“A demon…like from hell? Did you actually crawl up from—?”
“There is no hell, human. I am simply a higher being. Like you are higher than a mouse.” As an afterthought, he added, “Barely.”
“I knew I shouldn’t ask you—!” I spat.
“Well, technically speaking, you haven’t asked me anything at all.”
I scowled up at him, trying with all my might to burn a hole through his stupid, smug face. “Will you help him?”
He deliberated for a moment. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out the smile splitting his face like the Cheshire Cat’s. “Of course I could be persuaded to help out my little brother.”
I sighed. What am I willing to give…? “What do you want?”
He outstretched his arm, making no immediate movements to touch me. “Shake my hand.”
“What?” The image of myself, pruned up like a raisin, made my heart sink. “Why?”
“Oh come now, Eden. You care for him enough that you came to me for help. A simple handshake is all it will take.”
I stared down at it. A single touch could leave me dead on the floor. Or, at the very least, shorten my life a few decades. I supposed the question really wasn’t whether I’d shake his hand, but how many I was willing to lose.
“I wouldn’t hesitate. Who knows how much time Philly has left?”
Sucking in a deep breath, I steeled my resolve. “Alright.”
“Alright?”
I took his hand and gave it a firm shake, half-expecting that my knees would buckle beneath me. But I felt fine. And Gregory, for his part, did nothing but smile, the corners of his lips edging cartoonishly high into his cheeks.
“Interesting,” he mused. With my hand still in his, he opened the closer door, flooding the room with light. “It’s been a pleasure, Eden. Just remember, when you need my help again, don’t be afraid to come see your good friend, Gremory.”
I wanted to tell him I would never ask him for help again, but harsh words would serve better after my favor was done. “You mean…Gregory?”
“Of course.” He released me, striding down the hall until he came to a classroom door.
“Wait!” I hissed. “What about Phil?”
Just before he ducked back into class, Gregory shot me a wink. “Don’t worry, Eden. Phil’s going to be fine.”
I stared after the door long after he vanished. What the hell had I just done?
For as long as I stood there, I couldn’t work out his game. He clearly didn’t care enough about Phil’s wellbeing to run and help him, but he’d listened to me rave. He’d insisted on touching my hand, but I felt fine.
As the bell rang and the hallways filled, the noise and the glow that reflected off my classmates, which had appealed to me only yesterday, overwhelmed me. Knowing that I was alone in this sea made me feel small. Defenseless.
I walked. Where? No idea. The library door stood open and in my way and I needed no other provocation than that. Glancing the librarian at her desk, I kept quiet, tiptoeing to a line of computers in the corner that would obscure my face.
The worry at being caught didn’t last.
Phil had…lied to me. After promising he wouldn’t. And after all those times he’d demanded the truth from me.
But I supposed that shouldn’t have come as such a betrayal; he’d lied about everything. At this point, I wondered if there had been truth to anything he’d said.
My Eden.
Of course he’d lied. He hardly knew me, how could he possibly expect to entrust me with such a huge secret? Still, even as I reasoned that his caution was forgivable, I hated him. For all his talk of warning me and not wanting me to run, the least he could’ve done was tell me what I was getting myself into before—
Before? Before what?
I threw my head back with a sigh, meeting my own stare in the reflection trapped behind the computer screen. I froze. Where there had been a few splotches of red marring my left eye when I’d last checked, it had completely swallowed the blue. And the right was hardly better, gleaming like a twin ruby.
It made me remember a whisper in a dark planetarium. Your eyes.
***
I kicked a pot, sending it careening into the bench and into a million pieces. “Stupid!” I kicked another and watched the dirt fall like rain. “What are you so stupid?”
I yanked at my hair, staring at the floor so I wouldn’t have to make out the face of a moron reflected in the glass wall. A moron in sunglasses, despite the fact that it was dark outside.
What could’ve possibly deluded me into thinking I could trust Gregory? I knew the guy was trouble. He destroyed things. He hurt people. I’d sensed it in him and now he’d proven it.
Glimpsing Dad’s look of concern through the sliding door, I counted my breaths, trying to cool off. It didn’t work. Whenever I came anywhere close, the image of Phil would surface in my head, dying while the doctors looked on. While Gregory looked on. While I looked on, unable to speak, unable to help.
And I shouldn’t have cared so much. He’d lied. He wasn’t an angel. He was a soul-eating creature that could’ve fed on me at any time. A creature I’d stupidly thrown myself at like a worm on a hook.
He came from the same cloth as Gregory. What could that possibly mean for Phil?
For the moment, I didn’t care. I dwelled on my poor best friend, charred to a crisp. My indestructible Phil, fading into unconsciousness.
Don’t cry, angel.
Woah, backpedal, backpedal, backpedal… My Phil? I stopped pacing. When in all of this and a single kiss had he become my Phil? My head rebelled against the idea that I had feelings for him but that made perfect sense, didn’t it? Little lonely Eden Graves forgot her place and fell for a guy way out of her league. She never could help herself, could she?
Which would’ve been fine. If I wanted to disappoint myself time and time again, I could deal with that. I always had before.
But this time, it wasn’t just hurting me. No. This time, my concern for Phil had pushed me to betray Zach. For his sake, I shouldn’t have gone to that snake for help. And all for what?
“For nothing!” I yelled, throwing my arms down at my sides.
The greenhouse wall erupted.
I shrieked, falling backward against the storm of glass shards and torn leaves. The left side of my face took the brunt of it. Then my chest collapsed under the weight of the pots, dirt, and mulch that heaped themselves upon me, knocking my breath away. What little concentration I could pull together amid chaos forced my arms over my face, waiting for whatever had broken the wall to hit me next.
Nothing came.
“Ed?” Dad’s voice carried over from a distance. I couldn’t see him through my arms but I heard him enter with the sliding door. More frantically, he continued, “Eden? Where are you?” His footsteps echoed across the floor, drawing nearer to my grave.
“Over here!” I cried, thrusting my hand through the dirt and into the air.
The crash preluded the collapse of the ceiling. Glass fell like snow, so fine and light that it settled weightlessly over my face.
“Jesus!” he shrieked.
“Dad?”
“I’m coming!” I gasped and then choked on the dirt in my throat when the weight of the pot on my stomach fell away. His hands brushed furiously at the mulch over my nose and I sat up to rid the rest in coughs and gags. “What the hell happened?”
His face was more alive than I’d ever seen it, eyes wide and staring down at me like I’d grown a third head.
“I don’t know,” I replied. A pain in my head threatened to pull me under. The sound of my own voice made it pound tenfold against the front of my skull.
“Did you see somebody?”
I almost didn’t hear him. A black sea washed through my eardrums that I shook off, fighting to stay awake in a world of pain. A concussion?
“Ed, did you see somebody? Did you see anything?” He shook me by the shoulders. “Are you okay? Di
d you hit your head?” His fingers trailed down the side of my face. “Oh god, you’re bleeding.”
I lifted my hand to my forehead and cringed away with red fingers. “I—my head hurts.”
“We’ve got to get you to the hospital.” He hauled me to my feet. “Can you walk?”
I thought I could, but when he released me, I swayed and buckled, as if the legs were not my own. On a second try, I stood steady enough. “Yeah.”
I tried in vain to push the pain out of my head with bare hands, but I dropped my limbs to balance myself.
A pot behind me fell into a pile of ceramic. Dad screamed, yanking me behind him. “Christ! What the hell is that?”
I shifted onto my toes to collect the view. My first thought was that the plant had fallen off its perch, shifted too close to the edge by the erupting walls. Then I noticed that, while a few pieces had found their way to the floor, bits of it lay scattered across the shelf. It hadn’t fallen.
It had exploded.
And, looking around now, I couldn’t find anything massive enough to take down the huge glass structure. It was as though it had just…happened by magic.
Or by demon.
11. Lies
I must’ve looked like a sight on my way through the hallways. Stitches still fresh in my face, dressed in the same clothes I wore yesterday, complete with reflective sunglasses, and without a wink of sleep to show for my night spent in the ER. My parents had wanted to keep me home, a penance I’d thought over only long enough to pull onto our street and register their look of loss.
Besides, what would I do with another day spent on my own? I dreaded sleep. Dreaded what I’d see if I shut my eyes. Phil might’ve lied but every time I blinked I still saw his face under the oxygen mask, just before he vanished behind ambulance doors. The need for blood came as my only distraction. That, and the chance to see Phil, kicking back like usual in Calculus.
The sight of a black Mustang in the parking lot had taught me to hope. Maybe Gregory had upheld his side of the deal after all…
Taking in the extent of the school’s corridor crushed those feelings. Phil would’ve stood out among the masses. Besides, it could’ve been by my own delusion, but I thought he might look for me, too, after giving me the greatest fright of my life.
It only truly doused my hopes when I glimpsed Gregory at the end of the wing, leaning against the lockers. Smiling at me.
Even from a distance, he gave off this aura of bliss. He enjoyed the pain he caused me, relishing in it, drinking it in like a chocolate milkshake. With every inch I came closer, his smile edged up and I saw red. Fists already clenched, I prepared to pummel him so far into the ground, they wouldn’t be able to make out his pretty face among the tile and the insulation.
Then a body passed around the corner, dressed in a familiar Guns N’ Roses sweatshirt and jeans and I stilled, smacking shoulders with the passersby. I didn’t even look at his face. The only thing that really struck me was that Phil was here. He was standing, which meant he was breathing. His heart was beating.
I ran. Crossing the length of the hall in about five seconds flat, I threw myself at Phil, hitting him chest to chest with such fervor that it knocked him back a few steps. It felt like running face first into a brick wall but it didn’t occur to me to care. His arms wound around my back. His breaths hissed in my ear.
He was okay.
“I missed you,” he said.
“And I was worried about you!” I tried to step away but I hung too far above the floor, hanging in his arms. “What the hell happened?”
He didn’t answer, so I retreated enough to take in his face. He looked tired. So tired. Like when Zach had come to my room to cry over Gregory and he’d looked tired. Purple rings marred the undersides of his eyes.
I reached for them but his hand, bedecked in my father’s leather gloves, closed around my wrist. His face fell. “What happened to you?”
I’d almost forgotten how unappealing I probably looked. A string of cuts stung along my forehead and my neck, but none so much as the gash taken out of my lip, which seemed to throb even more in his presence. And even that took a backseat to the remembered haze of red that came over me when I realized Gregory had destroyed my parents’ livelihood.
“You.”
I flailed for solid ground and Phil released my wrist, letting me slide down his front and to the floor. Rounding on Gregory, I clenched my fists and struck out at the part of his stomach I knew would be the softest. The part that would hurt the most.
He caught me. “Woah there, Graves. Seems like someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”
“Do you have any idea what you did?” I snapped.
Gregory threw the arm that didn’t hold my knuckles over Phil’s shoulder. “I got Philly boy back. You’re welcome.”
“And what was yesterday then? Payment for services?” My other hand hit home, but it wasn’t soft like I’d expected. His midsection felt like the rest of him: hard and scaled. Reptilian.
“Good hit,” he laughed. “How are your fingers?”
They ached. But he didn’t have to know that. “Why did you do it?”
The blissful look remained of a man who enjoyed pain. My pain. “Before I say something incriminating, perhaps you could give me a hint? Killed your mother? Molested your father?”
“Don’t treat me like I’m stupid!” I hissed, narrowing my eyes at a passing boy who tried to look. “You destroyed my greenhouse.”
Phil went deathly still. His gloved hand fisted in Gregory’s shirt and lifted him off the ground much too easily. “You what—?”
Gregory held up a hand, as if this were a common occurrence. “And how would the little human know what I’ve done and haven’t done?”
“I was in it when it exploded, you snake! I could’ve been killed! Was that your game?”
“That doesn’t sound fun at all. Games are supposed to be fun.” He cast Phil’s arm aside with ease and fell on silent feet.
“We can’t afford repairs like that! We’re going to go broke!”
A gloved thumb moved over my lip. The feather-light touch sent agony through the gash splitting it and he cringed back in time with my wince. “Your face…but you’re alright? You’re okay?”
“I’m alive. That doesn’t change the fact that half of my parents’ store has been reduced to a pile! How are we supposed to make money? How are we supposed to eat?”
Phil’s fists clenched. “I told you she was off limits.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Phil. What good would it do me to wreck the store? I didn’t do that damage.” He turned his basilisk’s grin on me. “She did.”
I stared back, jaw agape. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Absolutely insane. And I bet all that energy you took from Phil was itching for release. You just so happened to be emotional enough about my dear baby brother that you couldn’t help yourself but let it go.”
I slapped his hand away when it went for an affectionate pinch to my cheek. “Don’t touch me.”
Behind me, Phil went blank. He said nothing, did nothing, showed nothing to give himself away.
“You can’t say it’s impossible, Phil,” he continued. “Your essence would be quite potent. Potent enough to take over, I think.”
Phil didn’t give any inclination that he cared either way about what Gregory said. And Gregory merely smiled back. I glanced between them, trying to glean meaning from the silence.
Nothing. For all I knew, they could communicate through thought alone.
Then, in a flurry of motion, Gregory pulled me to his side. “What—?”
“Now, now, dear. Let’s get some privacy before you speak sweet nothings in my ear.”
I felt just nauseated enough that I didn’t reply.
Phil fell into step at my other side, wrenching me free of his brother and folding me into his embrace. He followed Gregory into the same closet I’d pleaded for his life in yesterday.
With the gran
d addition of a third body, the dark felt heavy, like the dirt and pottery that had collapsed my chest. Robbed of my sight, the awareness of Phil’s presence scalded my flesh. The memory of his lips warmed mine so, if not for the feel of his body beside me, I might’ve convinced myself that he was upon me again. His chest to mine. His hands molded to my waist. Even the smell of him, the smell of roses, wafted through the air like I’d stumbled into a secret garden.
Gregory cleared his throat. It reminded me that their kind could sense emotions, and there was no way he couldn’t feel mine. “What the hell do you want?”
“Catch up, little sister. You—”
“Don’t call me that! I am nothing to you. And you are nothing to me.” His fingers found my jaw and held it in place. “And for the love of god stop touching me.”
“Relax, Eden,” Phil murmured, pulling me closer. The strength of his vow disagreed with his shaking hands. “We will fix this. I will fix this. I promise.”
“Fix what?”
Gregory pat my face in congratulations. “You are one of us now, Graves.”
“One of you?”
He pulled off my sunglasses. “Look at those eyes. It can’t come as that much of a surprise; you’ve been feeding off anybody who’ll shake your hand. You were absolutely thrumming with it when Lily touched you the other day. You tried to suck on her, too.”
I chuckled. “You’re crazy.” I reached for the doorknob under his arm, flooding the room with light.
Gregory slammed it shut and threw us back into total darkness. “Then yesterday, when you were sucking face with my brother, you got a little distracted and turned him into a raisin. All that energy gets pretty bored all cooped up.” He leaned closer, subjecting me to the smell of his breath: lilies and hot summer air. “What was it that got you so upset that you blew up your favorite place in the whole world? Was it me? Was it Phil?”
“That’s enough,” Phil countered, thrusting a hand between us. Gregory’s back hit the wall with an audible thunk.
“Should I pretend we all can’t feel it then? I can taste it like…”—he sucked on his teeth— “euphoria.”
The Amaryllis Page 12