Eat Your Heart Out (Descendants) (5 page)

CHAPTER 7

Daphne paced back and forth through the greenhouse, tapping a finger to her breastbone with the curved end of a trowel. She had a smudge of dirt on her T-shirt from the constant tapping.

“And you’re sure it was just the heart missing?”

Rachel lifted her head from her hands. A powerful headache poked behind her eyes, clawing through her brain. She hadn’t showered or even changed since she, Sid, and Bruno had raced back to Shipley with a dead werewolf in the trunk of their car. She pushed hair out of her face and pressed her hands to her eyes.

“Yes, Mom. The poor guy was beat up, but the only thing missing was the heart.”

More tapping. Daphne disappeared behind a row of hanging tomato plants and reemerged running a dirt-stained hand through her hair. The humidity in the greenhouse made her brown bob a ball of fluff. “Because there are certain species of banshee that also eat the liver,” she said, apparently continuing her first question with no regard for Rachel’s reassurances.

“Daphne,” Bruno said, arms crossed over his broad chest. “Listen to your daughter. We know what we saw.”

“It was just like Bernard,” Sid said. His voice was cracked and raw. Rachel knew he was probably reliving that horrible fight with Willem over the destroyed body of the troll. “It’s
got
to be Abbadon. Though I haven’t a clue why the demon is going for hearts.”

Bruno stood straight and scrubbed his hands over his shorn hair. One finger ran along the side of his face, tracing the line of the scar cutting from his cheek to his jaw. “We’ve got a lot of research to do. Let’s get started.”

* * *

Yet after nearly a full week of research, they were still at a loss. The tales about
Abbadon were sketchy at best. They knew exactly three things: The demon was immortal and had plagued a French village a thousand years ago, and it had been somehow contained in a vessel forged by a coven of witches. And this sparse information? It hadn’t been actually recorded until nearly four hundred years
after
Abbadon had been captured. That left a hell of a lot of gray area.

Rachel was going cross-eyed staring at the research. She pushed herself up from her seat at the dining room table and staggered into the kitchen for more coffee. The sky outside the kitchen window had faded from a brilliant blue to a bruised purple. In the distance, thunder growled.

A door slammed, and Rachel sloshed coffee over her hand. “Shit,” she yelped, dropping the mug in the sink and running her hand under cool water.

“There’s been another one,” Sid said by way of greeting.

Rachel groaned, and over at the table, Daphne’s shoulders sagged.

“What was it?” Kendra asked. She’d arrived back in Shipley from visiting her grandparents last night and jumped right into researching. A crease pulled the girl’s eyebrows together and her lips were sucked in as she watched Sid.

“A juvenile witch from the Savannah coven,” Sid said. “They found her tied in an abandoned warehouse minus her heart.”

A choking sound caught in Daphne’s throat. “A juvenile? God, that’s terrible. How old?”

Sid poured himself some coffee and slid a glance to Rachel, his face grim and his mouth pulled down at the corners. He sighed heavily—apocalyptically—before turning back to Daphne, Kendra, and Bruno hunched at the table. “She was in her twenties, but appeared to be around eight.”

“And you saw the body?” Bruno’s voice was savage. Rachel wasn’t sure if it was anger or despair that colored his words.

Sid closed his eyes for a long moment. “They wouldn’t let me. The juvenile’s mother … she was not in a state to show her daughter’s body. But I got it confirmed from another in the coven.”

Rachel slipped her hand down Sid’s arm and curled around his wrist. She squeezed, hoping it gave him some bit of comfort. She wished she had the power to give him strength. Sid seemed so tired, his skin ashen and a shadow of stubble crawling across his jaw. Sid shared another look with Rachel then tugged his hand free and pushed his horn-rimmed glasses further up his nose. Rachel frowned and chewed at the inside of her cheek. She tried not to feel slighted by the move and shoved her hand in her pocket before following Sid to the table.

Daphne was writing in a notebook. “So that makes—counting Bernard—five demons or half-demons found killed with their hearts missing. All concentrated around Georgia and South Carolina.”

Bruno leaned over the table to stare at the writing in Daphne’s notebook. “And none of the same species. A troll, a werewolf, a
selkie, a half-vampire, and now a juvenile witch.”

“Okay, and what connects them?” Sid’s arms were slack, one hanging at his side and the other curled limply around his coffee mug.

Rachel collapsed into her seat and stared at the stack of papers and books she’d been searching through. The words blurred on the pages. “Other than all being demons? Nothing? What does a seal woman have in common with a half-vampire?”

Bruno slapped a hand on the table, jolting Rachel. “There’s got to be something. We assume that
Abbadon is killing and consuming the heart, yes? So there must be something common connecting these victims that draws him.”

Rachel didn’t have an answer for Bruno. She didn’t even have the watery beginnings of an answer. She bent over a book she’d been reading. It was an eighteenth-century English translation of an early French demonology text. There was a lot about a suave werewolf who’d wooed and butchered the supple virgins of Renaissance Paris, but so far no mention of
Abbadon. Their greater demon apparently wasn’t sexy enough for this particular text. Rachel set it aside and picked up a sheaf of manuscript papers about the hunting habits of demons.

She flipped one page then another, but although her eyes ranged over the page none of the words penetrated her brain. She was like a full voicemail.
We’re sorry, but the brain you’re trying to reach is unable to receive more information at this time. Please try again later.

“I’m going for a walk,” Rachel said quite suddenly. Her back popped in three places when she stood.

“Want me to go with you?” Sid asked. His eyes were glassy when he met her gaze.

Daphne peered up at Rachel from where she’d bent over a roll of parchment faded with age. Her eyes flicked to Sid then back to Rachel. Heat crawled into Rachel’s cheeks. She shook her head. “No, I think I’d like to go on my own.”

The sky appeared sick. A swirl of purple and gray tinged with green.

Rachel stepped out the sliding glass door to the backyard and clicked it shut. She breathed deep and let her bare feet sink into the grass. The earth was warm against the soles of her feet, the grass coarse.

The line of magnolia trees at the back of the property were dull and nearly black in the failing light, the air around her shaded with that same sickly green that splattered the sky. A storm was coming. As if in confirmation, another growl of thunder rolled across the sky, long and low and menacing.

Rachel rubbed her hands down her bare arms and wished for a cardigan despite the heat still burning through the evening air. The air was thick, full of the promise of rain and the tang of lightning. She stepped farther into the backyard, closer to the reaching arms of a giant oak and into the shadows of the magnolia trees.

A wind kicked up, whistling through the branches overhead and making them groan. Under the oak, the world was painted in grays. Spanish moss dripping from the tree rustled in the wind, wavering like the tattered cloak of some old ghoul. Rachel shivered and walked faster.

She needed to clear her head, to find her focus. She knew how to do this, to study despite the ache in her eyes or exhaustion in her shoulders. Rachel stepped from the shadow of oak and stretched. She pushed her hands to the small of her back and arched. She let her head fall back, her mouth stretch open. She rolled her neck side to side,
then opened her eyes.

Rachel blinked quickly. What the—

Overhead, thousands of black shapes swirled in the sky. They were birds, thousands and thousands of them turning in a fierce circle. And not just one species. The black shapes varied in size, some flapping furiously and some soaring, yet they flew tight together. Swirling, swarming. They were a tornado. And the eye of their storm was directly over Rachel’s house.

The wind died, and the
bird calls prickled against Rachel’s upturned face. She shivered again at the sound. It was wrong, somehow, the birdsong. It spoke to some deep part of Rachel, the part that told her to flee. To get undercover immediately. But that deep part of her, that ancient instinct of predator and prey, knew there was nowhere safe from what these birds were screeching.

Rachel ran across the yard just as the first bird fell from the sky. Dead. A thud hit her shoulder, and another dead bird—a sparrow by the look of it—tumbled to the ground. Three more fell at her feet, a heron, another sparrow, and a hawk, and Rachel tripped trying not to step on them with her bare feet. Rachel wrenched her neck to the sky, but the birds were suddenly gone. Heavy gray clouds cluttered the sky and opened up, driving rain against Rachel’s skin and soaking her in an instant.

Her hands fumbled with the sliding door. The fine hairs along her arms stood on end. Static arced through the air, snapped around her with electricity. She heaved the door open as the world lit up in a shocking blue-white. There was a crack and a roar of thunder, and a fork of lightning connected with the metal rod atop the greenhouse. It split into a hundred serrated spikes and crawled across the glass panels of the greenhouse and burned into the ground. 

Rachel fell through the door and landed hard. She clamped her eyes shut, but jagged lightning still ghosted behind her eyelids. The air smelled like burning metal and scorched grass.

“Rachel!”

Rachel staggered to her feet, and her mom grabbed her shoulders, shook her.

“Are you okay?”

Rachel pushed her mom away and stumbled into the dining room. Her vision swam, and white bursts popped in the middle of her sight. Her knees quivered together, and she leaned heavily against the back of a chair.

“The signs,” she said.

Her sight was clearing, her head too. Three heads swiveled up to look at her, and she felt Daphne come stand beside her.

“Bruno,” she said again. “Before, you said you followed signs to Georgia. They showed you where Abbadon was. What were they?”

Bruno rubbed at his jaw, his eyes far away. “Lightning clusters, animal swarms, strange weather patterns. Spikes in electromagnetism.” The man coughed and stole a look at Sid. “It’s all very subjective, and quite a few on the Descendants Council don’t believe in it.”

“There’s a lot my father doesn’t believe in,” Sid growled.

Rachel flapped a hand through the air. “There was a swarm of birds directly overhead just now. Like,
thousands
of them. And then lightning struck the greenhouse. I’d call that a sign, wouldn’t you?”

Bruno nodded, slowly at first and then with vigor. He stood quickly, his chair scraping across the wood floors. He rounded the table and clapped Rachel on the back so hard she choked. “Rachel Chase, you are just as clever as Sid said. Outstanding job.”

Rachel dropped her eyes to the table and pursed her lips to hide how she smiled at the compliment. And something else: Sid had told Bruno she was clever? Warmth spread through her chest. Beside her, Daphne rubbed her back and leaned close. “That’s my girl,” she whispered.

On her other side, Bruno’s thick fingers flexed around the back of a chair.
“Rachel’s got the right idea. If we can’t find a pattern in Abbadon’s victims, we can
follow
the patterns to get to the demon before he strikes.”

Still seated at the far end of the table, Kendra cleared her throat. She’d been quiet since Rachel rushed back in, but now she looked up. Her blue eyes were troubled.

“I don’t want to sound like Sid’s dad or anything, but how can a lightning storm tell you there’s some big ass demon nearby?” Kendra frowned and sat back in her chair. “Sorry, but this is summer in Georgia. We get storms, like, all the time.”

Rachel looked from Kendra to Bruno. A muscle strained in the man’s neck. Kendra squirmed and self-consciously fluttered hands over her gills.

“I’ve held my tongue because you’re a friend to this family, but your opinion is not welcome.” Bruno’s nostrils flared and his jaw jutted out in anger. “What do you possibly have to add to the research? You’re a half-demon who has already proven you can’t be trusted.”

Kendra blinked against the nasty words. “Excuse me?”

Bruno’s hands clenched the back of the chair, his large knuckles straining against his scarred skin. “You heard me, young lady. You’re not entitled to be here. You’re not a Descendant, and you never will me. You’re just a demon.”

Kendra jumped to her feet, her chair crashing to the floor behind her. The air went thick and heavy, like another fork of lightning was about to crack through the roof and strike in the middle of them all. Anger built in Rachel’s chest and tightened in her shoulders.

“You know nothing about Kendra,” Rachel snarled. She stood straight and backed away from Bruno so she wouldn’t need to crane her neck to look up at him. How could this man, who was so supportive of her and Sid, say those things to Kendra? “Mr. Guillory,
you
are not entitled to say Kendra shouldn’t be here.” Her voice was crawling higher, getting louder. Her hands shook, so she balled them into fists. “You have no idea how Kendra has helped us, even though she doesn’t need to put herself in danger. You have
no
idea.”