Demon Heart (The Darkworld Series Book 3) (3 page)

My phone buzzed again. I picked it up, thinking it was Leo, but the number came up as unknown.

The devil knows your secret.

I stared.
Who has my number this time?
I’d had cryptic messages before, but I couldn’t tell if it might be the same person.

It had been so long since the others that I’d all but forgotten about them. But just before I’d first encountered the doppelganger, someone had messaged me with the claim that
A shadow has your face
.

Was
it the same person? Who else could possibly know?
Is it a warning? Or a threat?

“It’s not a very good one. Nice try,” I told my phone.

It buzzed back at me, and I nearly dropped it. Another message had crossed wires with the first.
Tell no one else what you are.

I felt half-tempted to dial the number, but something stayed my hand.
Tell no one.
One person always said that.

The one person I wanted to avoid.

Great.

ire sprang up all around me, orange flames licking at my skin. I flinched away from the burning, writhing wall, which cut off any chance of escape.

I stood in a large room, a bedroom. Through the haze of smoke I could see a four-poster bed, its feathery curtains ablaze. Flickering tendrils of fire ate away at the posh-looking furniture, smoke gushing out in clouds. On the wall opposite hung a magnificent, gilt-framed painting of a girl with long, curly black hair. As I watched, the paint peeled away from the background as the ever-spreading blaze devoured it. Underneath the roar I heard a whimper and realized I wasn’t alone.

A girl crouched in the corner of the room, arms wrapped around her knees, apparently oblivious to the fire raging around her. I tried to walk over to her, but a wall of flames barred my way, flaring out of the lush carpet.

“Stay… out…”

The girl raised her head, but she didn’t seem to see me standing there. She was older than I’d thought; her hunched position had made her look like a child, but she was probably around the same age as me. Her dark hair spilled from a bun, and her gown, similar to the one in the painting, was crumpled and stained, as though she’d fallen in the mud outside.

“Stay… out.”

She looked right through me, and I gasped. They shone violet. A demon’s eyes.

She doubled over, coughing. I tried to call to her to get out of the burning room, but it was like something had stapled my mouth shut.
Dreaming. I’m dreaming.

“Stay… out!”

Her eyes flashed again, turning grey-black, ordinary, human. I recognised it. She was fighting possession with everything she had.

“Is this what you want?”

The demon used her mouth to speak, but didn’t need to; its voice sounded in my mind, sliding through me like an ice-cold knife.

“I’ll burn you,” she said, in a tremulous voice. “I’ll burn with you.”

“Then burn.”

A single tear fell from the girl’s eye before the demon’s replaced it again, and with a cry, she leapt across the room, towards the flames.

Her skin ignited like paper, and her scream ripped through me. Darkness crowded my vision, and I awoke.

“Are your dreams always this violent?”

Crap.
I wriggled around, disorientated. I still couldn’t see. For a second I wondered why I lay on the floor, and then I remembered that Cara had commandeered my bed for the night, leaving me to sleep on the camp bed. Somehow I’d ended up underneath it, tangled in my covers―which explained why I couldn’t see anything but darkness. I hoped I hadn’t been shouting in my sleep.

“Only when I’m sleeping on the floor.”

I wiped away the tears as I clambered awkwardly back onto the camp bed. It attempted to tip me off again.

“You sleep okay?” I asked her, groaning as my back protested against lying back on the collapsible bed.

“Not great. You need to turn down your heater. It’s boiling in here.”

So it was. No wonder I’d been dreaming about fire.

I still felt thoroughly unsettled. Generally, when my dreams were that vivid, it was because of a demon. The fortune-teller had explained that demons had license to enter the dreams of anyone with a close connection to the Darkworld. Lucky me. They’d enjoyed giving me sleep paralysis, dreaming of being frozen, then awakening to find I’d unconsciously used magic in my sleep and couldn’t move a muscle. But fire? Not exactly a demon’s friend. I’d figure this one out later.

Cara stretched, groaning like she’d been the one sleeping on a camp bed. “What’s the plan for today?”

“Want to walk to Blackstone?”

“Sure. I wanna take a look at the market.”

Cara had arrived the night before, straight from Edinburgh. We’d got takeout from Bargain Burgers and watched movies until the early hours.

“Sarah’s working this morning,” I said. “And Alex is out at one of her clubs. Archery, I think.”

“You aren’t a member?”

“God, no. I’d take my own eye out.”

Cara laughed. “Fair point.”

Mandeep had gone out, too, so Cara and I left the flat alone. We ran into Pete on the way out, on his way back from last night’s fifteen-hour bar crawl and looking decidedly worse for wear.

“Are you new?” he asked Cara blearily. “You have the most beautiful walk.”

“You look like shit,” Cara said, raising her eyebrows as he hugged the kitchen door.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’d better get out before he vomits on one of us.”

We hurried outside. Pete had most likely spent the night in pursuit of Danielle, the girl from the flat upstairs, on whom he’d nurtured a hopeless crush for the past six months.

Flakes of snow drifted around us as we began the walk through the woods towards Blackstone village. The strong gale bent the spindly trees backwards, and the rain from the day before turned the leafy path to mush.

“I should have brought hiking boots,” Cara muttered.

I grinned at her. “Y’know, we could have signed up to this weekend’s hike to Ben Nevis. It’s supposed to be buried under six feet of snow.”

“No thanks.” Cara huddled inside her thick coat. “I’d prefer to keep all my fingers and toes.”

We more or less slid down the last part of the path, and Cara swore as our feet sank into marshy grass.

“Holy hell! Where’s the path?”

“Um… here,” I said, apologetically, trying to lead her onto the least swampy part of the track that led towards town. I tried to distract her by pointing out the ruin of the Blackstone family house and succeeded because she forgot all about the mud and stopped to stare at it.

The old manor house lay like a sad, sagging skeleton, its walls ripped away to bare the foundations. The surrounding area was scorched, and nothing grew there, even though it had been undisturbed for a century and a half.

“Jesus,” she said. “A whole family died in there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The town’s named after them; the survivor built it as a monument to their memory.”

That was the official story anyway, the one all the locals believed. But every magic-user in the area knew that the Blackstone family had been sorcerers, and their daughter Melivia had fallen for the promises of a rogue sorcerer who had tricked her into summoning a demon. That event had triggered the Demon Wars, as a group of demons led by a power-crazed sorcerer had invaded our world. The Venantium had defeated them, but it was far too late for the Blackstones. They’d all died, and Melivia had burned herself alive to kill the demon possessing her―

A sudden image of a girl running into an inferno ripped through my mind. It couldn’t be― Could it?

Was that what I dreamed?

I’d never dreamed of an actual place or event before. Usually my dreams of suffocating or freezing were the demons playing tricks on me. But this… could it be simple coincidence?

“Ash? Where are you going?”

I left the track and walked towards the house. I stood on tiptoe to get a closer look at the first floor, trying to see if any of the rooms bore any resemblance to the room in the dream… but it was hopeless, I realised almost instantly. The rooms had burned away to ashes, and the entire right wing of the house had been completely obliterated. Rotting floorboards hung over empty air, with gaping holes where the windows had been. I almost fancied I could still smell the burning, feel the smoke in the back of my throat, choking me.

Shaking my head, I turned back to Cara, and my heart jolted. The fortune-teller stood beside me, her long black coat billowing in the wind.

“Ashlyn,” she said, in her soft voice. She, like me, stared at the house, with an expression I couldn’t quite read. I’d known for ages that she could change her appearance using magic, but tended to forget about it. Now, however, her carefully blank features really did look artificial.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“I could ask the same of you.” Her gaze remained on the house, like she could see something I couldn’t.

“I’m giving Cara a tour of Blackstone,” I said, gesturing behind me. “Showing her all the, uh… sights.”

Cara stared openly at the fortune-teller as though she were a ghost. I supposed her ghostly pale face and silvery hair didn’t help that impression.

“I don’t believe we’ve met. Delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Cara.”

Cara finally remembered how to close her mouth. “Um… hi.” She gave a nervous laugh.

“Well, don’t let me interrupt your tour.”

The fortune-teller strode off in her usual brisk manner before I had the chance to blink.
She didn’t say what she was doing here
. And I’d totally forgotten to ask her about the weird messages.
Dammit.

By now, her retreating figure headed towards Blackstone. I could never figure out that woman. She defined mystery, a powerful sorceress who masqueraded as a fortune-teller by the name of Madame Persephone. She’d helped us―hell, saved our lives―on more than one occasion, most recently when we were trapped in the crypt with Jude, and it was her who’d got us off any charges of misusing magic from the Venantium―even me, after the doppelganger had made them believe me to be a dangerous rogue.

That still didn’t mean I trusted her. She’d spent most of my life also pretending to be my Aunt Eve, supposedly for the purpose of watching over me. It had been her who had sent me the amethyst pendant, my demon heart, on my eighteenth birthday. Lucifer, my higher demon ancestor, had given it to her to watch over―after she’d had an affair with him, something that completely stumped me.

Not that I was likely to get any more answers from her about
that.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to, really.

Cara still gaped after her. “Who the hell was she? She talks like she’s out of a book!”

“Crazy fortune-teller,” I said. “She’ll be on her way to the market now. You should get her to do you a Tarot reading.”

“No freaking way!” Cara shuddered, wiping mud off her boots. “She’d put a curse on me.”

“Nah, she wouldn’t.”

And Cara gave me a lecture on associating with fortune-tellers all the way into town. We made our way through streets that twisted like ribbons around Victorian houses and cosy cafes. Like all market days, stalls had sprung up all over the square, selling all kinds of paraphernalia, from second-hand DVDs and books to charms and jewellery. Cara, as expected, made straight for the stall proclaiming to sell amulets to ward off evil, although even she declined the “lucky charm” woman’s offer of a regular amethyst crystal shard which cost as much as a holiday to the Bahamas. She did, however, buy a pendant made of small crystals threaded onto a piece of string―in my opinion, still hugely overpriced, but nothing would deter Cara from her mission to repel supernatural forces. If only that kind of thing actually worked for me.