Shadowed (Fated) (2 page)

Evie’s heart kicked violently in her chest. She
reached over, grabbed the door handle and slammed the door shut on Tom, then
rammed her foot to the floor and tore out of the parking lot, managing to skid
across the road in a screech of tyres.

Blinded by rage and tears, she shot right through
the stop sign on Main Street, almost knocking Mrs Lewington, her mother’s
boarder, clean off her feet.

Ignoring the old woman’s protests and the stares of
several townsfolk, Evie kept driving as if she believed that by driving fast
enough she could somehow put enough distance between herself and the past.

As she tore up the road towards her house Tom’s words played on a loop
in her head.

Everyone believed that Lucas had ditched her and
that’s why she was acting the way she was. As if she’d ever act this way over a
boy breaking up with her. Tom had no idea. None of them did. And she knew that
it was partly her fault – she hadn’t told them the truth. How could she?
What would she say?
Oh, by the way I’m
actually a demon Hunter. Yeah, just like Buffy. But no, I can’t prove it
because we killed all the demons and saved the world, so you’ll just have to
take my word for it.

And Tom expected her to go and see the school
guidance counsellor! She laughed under her breath as she swung into her
driveway. And tell them what exactly? That she had issues because her boyfriend
had been stabbed to death right in front of her? That she dreamt every waking
moment, and every sleeping moment too, of finding the man who’d done it and of
killing him?

Should she tell them about Cyrus, a Hunter just
like her, who had sacrificed himself – taking her place – to end
the war no one had even known was raging all around them? Should she go all out
even, and admit that she had nightmares about Thirsters? And about demons with
razor-backed tails and ones with acid-coated skin? Should she admit that, when
she finally managed to get to sleep at night, it was only after taking pills
pilfered from her mother’s bathroom cabinet and that when she slept it was with
one hand under her pillow, her fingers locked tight around the hilt of a knife?
Should she tell them she was too scared to look in the mirror these days
because she didn’t recognise the girl staring back at her?

Maybe when she was done telling the school
counsellor all about it, and if she wasn’t already locked up in a padded cell,
she could write an essay for her English teacher on the subject of fate. She
had so much personal experience to flavour it with. She could tell him all
about how she’d been told she was the fabled White Light, whose destiny was to
end the war between humans and unhumans. And how, like an idiot, she’d believed
it all, and it had turned out to be a lie.

There was no such thing as fate. There was only
life. And death. And, in between, only heartache and hurt.

She pulled up in front of the house and killed the
engine. Her mother was home. She could hear her upstairs, talking on the phone.
Evie’s senses had sharpened to needle points in the last eight weeks. She
didn’t know at what point they’d stop improving – when she could hear the
termites burrowing through the wooden stairs in the basement perhaps? She’d
learnt to drown background noises out until they became a fuzzy white noise in her
head, similar to the sound of the river rushing at the bottom of the orchard
behind the house.

She skirted around the house to the back veranda.
The leaves had almost all fallen. The trees were standing knobbly branched and
embarrassed almost as far as the eye could see. She looked away deliberately
before her eyes could fix on the tree she’d climbed with Lucas but it was too
late. Her feet had already paused, tripping on some tree roots buried beneath a
pile of leaves and her memory had already gone ahead and hit the replay button,
even though remembering that day felt like someone was prising her rib cage
open with rusty forceps and poking her heart with a blunt scalpel.

She could see Lucas standing balanced in the fork
of the tree, reaching down with one hand and pulling her up as if she weighed
less than nothing. She shuddered a little in the cool air as she remembered how
he’d her caught around the waist when she’d lost her balance. How he’d smiled
and the sunlight had brushed his face, making shadows dance across his lips.

A howl brought her out of her daydream. She spun
around. Lobo was standing on the top step of the veranda, nose to the air. He
started whining as she walked towards him. He’d stopped leaving the safety of
the veranda since he’d been attacked by a Mixen demon. Her mum was going crazy
at him for doing his business on the bottom step.

‘Hey boy,’ Evie said, dropping to her knees and
burying her face in the husky dog’s fur. He licked the side of her face in
greeting.

‘There are no monsters anymore, you hear?’ she
whispered. ‘They’re all gone. They can’t come back.’ She closed her eyes. ‘They
can’t come back,’ she repeated, feeling the serrated edge of her own words
ripping into her flesh.

‘Evie! Is that you?’

‘Uh-oh,’ Evie whispered, getting slowly to her
feet. ‘Better get behind me, boy.’ She shouldered her bag and reached with a
sinking feeling for the screen door.

Her mother beat her to it.

‘I’ve just got off the phone with your principal,’
she announced, yanking open the door. Evie was sure her mother had lost a few
pounds and gained several new worry lines around her mouth in the last two
months and the knowledge that she was responsible weighed heavily on her.

‘Well?’ her mother demanded when Evie said nothing.
‘Are you going to explain to me why you just walked out of your English class?
You can’t keep cutting school, Evie, storming out whenever you feel like it!’

Evie sighed loudly and felt Lobo inch himself forward
and rub himself against her leg. She reached a hand down absently and stroked
him. ‘Mum, do we have to do this now?’ The truth was she really didn’t have the
energy, not after the conversation she’d just had with Tom.

‘Now?’ her mother yelled. Evie looked up in shock.
Her mother never yelled. Not even after Evie had turned up at the crack of
dawn, after having gone missing with Lucas and walked like an ashen-faced
zombie to her room. Not even after she’d stayed there for four days, curled on
the bed, facing the wall, refusing to eat or talk or admit where she’d been.

‘Yes, we are doing this now,’ her mother went on,
‘because there never seems to be a good time. I thought if I waited then maybe
things would eventually get better. But it’s been two months and you still
haven’t said a word about what happened to you. And what am I supposed to
think, Evie? Answer me that? You disappear for days with that boy …’

‘Lucas,’ Evie said through a clenched jaw. ‘His
name is Lucas.’

‘You disappear with him without so much as a
goodbye or a note, and the next thing I know I get a call that you’re in New
Mexico – that he’s abandoned you.’

‘He didn’t abandon me,’ Evie growled.

‘Well, what else am I supposed to think?’ Evie’s
mother sighed, her tone softening. ‘We’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since.
And then when I find you’re not even at the gas station where you said you’d be
– well …’ She shook her head, words apparently deserting her. ‘Can you
even imagine how worried I was? And you didn’t even think to call me and tell
me where you were?’

Evie glared at the ground, feeling her eyes tearing
up. She knew that her mother had a right to be mad at her, but there was so much
anger inside her own body that she couldn’t see past it enough to do anything
about her mother’s. Everything was so impossible, so tangled up. She wished she
could just fall into her mother’s arms and cry, and tell her everything and
have her soothe it all away, but even if she could open up about what had
happened, there were no words that could soothe it away anyway.

‘Evie,’ her mother said more gently, using the same
pleading tone that Tom had tried in the car. ‘Please, talk to me.’

Her face was contorted with worry. And Evie knew
she was responsible, just as she was responsible for the pain and suffering of
dozens of other people – of Cyrus’s mother Margaret, and the rogue
Hunters Vero and Ash. And, of course, Lucas’s sister, Flic. If Evie had died
instead of Cyrus, instead of Risper, instead of Lucas, she wondered how much
less suffering there would be in the world? No one except her mother would miss
her. She felt a pang that twisted itself into the unbreakable knot of emotions
inside her. Steeling herself against the pain and her mother’s indignation,
Evie rushed past her, heading for the stairs, her chin tucked in tight to her
chest.

‘Evie!’ her mother called after her as she trudged
up them, ‘you can’t keep on behaving like this.’

Evie slunk into her bedroom and closed the door,
trying to block out both her mum’s shouts and the screaming voice of guilt in
her head. She crossed to her desk, which she’d swept clean of everything. All
her old magazines, term papers, essay notes and books were stashed in a
cardboard box inside her closet, already coated in dust. She’d taken down all
the photographs that had been stuck on the walls, as well as the list of
colleges she’d intended to apply to, and in their place she’d tacked up a sheet
of paper with a single word on it:

VICTOR

She stared at it for several minutes, then pulled open a drawer and took
out a piece of paper. On it were fragments of text, drawn from memory, as complete
as she could make it.

From two who remain a White Light will be
born

A purebred Hunter fated to be the White
Light

Standing alone in the final fight

To sever the realms by passing through
the light

Memories will rise, shadows will fade.

Facing an army from the realms

The sun, the giver of life and the light

Together will stand and fight

And one will sacrifice himself

Closing the Gateway by walking back
through

Crossing into the dark, memories will
fade and shadows fall

Evie dropped the sheet of paper back onto the desk. She didn’t know
why she kept looking at it. The thing was done. The prophecy had come true. She
had never been the White Light. It had been Cyrus all along. Anger ripped
through her every time she thought about it. The Sybll were worse than the
witches in
Macbeth
. At least the
witches got the right person. They hadn’t gone telling Macduff he was going to
be king.

She walked over to the bed and flopped down on it,
curling onto her side, her hands sliding beneath the pillow and pulling out a
crumpled T-shirt. She balled it up and held it against her face, breathing in
deeply and closing her eyes as the scent of Lucas overwhelmed her. It was
fading but she could still smell him – a trace of citrus and of late
summer days, hazy with smoke and horses.

Her mother was right about one thing, Evie thought
to herself as she lay there clutching the T-shirt to her lips – she
couldn’t keep on behaving like this. She needed to do something before she went
mad, before all the anger inside her erupted in a lethal, all-consuming
torrent.

Her eyes flew open and settled on the piece of
paper above her desk.

Victor.
Once she had found Victor – and
killed him – then she’d feel better.

Her mother was calling her down to dinner. Evie rolled off the bed,
putting one heavy foot in front of the other. She was so tired. She knew she
probably looked like a train wreck but she no longer cared. It had been weeks
since she’d looked in a mirror. She had covered the one in her room with a
scarf, and stood with her back to the basin every time she brushed her teeth to
avoid having to see her reflection in the bathroom cabinet.

She forced herself down the stairs, wary at what
admonishments her mother might be dishing up alongside dinner. But when she
made it into the kitchen she saw her mother had regained her calm.

‘Joe’s coming over later,’ her mum said, bustling
about the table, pouring Evie a glass of juice.

Evie raised her eyes. Her mum was keeping her own
gaze firmly fixed on the tabletop. She’d started humming. Evie smiled quietly
to herself as she watched the blush creep up her mother’s neck. There was one
thing to be glad of at least. Evie’s old boss, Joe, was a good man and her mum
deserved someone in her life who made her happy, seeing how Evie was failing
monumentally on that score.

‘You know, Joe said he’s holding your job for you,’
her mother told her, sitting down at the table.

Evie picked up her fork and started toying with the
food on her plate.

‘What do you want me to tell him?’ her mother
asked.

When Evie didn’t answer she hurried on. ‘Well,
maybe you could tell him yourself, later. I think it might be a good idea, you
know. The diner was always a good job. Much better than that silly boutique. I
told you it wouldn’t last a month and I was right.’