A Demon's Wrath: Part II (Peachville High Demons) (8 page)

But none of that was enough.

I tried to act patient, but at night after Lea had
fallen asleep, I often stayed up and read through the notes Andros
had taken about the Order of Shadows. I learned everything I could
about them and how their magic worked. I spent a lot of time drawing
pictures of the portal rituals, trying to make sense of what was
happening. I looked for any kind of clue that might show a weakness
or an opportunity to defeat them. I became obsessed.

What was the significance of the circle of black
roses? How were the demons summoned to the portal? Were they marked
and chosen beforehand? Or did the hunter only need to know their name
in order to summon them?

And why was it different when Aerden was taken?

Was he still alive somewhere? Would I ever see him
again?

The questions in my head haunted me at night when
I let them rule my mind. Some nights I felt like my head would split
apart from all the unanswered questions inside. I just wanted to know
the truth. I needed answers.

Answers that weren’t coming fast enough.

We studied the portals, the stones, the roses. We
listened to those who would talk.

But I wanted more.

In my mind, I had started to formulate a plan. If
I could just find the portal Aerden was taken through, maybe I could
go through long enough to find him and bring him home.

Only, finding the specific blue portal he’d
been taken through was harder than it sounded. Some days I felt like
I was going to lose my mind if we didn’t find it soon.

Then, one day when we were rebuilding some of the
houses in Sapuran, we got our first real breakthrough in a decade.

Lea and I were working on the roof of one of the
homes when the commotion began. We exchanged worried glances, then
got down and rushed to the other side of the village where a group of
demons had gathered around Andros and Ourelia.

We pushed through the crowd of worried faces.
“What is it?” I asked.

He looked at me with such intensity, my heart
nearly stopped. “A new portal has been found,” he said.

“What color stones?” I asked, barely
able to breathe.

“Blue.”

“Show me.”

The demon who had found the blue portal took us to
a location deep inside the caves of Muro, carved into the side of the
Black Cliffs. My heart sank when he brought us to the mouth of the
cave.

This couldn’t be the place where my brother
disappeared. In my vision when he was taken, he had been in an open
field, much like the one near Klashok.

Still, finding any portal was a victory.

“How did you find this?” I asked.

The young demon’s name was Jericho and he
was relatively new to our group. “I grew up near these caves
and like to come here sometimes when I want to be alone to think,”
he said. “So when Andros told us to start looking for signs of
portals, I thought maybe this would be a good place to hide one.”

“Good job,” Andros said. “I had
no idea the roses could even grow this deep in the rock.”

“The area here looks abandoned,” I
said. “Is it possible this portal hasn’t been used in a
long time?”

“Anything is possible,” Andros said.
He walked around the small circular area here at the end of the cave
that housed the portal.

“Do you feel it?” he asked. “Any
type of pull toward these roses?”

I moved closer to the circle of black and shook my
head. “Not even the slightest bit of magic. And look.” I
pointed where our footprints had disturbed the dust covering the
rocks. “No one has been for a very long time. Years. Maybe
decades.”

“Why would the Order abandon a portal?”
Andros asked.

I knew he didn’t expect an answer, but it
brought up all kinds of questions in my mind. Had something happened
to the witches on the other side? Or maybe the hunter who was
supposed to be protecting it? Without the hunter, maybe the portals
went inactive?

Frustration ate at my insides. I was so tired of
only having these tiny little pieces to the puzzle. We’d been
searching for so long. Where were all the answers? What were we
missing?

When Andros had said a blue portal had been found,
I’d gotten my hopes up, thinking maybe we had found something
that would make a difference. Maybe I had finally found Aerden’s
portal.

But what good was an abandoned portal? An inactive
portal was nothing to us. We might never know why the Order abandoned
this place.

I paced the area, my anger building with each
step. The power inside of me roared to life and I felt like I was on
the edge of losing control. I’d been so patient for so long,
but at this rate, we might never find the truth about my brother. I
couldn’t take it anymore. I was so tired of disappointment.

Ice gathered on my fingertips and even though I
tried to push it down, it continued to grow until my entire fist was
covered with frost.

“Denaer, it’s going to be okay,”
Lea said, touching my shoulder. “We’re going to find it.”

“When?” I shouted. I pulled away from
her, nearly knocking her backward. “When will we find the
answers? It’s been twenty-five years since Aerden was taken and
we’re no closer to finding him than we were back then.”

In my frustration, I slammed my icy fist against
the back wall of the cave, putting more strength into it than I
intended to.

The blow thundered through the corridor as my hand
punctured the molten rock. Ice spread in a circle around my fist, the
rock crackling and splitting as it froze.

I pulled my hand away and backed up, watching as
large cracks tore through the icy walls, then shattered like glass.

For a moment, I was afraid the whole place would
come down on top of us, burying us inside this cave like a tomb.

But only the back wall tumbled to the ground. A
thick spray of fog rose up from the remains of the wall as the warm
air in the cave began to melt the ice-encased rock.

I stared ahead, shocked by my own strength.

“Let’s get out of here before the
whole place caves in,” Andros said.

“Wait,” I said, just making out the
image of something glowing beyond the debris.

I lifted my arm to shield my face and stepped
forward, stepping carefully over the rubble.

“What is it?” Lea asked, coming up
behind me.

“Do you see it?” I asked. “That
blue glow?”

“I do,” Jericho, the demon who brought
us here, said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” I made my way
through the cool misty fog. The wall I’d brought down had been
several feet thick, but once I got through the worst of the debris,
the corridor opened up into a small room about a quarter of the size
of the portal room we’d been standing in.

It was a den of some sort. Rags lay in a pile on
the floor at my feet like a nest.

But it wasn’t an animal or beast who lived
here.

Along the far wall of the space was a bookcase of
dusty tomes.

As I stepped forward, something cracked beneath my
feet. I looked down and gasped at a scattered collection of human
bones.

These rags were not a bed. They were the clothes
this creature had been wearing when it died.

“What is it?” Lea asked, finally
reaching this side of the fallen wall.

I crouched down. This was exactly the kind of
break I’d been waiting for.

I picked up a bone and lifted it into the air.

“It’s a dead hunter.”

Andros pushed forward
into the small room. “A dead hunter?” His voice was soft,
almost reverent.

He studied the bones
and the rags.

“This means
they can be killed,” he said. “What if the hunter’s
death is what closed the portal?”

He crossed toward the
piles of books and trinkets along the far wall. His hand trembled as
he picked up the tattered tome at the top of the stack. He blew a
puff of air across the spine and dust flew out from it, hovering in
the air for a long moment before fluttering down to join the
long-settled decades of dust on the ground.

He crouched low and
opened the book, his eyes glued to the pages. His lips parted as he
read, his hand slowly rising to his mouth.

“What is
it?” Lea asked.

Tension gathered in the
room as we waited for him to answer. We’d never found a
hunter’s den before. We’d never even seen or heard of a
dead hunter or known if they were immortal. The true impact of this
find hadn’t even sunk in yet, but we all understood the
importance these books and belongings might have if they contained
any kind of information or clues about the Order of Shadows.

The look in Andros’s
eyes when he turned said it all. Heat spread across my skin and I
fell back against the broken wall of the cave.

“I’ve
never seen anything like this before,” Andros said. He turned
the page and scanned the contents, his breath coming faster. “There
are spells in here. I can’t understand all of it, but some
things are familiar. And there are diagrams. Maps.”

“Maps?”
I asked, my heart squeezing. “What kind of maps?”

“I’m
not sure,” he said. “I think they might be maps of the
human world.”

“What about
the other books there?” I asked.

Andros set the first
book down and Lea and I joined him near the wall to look through the
other items. Ourelia and Jericho searched the rest of the small room.

“Look at
this,” Lea said. She sat down in the dust and reached out for a
faintly-glowing stone half-covered in dirt and grime.

The moment her fingers
touched the stone, her eyes went wide and all the breath was pushed
from her chest. She looked at me, terror darkening her eyes as they
clouded from green to black. She reached for me, clutching my wrist.

In an instant, the
ground fell out from underneath us. The world spun in circles and I
had to fight to stay upright. I was blinded for a moment, unable to
tell where we were or what had happened.

But then, we landed in
a new time and place. When my sight returned to me, we were standing
in the hallway of a strange building.

I had no idea how we’d
gotten there, but something was definitely off about the whole thing.

Two human women stood
in front of us talking, but neither of them seemed to have even
noticed our presence. The color of this place was off, too, as if we
were in a faded version of reality, the edges of every surface
slightly blurred and muted.

As if we were caught in
a dream.

“What’s
happening?” I whispered, backing away from the women.

“I have no
idea,” Lea said. She looked down at the small round stone in
her palm. “Somehow this stone brought us here, but I have no
idea where here is.”

“Why
haven’t they even turned to look at us?” I asked.

Lea studied the women.
Carefully, she stepped forward, walking around them and even between
them. She lifted her hand up in front of one of the women’s
faces, but the woman continued her conversation without so much as
blinking.

“They can’t
see us,” she said.

Behind me, Andros
suddenly appeared in the hallway. It took him a moment to catch his
breath, but when he did, he was actually smiling.

“Do you
understand what’s happening?” I asked him.

“As if it
wasn’t enough for us to discover a dead hunter and her spell
books today, we’ve also discovered a hidden power of Lea’s.”

“I did
this?” she asked. She put her hand straight through one of the
women’s bodies, as if we were merely watching an apparition or
a memory.

“I’ve
heard of this ability but never actually known anyone who could do
it,” he said. “When you touched that stone, it somehow
triggered a memory. But not one of your memories. One of the stone’s
memories.”

She shook her head. “A
stone can have memories?”

“Yes,”
he said. “Everything has memories. Demons, places, objects.
Something about this stone held a memory so strong it triggered your
ability to see this memory. And in fact, not just see the memory, but
also to relive it.”

“So what
we’re seeing here is a memory?”

“Yes,”
he said. “We’re inside the stone’s memory. Look.”

He pointed to the two
human women. The taller one, an older woman with white hair, took out
a small box and presented it to the younger woman.

“Why can’t
we hear what they’re saying?” I asked.

Andros shook his head.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It could be that
this is a new power and Lea will need to work to gain more control
over it, or it could be that her powers don’t manifest sound at
all. Only time will tell just how strong of an ability this will be
for her.”

The younger woman
opened the box, tears in her eyes. She gasped at the blue stone
inside, happiness and gratitude in her expression.

But as the older woman
took the stone from the box, something about the memory darkened. My
stomach twisted as she grabbed the younger woman’s hand and
forced the stone against her skin.

The young girl’s
mouth curled into a painful grimace and her legs gave out from under
her. She fell to the ground, but the older woman never let go.
Instead, she slowly couched to the floor, keeping the stone pressed
firmly against the other woman’s palm. She was saying something
furiously and as she spoke, the younger woman’s skin began to
wrinkle and dry, as if sucking the life directly out of her body. Her
hair began to fall out in patches and her eyes dulled.

When the spell was
complete, the older woman smiled and stood. She straightened the
skirts of her gown and tossed the blue stone at the younger woman’s
broken body.

She wasn’t dead,
but she was changed. She was turning into a hunter. I don’t
know how I knew it, but I was sure that was what we had just
witnessed.

Then, as suddenly as
we’d appeared in that place, we left it again, sucked back
through time and space until we stood, once again, firmly on the
dusty floor of the forgotten cave.