Sorcerers of the Nightwing (Book One - The Ravenscliff Series) (14 page)

Devon gave a statement to the police when they arrived, but professed ignorance when Crispin insisted his attacker had “hands like claws.” Devon told police that in the rush to come to Crispin’s aid, he’d never gotten a good look at the kid.

That wasn’t true, of course, but he knew the creature wasn’t going to be caught by any police dragnet. In fact, Devon had gotten a good look at the
thing: except for the talons, he’d looked like an average kid, and that was what was so scary. The dumb-ass demons like the one that had come through his window the other night were not nearly so threatening as these clever ones, who could take the shape of humans. Devon realized he had to be on alert twenty-four seven now: at any time, those around him might not be what they seemed.

Like little
Alexander Muir?

The other kids at Gio’s all wanted to meet Devon after his display of strength. He was suddenly the kid to know, and the jocks were all telling him he should join the football team and the popular girls were all flirting with him. Cecily put a stop to that by announcing they had to get back home; her mother had called wondering where they were. Devon thought maybe she was making
that up, but he was just as glad to get out of there. All that attention made him uncomfortable.

They piled back into Flo and D.J. dropped Natalie off first. She lived in a small white house near the pier, where her father kept his boat. Then they brought Marcus home. He lived in a redbrick house with a white picket fence. His mom was outside raking leaves and gave Marcus a big hug as he came
walking up the driveway. Devon wondered what it felt like to have a mother.

Back at Ravenscliff, he took a long shower, feeling dirty from the encounter with the demon. Why were these attacks happening so often? Back home, the experiences with the demons had been rare and came with some degree of warning: a gradual increase in the temperature and the pressure around him. Here everything was
unpredictable and far more intense. It was as if by his very arrival in Misery Point he’d disturbed a long dormant hornet’s nest.

Devon let the spray hit his face. Dad sent me here to find the clues and discover my truth, a truth he apparently was not free to tell me. He turned off the shower and stepped out into the steamy bathroom. I’ve got to find the answers. And soon.

The thing at the
pizza joint had confirmed what he’d already concluded: that bolted door in the secret room must never be opened. Behind it lay creatures that their brother demons wanted liberated. But what connection did Devon have to them? Why did the demon tell Devon to open the door? Why was Devon the only kid in the world who knew demons and monsters were real?

And what was all this about Sorcerers and
Guardians of the Portals? And finally, who was the boy in the portrait who looked so much like him?

Devon was convinced Alexander held some of the answer in his fat little hands.

Dressing quickly, he headed down the corridor to the playroom. Once again he heard the inane laughter of that stupid clown and saw the blue flickering light of the television.

Alexander didn’t seem surprised
when Devon walked in. He just looked up at him from his beanbag chair, where he sat alternately watching the TV and reading about Huck Finn. His eyes reflected no astonishment, no guilt at seeing Devon. They were empty, as empty as anything Devon had ever seen.

“So,” Devon said. “Tell me what you think of Huck.”

“He ran around doing bad things,” Alexander replied, the touch of a grin playing
at the corners of his mouth.

“And what might you know about doing bad things, Alexander?”

“My teachers told me I was a bad boy.”

Devon sat down on the floor beside him. “I don’t think you’re bad. But I do think sometimes we all do bad things, things we wish later we could do over.”

The boy squinted at him. “So were you scared?”

“Did you want me to be scared, Alexander?”

The boy
shifted. Suddenly he seemed uncomfortable, less calculating, even—could Devon trust it?—sorrowful.

“Have you ever been scared, Alexander?” Devon asked.

The boy looks at him, suddenly all bravado. “No. I’ve never been scared.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The boy stood up abruptly. He strode over to his toy box, opening the lid and withdrawing a ball. He began bouncing it up and down.

“I’ll bet you were scared when they sent you off to that school,” Devon said. “I’ll bet you were scared when your father went away.”

“He’s coming back!” the boy said sharply, looking over at Devon.

“Who’s coming back?”

“And when he comes back, he’ll make everything okay!”

“Are you talking about your father?”

Alexander seemed to retreat into his thoughts. At the mention of his father
he seemed to grow sad. He stopped bouncing the ball and held it in his hands.

“If my father were here,” he said, “he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me.”

Devon stood, walking over to the boy. “Do you think something bad is going to happen to you, Alexander?”

The boy seemed to suddenly hear a sound far off in the distance. “It’s time for Major Musick,” he announced, almost dreamily.

“Alexander, let’s talk. Are you frightened of something? Talk to me about your father. Talk to me about—”

“It’s time for Major Musick,” he repeated, enunciating each syllable, as if Devon were the foolish child, the frightened idiot. The ball rolled away as Alexander headed back over to the television set.

Devon intercepted him. He took the boy by the shoulders and looked down into his
round button eyes. He was startled by the raw terror he saw there, but Alexander did his best to keep his eyes averted. For an instant Devon wanted to disbelieve what he saw, to dismiss it as Alexander’s game.
Pity me, the poor innocent frightened child, abandoned by my father
. But the kid was trying too hard to disguise his fear. He didn’t want Devon to know that he was scared any more than Devon
had wanted the boy to know of his own fright at being locked in that room the other day.

But what could be frightening him?

“It’s all right, Alexander,” Devon tried. “It’s okay to be frightened sometimes. We all get frightened once in a while. Tell me what’s wrong. Maybe I can fix it.”

“You think you could?” He laughed. “You really think you could?”

“I could try. At least by talking
about it—”

“I can’t! He won’t let me!” The boy shuddered against Devon. His eyes searched back and forth across the room.

“Who, Alexander? Who won’t let you?”

The boy was silent.

Devon looked closely at him. The boy’s eyes were like burning coals. His mouth curled in a snarl that seemed so alien to his smooth, childish features. It was the expression of an adult, a cynical, bitter
man.

“Let me go,” Alexander said.

Devon complied. The boy settled back into his beanbag chair. With the remote control, he switched the channel to Major Musick. Devon walked up behind him to watch.

On the screen, four rows of blank-eyed children sat in low-rise bleachers. The children were clapping, all in unison, like little robots, or like those windup monkey bands. The camera scanned
past the gray masked of their faces. It lingered on the face of one of them: a skinny boy in a crew cut, his face a mass of freckles.

Major Musick came out then, making his entrance from behind a frayed red velvet curtain. “Hello, boys and girls,” he barked. “What shall we sing today?”

Just what was it about this creature that so entranced Alexander? Devon watched as the boy hunkered down
to raptly watch the show. Major Musick launched into a crazy song about big black birds flying through the sky. Devon observed the painted lips, the big red nose, the little darting eyes surrounded by enormous white circles.

“He’s creepy,” Devon told Alexander.

But Alexander wasn’t paying any mind, just singing along in a low childish voice to the song about the birds.

Devon shuddered,
putting his questions aside for now, and left Alexander to his clown. More than anything else, he just wanted to get out of that room.

“He needs
a shrink,” Cecily said as they walked out to the stables, the sky darkening above them. Yet another storm was looming on the horizon. “His mother was loco. It must run in the family.”

“Cecily, I know you think the ghosts in this house are harmless. But I’m not so sure.”

“Oh, Devon, really.”

She slid the bolt aside and pulled open the door. Devon inhaled the thick air of the stable, heavy
with the pungency of straw and manure. Cecily’s horse, Pearlie Mae, was a champion, a beautiful white Morgan with sharp pink ears and wide blue eyes.

Devon caressed the side of the animal. “Does Alexander ride?” he asked.

Cecily laughed. “You kidding? That little porker? He just sits in front of the computer or the TV and eats Ring Dings all day long.” She shook her head. “I tried being
friendly to him when his father first dumped him here, but he’s just so miserable.”

“I’m worried about him,” Devon told her.

“With reason. Too many of those things can kill you!”

Devon smiled wearily. “I wasn’t talking about Ring Dings.”

“Then what?”

“I’m not sure,” he told her. Pearlie Mae snorted. “Tell me something. Do you think Jackson Muir really was a warlock?”

Cecily moved
in close to him. “Oh, Devon. Maybe we’ve filled your head with too many of our stories. Our ghosts aren’t menacing. Pretty soon you’ll get used to them. They’ll fade into the background, like the wallpaper.” She reached up and put her arms around his neck, pulling him close to her so that he could feel the contours of her breasts against him. “You were just so manly at the pizza shop today,”
she told him.

For a moment, so close to Cecily, the smell of her hair enveloping him, Devon forgot all of his fears. All thoughts of demons and ghosts and secret rooms were chased from his mind by his proximity to this beautiful girl.

They kissed.

In her stall, Pearlie Mae whinnied and whipped her tail. Devon eased Cecily back, gently removing her arms from around his neck.

“Cecily,”
he said, “I can’t deny that I like you a lot. But this stuff that’s been happening ever since I got here—I’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”

“What are you talking about?”

He sighed. “All right. I’m going to try something. I don’t know if it’ll work, but I’m going to try.”

She looked at him strangely.

He closed his eyes and concentrated. Once, trying to impress Suze back home,
he’d tried lifting the front of a Volkswagen. It hadn’t worked. But now he wasn’t trying to impress Cecily as much as enlist her help; he needed an ally in fighting whatever it was that threatened him, and maybe Alexander, too.

“Watch the door,” he told Cecily.

Devon closed his eyes and visualized the stable door. It was standing wide open, the way they’d left it. He concentrated as hard
as he could and—

The stable door swung shut.

“Whoa!” Cecily shouted. “How’d you do that?”

“I can just … do things,” Devon replied, adding, “sometimes.”

She stared at him. “Do something else.”

“I don’t know if I can,” he told her.

“Then how do I know that wasn’t the wind?”

He sighed. He looked around. His eyes came to rest on Cecily’s horse. He concentrated.

And within seconds
Pearlie Mae levitated three feet off the straw-covered floor.

“Oh my God,” Cecily breathed, her face going white.

Devon brought the horse gently back to earth.

“Oh my God,” Cecily said again. “That was definitely not the wind.”

“Ever since I was a kid, I could do this stuff.” Devon smiled awkwardly. “Sometimes it doesn’t happen, try as I might. But see, Cecily, that’s why I’ve got
to discover the truth of who I am. Why I’m like this. And I’m certain my dad sent me here so I could find out.”

“Oh my God,” was all Cecily said again, sitting down on a bale of hay.

Devon sat down beside her. “Do you think I’m a freak?”

She looked up at him, and finally smiled. “I could never think that, Devon.”

He sighed. “Good. Because I need your help. You’ve got to believe me
when I tell you what I’ve seen in that house. What I’ve seen all my life.”

So he told her about the demons—the green eyes in his closet back home, his father’s admonition that he was stronger than any of them. He told her about Alexander’s prank and about what he found in the East Wing. The portrait. The door.

“It’s not like I don’t believe you, Devon,” Cecily said when he was finished.
“It’s just that—I can’t adjust to the idea that there are demons in Ravenscliff. Ghosts, sure—but Mother always told me I had nothing to fear from anything in that house. She might be odd, but I can’t believe she’d let me stay here if there was any danger.”

Devon considered this. “I don’t think there was—not before I arrived, at least.” He looked at her. “I have a theory. I think somehow my
coming here has stirred things up. Gotten whatever forces are here all riled.”

“But why?”

“Something about who I am. My past. Where I came from.”

“Your real parents?”