Bitter Demons (19 page)

"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.

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.

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
Jackson'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.

When he poured through the portal, we forced
him into Maureen's body, as the ritual commands. At first, we
believed the ritual was a success. We waited for Maureen to wake
and accept us as sisters, but her body began to tremble
uncontrollably. Right away, the ritual room grew cold as ice, and a
feeling of desperation fell over me.

The demon ripped free of Maureen's body and
she fell lifeless to the floor. Several of the members rushed
forward to try to save her, but the demon lashed out with such
ferocious anger, it filled the room with hatred and fear. Chaos
erupted. Several loyal members of the Order were lost to us today.
Maureen and her mother. Gladys, one of my mother's friends from the
old days. Penelope, a sweet young girl of only twenty-eight who had
just been brought on as a member of our council. Jocelyn and her
sister Jacie were both also killed at the hands of this beast.

I cannot find the words to express the full
horror of today's events. Seeing the blood run along the floor of
the ritual room was the most disturbing and heart-breaking
experience of my entire reign as Prima.

Once I gathered my wits and recognized what
was happening, I knew we had to get the situation under control as
quickly as possible or we might lose the whole of our membership to
the demon's anger. I joined hands with the surviving witches and
somehow my training kicked in and I was able to remember the ritual
to contain a demon. A stone statue in the corner of the room was
perfect for containment.

As we started to chant, I felt a strange
power coursing through me. Not a foreign power, exactly, but more
powerful and more pure than anything I'd ever felt before. Once we
joined together, we were able to subdue the demon quickly. We
transformed him into a human male. We split his power from his body
and stored it in the stone statue. With his power taken, he
collapsed onto the floor of the cold ritual room.

I do not yet know what we are going to do
with him. It is rare for a demon to overpower a girl of eighteen,
so I know we have a very dangerous and powerful demon on our hands.
We will call him Wrath. I will write tomorrow when the demon has
awakened and I have the opportunity to question him. For now, he is
held on the third floor in shackles and chains.

My hands were shaking so hard by the time I
got to the bottom of the journal entry, I could hardly turn to the
next page. Another entry, in the same handwriting as the first,
detailed the Prima's questioning of the demon. They called him
Wrath because of his anger and thirst for blood. After days of
questioning, they finally got him to talk. He told them that his
brother, Aerden, had disappeared a long time ago.

It took him years to figure out where his
brother had gone and who had taken him there. He discovered the
Order's servant in the shadow world and followed her, tracking her
until he understood how she stole demons from his world and moved
them to another one. He'd made sure he was the next one chosen for
this particular gate, and when he had the chance, he came through,
determined to kill anyone who stood in the way of him being
reunited with his twin brother, Aerden.

Tears ran down my cheeks at the story that
unfolded through the journal. Jackson came through the portal in
demon form, looking for his brother. He'd killed six women before
he was trapped in human form, his powers stripped from him.

The thought of Jackson killing all those
people was hard to process. My hands wouldn't stop shaking and my
entire body was tense. The image of him as some dark shadow coming
through with nothing but rage and hatred made me feel sick to my
stomach.

But how could I blame him for what he'd done?
If someone took my twin brother away and forced him into eternal
slavery, I'd be angry too.

Only, why had they kept him alive all this
time? Why not just bind him to human form and then kill him? Why
was he forced to stay here in Peachville for all these years? It
didn't make sense. If the witches hated him so much and he was
despised for what he'd done, why was he still alive at all?

I searched through the rest of his file, but
couldn't find an answer. The final page in the folder was a single
note indicating that the stone statue that held Jackson's demon
power was still here in town.