Ana Awakens: A YA Paranormal Murder Mystery Novel (The Clermont Coven Trilogy Book 1)

by Alina Banks

  “Going further isn’t going to be possible.” I glanced back at Alex. “The tracks I was following are gone.”

  “Any chance of getting them back?”

  “Maybe if I was better at whatever it is I’m doing.” I shrugged. “Right now, this is all guesswork. I’m just hoping I’m doing this right, because I’ve never been able to see things like that before, and it’s not as though I knew in advance this was going to happen.”

  “Okay.” He stepped forward so he could stand beside me and he looked around. “We’re not really near anything here, which isn’t necessarily a sign of anything. Do you know which direction the tracks went in?”

  “Seems like they kept going north, but there is always a chance that the direction could change at some point.”

  “We have a few cabins that are relatively close. Maybe we could check one of them out.”

  I shook my head. “It’s past midnight. I should get back home before my parents call the police. It’s already past my curfew, and I’m not normally late, so I’m sure they’re worried.”

  “Understandable.” Alex smiled. “Then I’ll walk you home, make sure you get there safe.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “Once we’re out of the forest, we should go our separate ways. Your parents must be worried about you too.”

  “Honestly, Ana, my parents really don’t care that much.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulders again. “Why else do you think I was out here the other night? Sometimes, I come out here just to get away from home, because being there…I don’t know how to put it into words, but it’s very lonely. I miss the times when Dante and I were close, because his home life is similar, and I’m pretty certain that’s all because of what happened before.” He shook his head. “I’ve wished for a normal family more times than I can count.”

  I let him lead me back through the forest. “I know what you mean. Before we ended up here, Mom was the one who had us moving from one place to the next, for what seemed like no reason whatsoever. It wasn’t exactly an enjoyable experience. I never had a chance to make friends, really. Instead, I was always the odd one out. Things are different here, but it’s the first time things have worked out this way, and I know I have Sabrina to thank for that.”

  “For as long as I can remember, Sabrina’s been the kind of person to be friends with everyone,” he said. I’ve always kept my distance, which may not have been the best choice, but I didn’t want to get too close to anyone. That’s something Dad taught me, but I think I’ve changed my mind. Being close to people isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the risk of being hurt.” He shrugged. “I regret a lot of the choices I made in the past, because I made them for the wrong reasons. I made them because other people thought those decisions would be best for me. At the time, I didn’t know any better. Now I do.”

  “It happens a lot.” I looked at Alex. “I think if I knew more back then, things would have been different. If I had known about the past when I was growing up, then I think I would have been more accepting of...well, everything. Or I could have been just as angry, because even now, it feels like my mother is putting her needs above my own.”

  Sasha was waiting for me when I stepped into the house, and as I moved silently through the living room, I saw a light on in the kitchen.

  “Ana, this is two hours past your curfew.” Mom’s voice came from the kitchen, and when I looked, it seemed like she was heating up something for dinner. “Please explain to me why you’re home so late.”

  Should I be honest with Mom and tell her I was out looking into someone’s murder? That seemed like the wrong choice, but with everything that had happened…

  I stepped into the kitchen and leaned against the wall. “You working late again?”

  She smiled. “It’s part of working at a hospital, sometimes.” Her eyes met mine. “Talk to me. I know there was another murder, and something about this makes me think you being so late was because of that, so be honest with me. I know it might feel like lying is the better idea, but if you’re making those choices, then I need to know.”

  “Are they the kind of choices you would make?”

  “Back then, no.” Mom sat down at the breakfast bar. “When I was your age, all I wanted was to be normal, and you…”

  “Mom, I’ve never had a chance to be normal.” I shrugged. “We traveled from one place to the next, making it impossible for me to have any friends, and now that I’m here…you came back to Clermont for a reason. I think that reason was the murders, even if you aren’t ready to tell me that yet. And if you’re here because of them, I get the feeling you were a part of something before all of this, which is the reason you left. Now that I’m in the middle of it, I’m becoming a part of it, even though that’s not what you want. When I was out there…I saw the body of the boy who died. I could see what was done to him. His throat was slit while he was tied to something, and that’s really not good.”

  “No, it’s not.” She gestured for me to join her. “Did you see anything else?”

  “There were some symbols up his arm I couldn’t see properly, that make me think the murder was a part of a ritual. Now, I think they all were, apart from Wayde. They were…I don’t know how to put it into words, Mom, but they lit up for me, so I could follow them. At least, until they faded away entirely.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s the way these kinds of things often happen. Tell me what the tracks looked like.”

  “Physically, they looked like cloven hooves. They were red, and there was something very dark about them.”

  “Could you tell where they came from?”

  “They disappeared before I could find out.”

  Nodding, her eyes met mine for a moment.

  “I’m not going to stop looking into this,” I said.

  Laughing, she wrapped an arm around my waist. “I didn’t think for a moment that you would, but I will still ask you to be careful. The last thing I want is for something to happen to you. Going out there, knowing there’s something killing people for their life force, isn’t the safest thing to do, but I won’t stop you. My sister was the same way. If she knew there was someone out there who needed help, then she’d do whatever she had to. I know you’re a lot like her. You’re probably more like her than you are like me, probably because you’re more like my mom too. I am grateful for how much you resemble them. It’s almost, in some way, like being around them both again.” She smiled at me. “You’re going to make better choices than I ever did.”

  I breathed a sigh and studied her again. “You said before you’d tell me why this is happening.”

  “I will.” Mom smiled. “Right now, I feel like it’s best not to, because the moment you find out the whole truth, it’s going to change your life the same way it changed mine.”

  “Being here has already changed my life. I know there’s something different about me, Mom. No one else saw the body or those ominous tracks, and if that is the case…I know you’re scared. You’re scared of admitting the truth because you’ve kept it from me for so long, but I need to know what I am. I need to know who I am.”

  “You know who you are. You’re Ana Price, the daughter of a Conway and a Price, which you know means something to this town. Every time you learn something more about what you can do, you’re one step closer to understanding what it means to be a Conway. I think, in some ways, it is better for you to learn the truth on your own.” She stood. “Go to bed. We can talk about this tomorrow, and I promise, if you still want to know, I’ll tell you the whole truth.”

  “Like you promised last time.” I shook my head as I stood. “I know you don’t want to tell me. If you did, you would have told me a long time ago, and I wouldn’t still be trying to convince you to be honest with me.” I sighed. “It’s okay, Mom. I’ll learn the truth eventually.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mom was still getting ready for work when I left for school the next morning and it seemed obvious that she was avoiding me. No
matter what she said to me, I knew she didn’t want to tell me anything more about who I was, or what I was, than she already had. There were other people I could ask, like Alice, but I wanted to know from Mom, because she was the one who’d been keeping a secret from me for so long. From what she’d said, she’d been told the whole truth about who she was long before she chose to tell me anything, and that…

  I looked back at the stairs, hoping she might be walking down them. The longer it went on, the more I felt I couldn’t trust her to be honest with me. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t told her about the weird things I was dealing with. Surely it would make more sense to tell me rather than watching me fumble around in the forest in the middle of the night.

  As I walked out the door, I thought about everything I’d experienced since we moved to Clermont. I definitely wasn’t the person I’d been when we first moved here, but then there were still little things that stuck out to me from before the move that told me I simply hadn’t put two and two together. There had always been something different about me. There had always been something different about her.

  I walked to the bus stop and tried to rein in my frustration. I leaned on the pole, trying to work out why Mom wouldn’t tell me the truth, and found myself thinking about what Alex had said before: all this had something to do with a demon. Maybe that was the truth, and the whole reason Mom wasn’t telling me the truth was her misguided way of keeping me safe. She couldn’t see that keeping the truth from me was making it harder for me to be able to do what felt necessary.

  I watched the bus pull up to the stop. I knew that the driver had been here since Mom was in school, and he probably knew more about who I was than I did. Stepping on, I gave him a smile. He nodded in response, the way he always did. I made my way down to my usual seat. No one ever sat next to me. At least, not on a normal day. I was barely paying attention when I glanced to the side and saw Alex plopping down next to me.

  “Morning.” He smiled at me. “How are you feeling after last night?”

  I shrugged and turned to look out the window. “Like Mom knows the truth about everything, and she doesn’t want to tell me.”

  “There has to be something more we can do.” Sabrina held the local paper in front of her. She looked down at the report on the latest murder. There was no mention of the slit throat or the signs of the ropes that had been tied around his wrists, which I believed they’d kept out of the paper on purpose. “People are dying.”

  I glanced at James and nodded. “Maybe there’s nothing more we can do.”

  He shrugged, attention focused on Sabrina. “We’re still in school. It’s not like we know more than the police do about hunting a killer.”

  “Only they don’t seem to be hunting a killer. They keep talking about how it’s probably nothing more than wild animals and how we shouldn’t worry. How can we trust that they’re doing their jobs?”

  “Do you think it’s better for them to make it obvious what’s happening and scare people, or to keep the truth from them while they actually hunt down the killer?” My eyes met Sabrina’s when she looked at me. “They’re making the most logical choices they can. The moment people learn that there might be a serial killer, they’ll panic, so I believe they’re trying to mitigate that problem. At the same time, I don’t think they’re going about this in entirely the right way, but I’m not a police officer. I have no idea how they think.”

  “Possibly.” Sabrina nodded. “It would make sense, but we know so much more than they’ve been saying, and I still don’t think they’re truly capable of dealing with whoever this is. Especially since the killer was willing to kill someone on school grounds.”

  “In all honesty, I think that was probably a mistake on their part. They didn’t realize how strong Wayde was and couldn’t anticipate how fiercely he’d fight back.” I sighed. “Whoever it was probably believed they’d be able to deal with Wayde without killing him immediately, because all the others had been found in the forest a couple of days after they first went missing. Something happens to them during those days they’re gone, and I think working out what that is might give us an idea of the kind of person we’re dealing with. We have to ask why it would take them a couple of days to ditch them. What do we know about the murders that the police don’t?”

  Just as I expected, Sabrina pulled a notebook out of her bag. “Mom doesn’t always know when I’m listening in on her conversations, so I pick up details most people don’t. I know, from what she said, that she doesn’t trust the police to find the killer. She’s been talking about a group who happened to be here before. She’s never gone into detail, but, considering what we know, I’m certain that the group she referenced is linked to what happened before, and if my mom thinks they’re the best people for the job, then I feel like this is something…different.” She ran her tongue over her bottom lip. “We don’t know much about that incident, but we do know how many people died. There were so many lost…both before the night the big thing happened and more on the night itself.”

  “How many people know about that night?”

  She looked at me. “Everybody and nobody. This is going to sound incredibly strange, but we all know it happened, yet no one ever talks about it. No one seems willing to go into detail about what happened and what caused it. What I do know, since I have been looking at some of the old articles from then, is that the police did something similar - they wouldn’t talk too much about the details of the cases they were dealing with, yet it was obvious something bad was happening. Your mom was the sole survivor of your family, Ana, and then she left Clermont.”

  “Yeah, I know, but she never told me why she left or why we came back. I think she’s trying to protect me. You don’t need me to tell you that she’s obviously failing.”

  “Logically, I think what we need to do is learn more about everything that happened, but the problem we have is that everyone here seems to keep quiet in the hope that they’d be able to protect the town from knowing the truth. The police know something more is happening, and they’ve made the decision to protect people, even though that might actually lead to more people being killed.”

  Unusually, there was no one in the library when I walked in after the final bell had rung, but then, maybe that was because people didn’t want to be hanging around when it seemed like everyone who’d died was a student. I waited at the seat I normally sat in for a few minutes, and then, just like before, Alice walked out to join me. “Hello, Ana. I wasn’t expecting to see you today.”

  “Do you always know when I’m going to come to the library?”

  “I have an idea, most of the time.” She studied me. “Do you need something?”

  “Mom still isn’t willing to tell me what’s happening, and yesterday…” I nibbled my bottom lip. “I hate not knowing, but I’m not going to ask you to tell me. I feel like that would be unfair of me.” I smiled at her. “What I would like to do is ask you about something I saw yesterday, in the hope that you can give me an idea of whether or not I’m on the right track.”

  “Honestly, I think Lilah’s making a monumental mistake. She knows better, but, unfortunately, nothing is going to change her mind when it comes to protecting you.” Alice shrugged as she took the seat opposite me. “I would tell you if you asked, because you deserve to know, and yet I’m still grateful you haven’t asked, so I don’t end up getting on Lilah’s bad side.” Her eyes met mine. “Tell me what you saw yesterday.”

  “We went out to investigate the murder site, and I could see some sort of spirit where the body was reported to be dumped. He wasn’t very…I don’t even know the words to describe it, Alice. He was translucent, and I could see him, but not in detail. Not in the way I see you.”

  She gave me a smile. “This is all new to you. You’re not expected to know what you’re dealing with, but this is the point when Lilah should have told you everything, because sight like that is actually pretty unusual, even with those of us who are more unusual.” She ran he
r tongue over her bottom lip. “You were seeing the spirit, Ana, and the state it was in tells me there are two possibilities. The first is that the body had been left there long before it was found, but, having been through something similar to this before, I don’t believe that is the case. The second possibility is that someone drained their life force, down to the last dregs of it, so you couldn’t see the body as well as you could have, otherwise.” She sighed. “Tell me what you saw on the body.”

  “Tie marks or chafing from what looked to be rope, and there were these symbols going up his arms. I’m pretty sure the victim was ritually killed. It’s very concerning to me that none of this was even mentioned in the local paper.”

  “For now, they aren’t going to say anything. People, at least those who were here before, are going to have an idea of what’s happening, and they’re going to be doing what they have to in order to prepare for the worst-case scenario. This is one of those towns where everyone knows there’s something weird going on, but they don’t talk about it. If they don’t talk about it, then it isn’t entirely real…at least, until something like what happened before happens, making it impossible for them to keep pretending that everything is normal.” Alice shrugged. “I can understand that all this is frustrating for you. It was for me, back when this last happened, and it took me a long time to understand the choices people were making.”

  “Got any idea what I should do next?”

  “Ana, you and I both know you’re already started down a path, and you need to keep going down it. You know what the right choice is.” She stood and smiled down at me. “You’re not like Lilah, and I think that’s what scares her the most. If you were like her, you wouldn’t be walking this path. I think it’s a good thing, but there’s a chance she doesn’t, because she’s scared for you. She’s scared of how things are going to work out, but she doesn’t need to be. You’re the one we needed before.”