots and I didn’t think anyone else was still home. He tried to play it off like he had been working or something, but it was pretty obvious that Desmond had been waiting to walk me to Louie’s. Again, I would have thought it sweet, but I knew better. Desmond wasn’t worried about my safety as much as he was worried about what trouble I might cause if I was allowed to stay home alone. Desmond was thankfully quiet on the walk over to Louie’s, but I could still feel him watching me. When we got to the diner, he turned to me.
Rise of the Discordant: The Complete Five Book Series Page 33
