Demon High (10 page)

Unfortunately, I couldn’t leave my thoughts behind with it. Doubts, worries and general anxiety haunted me throughout Biology 101. I set my scalpel down on the table and let my lab partner, Sheila Reynolds, take over.

“Cool,” she squeaked as the frog’s chest cavity fell open, revealing his lungs and guts.

I stared at the clock, wishing I could move the second hand with my mind.

“Don’t concentrate too hard, Ms. Dent. I’ll start to think you aren’t enjoying the lesson.” Mr. Parsons, the biology teacher, wandered by.

I twisted my mouth into a half smile and picked up the forceps. I had successfully pinned back a flap of frog skin to the wax lined-tray, when Brittany appeared in the doorway. She didn’t glance at me, and I studiously followed her example, concentrating on my green friend.

“Lucinda.” Mr. Parsons motioned to me from the doorway.

I dropped the forceps with as much feigned regret as I could muster and moved his direction. He held up a hand to stop me. “Take your things. I don’t think you’ll make it back before the end of class.”

He gave me a concerned smile that sent ice shooting through my veins. I grabbed up my books and jogged from the room.

Brittany was waiting for me outside the door. When she saw me, she started walking.

“What’s going on?” I asked, skipping steps to keep up.

“Your grandmother called. She needs you to come home,” she said.

“Nana? Is she—.”

Brittany shot me a don’t-be-difficult look. I realized then this was a Brittany-thought-up plan to get me out of class.

“I need to show you something.” She took a sharp left, cutting through the freshman hall to get to the office. “Caldera High has new students.
Two
new students.”

I knew how she said it, this wasn’t going to be good.

o0o

I wasn’t sure what Brittany’s announcement meant exactly or how it affected me, until we rounded the corner of the office threshold and I saw the two students in question.

Two of the demons from our Friday night circle. The lost-looking guy and the oversexed female.

“Oh, Lucinda, you’re here. Your grandmother called. She isn’t feeling well and needs you to pick her up at the doctors’. I guess she took the bus there.” Mrs. Adler, the office secretary, pulled a red push pin off her bulletin board and handed me the note that had been tacked under it. “Here’s the number, if you need to call her back.”

I glanced down at it. It was for the free clinic. Brittany was thorough.

When I looked back up, the male demon was analyzing me. I swallowed and dropped my gaze. People didn’t look at me like that; they didn’t notice me at all.

That he did made me forget for a second what he was. I smiled.

“I hope your grandmother feels better soon,” he said. Despite his words, his face remained impassive.

“Oh, yes, family is so important.” The female demon sidled up next to him. She was dressed differently than she had been in the circle. They both were, actually, but her change was more obvious.

Her clothes were modern and expensive looking. Her hair was shorter too, still long but not twisted up in the painful way it had been in the circle. And she was wearing make-up with the same light but effective touch Brittany’s always had. She even had the smoky eye.

She ran her fingers down the male’s arm, but her gaze was on me. She was smiling, as if she had a secret no one else was in on. Which, of course, she did, at least as far as the adults present were concerned.

I tried to smile back, but my lips refused to move. The boy she was stroking didn’t smile either though. In fact he stiffened, and the girl dropped his arm as if she’d been shocked.

I frowned wondering what had passed between them, but Mr. Finney placed a hand on my shoulder. “We all hope she’s doing well. We’ll plan on seeing you tomorrow.” And I was shoved out the door. Not literally, but it felt that way.

The demons watched as I walked to the school’s front door. I could feel their eyes on my back. I had no idea what Brittany had been thinking. I couldn’t leave the school, not when two demons had just appeared.

I stepped out the door and turned, determined to find an excuse to go back inside.

“If you are going to hum, you might at least pick something up-to-date.” Brittany had snuck out a side door and circled around to the front. She stood with one hip cocked and her book bag slung across her chest. “Funny thing. I have a dentist appointment my mother totally forgot about. Looks like I’m leaving too.” She adjusted the weight of the bag a bit and waited for my reply.

I shook my head. “There are demons in there.”

She looped her thumb under her bag strap and moved it higher onto her shoulder. “Yeah, I know and you stood me up at lunch.”

When I didn’t reply, she continued, “You think I just wanted an excuse to get pedis? Not…” She glanced down at my worn tennies. “That I don’t think you could use one.”

I scowled. She rolled her eyes, grabbed me by the arm and started marching me toward the parking lot. “We can’t talk here. The offs—” She jerked her head toward the office we’d just left. “—will get suspicious.”

Realizing there was truth to that, I let her lead. However, halfway to her snazzy import, I jerked away. “We’re clear now. Talk. And first up better be how this—” I waved my hands above my head. “—is going to get us back inside where we can watch those demons.” I moved from one foot to the other, suddenly unable to stand still.

She leaned against a beat-up 4x4 and pulled a palette of lip gloss from her bag. At first her taking time to fix her makeup annoyed me, then I realized Brittany’s lip gloss was my humming. After smoothing the shimmery pink stain over her already perfect mouth, she snapped the lid closed. “We don’t need to get back inside, not immediately anyway. We need time to research, think.”

“There are demons in there.” I said the words slowly because obviously she was missing this very large, very important point.

“Yeah, and if they were going to possess everybody or whatever it is demons do, they wouldn’t have bothered going through enrollment. I mean, who does that? They’re demons. You think Mrs. Adler’s going to take them down if they try to bowl past her?”

In some strange way Brittany’s line of thinking made sense, or maybe I was just so mentally exhausted I wanted it to make sense. Still, I couldn’t quite get my body to settle down. I twisted back and forth a few times, facing her then the building, then back again. Finally, seeing she wasn’t going to make any move to return to the building, I gave up.

My gaze still locked on the building, I let my body slide down the side of the 4x4 until I was squatted next to one over-sized tire. “So, what all do you know?”

She hadn’t said she had an inside scoop, but I knew she did. She was Brittany after all.

She dropped onto the ground beside me. With both of us sitting, we were completely hidden from anyone walking in or out of the school.

“Nellie Gwyn is the girl. She’s definitely the demon we saw Friday night. You should have seen her when Shane Bollock and company went strutting by. Her tongue practically darted out of her mouth, like a snake.” Brittany muttered the last, made me wonder if Brittany didn’t appreciate the competition. I’d never seen her flirt with Shane or any guy, but she was used to being the axis of attention at school, everywhere I guessed.

“Her clothes are different. I think I saw that outfit in Elle.” She frowned. “In the pile of stuff we gave Theodore.”

 That made sense.

“Oh, and she lost the accent, did you notice?”

I hadn’t, but again, made sense. “She’s a demon,” I said. It was beginning to sound redundant, but it said it all—why we should be inside
doing
something, why Nellie was suddenly a fashion plate who talked like a local, everything except….

“Why are they here?” I asked.

Brittany held her lip gloss palette out to me. I just stared at her.

She shoved the overpriced bit of plastic and shine back into her bag. “That’s more your area, isn’t it? I don’t know anything about demons. I know gossip.”

I sighed. “Okay, what else did you learn?”

Her eyes brightened. “This is the best part. The guy, his name is Oscar. Oscar Mullin.”

“The dead guy?”

“What do you think?” Her expression said she wanted it to be true.

I rubbed my hand over my forehead. “Could be, I guess. Humans can become demons.”

“Did he sell his soul? Like Theodore?” she asked.

I filled her in on what I’d learned from Mum’s book.

“So, you think he’s the last one? He seems kind of….”

“Hollow?” I finished.

“Yeah, that.” She tugged her bag closer to her chest and hugged it against her. “They’re real, aren’t they? This isn’t a game.”

I smashed down the top of my battered backpack for no reason except it gave me something to do. “Yeah, they’re real.”

We were silent for a minute.

“Lucinda,” she murmured. “This probably means my cousin didn’t just run off.” She looked at me, but I had nothing to say. Nothing that would make anything better. After a second she looked away, out over the parking lot. Tears glimmered in her eyes. She pressed the pad of her ring finger to the corner, wiped the tear on her shoulder and inhaled. “We fucked up royally, didn’t we? What are we going to do?”

It was a damn good question.

With no other plan, Brittany convinced me doing some research was a better bet than charging into the school, holy water boiling and crucifixes blazing. That looked all cool on TV, but wasn’t a serious option in real life, at least not for us. We weren’t demon hunters. And before we sent them back to hell, if we could send them back to hell, we needed to find out why they were here…and if they had done anything to Brittany’s cousin and his friends.

We stopped by my house first for Mum’s book, then went on to Brittany’s for high speed Internet and a sleek new computer.

She pulled her car into the drive, brazenly parking in the open even though school was still firmly in session.

“My parents won’t be home until after six. Dad’s at work and Mom’s doing a spa day,” she explained.

Somehow I doubted Brittany would have hidden anyway. She would have just talked her way around any questions about her early release. It’s what she did.

Brittany settled in front of the computer while I thumbed through the book. There was no noise except the click of her mouse and the flipping of my pages. It was the kind of quiet you feel. We’d been at it for only a couple of minutes when she shoved her chair back. “You need to read this.”

I scuffed my chair toward the computer. Loaded on the screen was a page of information on a woman named Nellie Gwyn. She’d lived in the 1600’s, and according to the web site, she was mistress to a king. She’d also proudly proclaimed herself a whore on more than one occasion.

“Sound like our demon?” Brittany asked.

I didn’t answer. I’d spotted something else. “Scroll down,” I ordered. Brittany lifted a brow at my tone, but complied.

And there in all her virtual glory was Nellie—our Nellie. It was a painting and not an exact match, but close enough I had no doubt the woman dressed in gold brocade was the same one we’d seen in our circle, and then again today at school, dressed much more conservatively in designer boots, jeans and a peasant blouse.

“I think she’s had a nose job.” Brittany prodded her own perky organ.

I squinted at the picture. She was right. Nellie had undergone a few modifications of the rhinoplasty variety. “It’s her, though,” I mumbled.

Brittany tapped her finger on the mouse. “What’s it mean? You think she sold her soul like Theodore? Maybe to get the king’s attention?”

I twisted my lips to the side. “Could be. She seems awfully cocky for someone who sold her soul, though.”

“Maybe she was always a demon. You think that’s why she was so outspoken about the whore thing? So unashamed?” Brittany twisted her lips to the side. She sounded a bit wistful. “Normal people don’t admit things like that. Even when everyone knows they’re true.”

I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. She leaned forward and clicked through a few more pages. After a while she removed her hand from the mouse. “I don’t see anything that would explain what she’d want at Caldera High. Maybe she was bored, or lonely.”

I stared over Brittany’s shoulder at the computer. “I don’t think demons get lonely.”

She blew out a breath. “Everyone gets lonely, Lucinda, if they don’t have friends.”

Again I expected her to say more, but she turned back to the computer. She typed Oscar Mullin’s name into the search box and started clicking. I returned to my book. A few moments later, she tapped on her desk. “It’s him.”

I closed the book on my finger. “How do you know?”

“Another picture. It’s on the county history museum site. It took me a while to find it.” She pointed at the screen. The history museum’s site was a nightmare. I’d tried to navigate it more than once while working on a paper, and I’d failed to find anything, even when I used the site’s search function. But Brittany had worked her magic and somehow dug out a faded oval image. It showed a teen wearing a somber dark suit, a stark white shirt, and what I thought was called a cravat. It was his shoulder-length curly hair that gave him away though, that and the morose shadow that seemed to hang around him. I bit my lower lip. Even in the somber 1800’s image there was something appealing about him, something that drew me in.