Controlled by a Fire Demon: The Owl Shifter Chronicles Book Two

by Qatarina Wanders

Emily sighed.

  “Look, I don’t presume to know what you’re going through or what’s going through your mind.” Aunt Anastacia spoke again, her voice somewhat softer now. “I don’t expect you to trust me even. Nevertheless, I do have your best interest at heart. I’m positive the Adoption will go smoothly.

  “Your grandfather—my father—didn’t have as much integration as you do, and he became Adopted. He didn’t even have a fire demon. He wasn’t as powerful as you are. That’s why he failed. But I have faith in you, my dear. I have faith that this evil scourge of the Alfreds will no longer afflict our world. I have faith that you’ll be the one to end them—and end them for good. You just have to have faith in yourself.”

  22

  “I’ll do it,” Emily said afterward. “But only on one condition.”

  “What’s that?” Aunt Anastacia raised an eyebrow.

  “We’ll have to escape from here—”

  Aunt Anastacia began to complain, but Emily overshadowed her voice. “—and we’ll have to get Rina and Joanna back, if they’re still alive.”

  “They’re still alive. I can sense their life forces.”

  Emily exhaled loudly, her shoulders slumping in relief. She’d been hoping they were still alive, never really knowing if they were. She didn’t bother to ask how Aunt Anastacia could sense something like that; she was just happy to know they were still in the land of the living.

  “But I seriously doubt we’re going to defeat the Alfreds here and then defeat their parents at their home and rescue your friends without an Adopted.”

  Emily smiled. “I have an idea.”

  Aunt Anastacia did a half-roll of her eyes. She leaned back in her chair and relaxed. “Let’s hear it.”

  “So far, you’ve been thinking about defeating the Alfreds,” Emily started. “But we don’t need to defeat them. At least not now. Not when they have the upper hand.”

  Aunt Anastacia furrowed her brow. She seemed to be catching Emily’s drift. She leaned forward again in renewed interest. “Go on.”

  “So I propose we employ tact and deception,” Emily offered, trying to sound official. “We don’t need to defeat them. We only need to escape from them.”

  “You mean run?” She said that as if running was an alien concept.

  “Yes, precisely that,” Emily said defensively. “There’s nothing dishonorable about running. Especially when we’re still going to meet them for a final showdown.”

  Her aunt mulled over the words for a bit.

  Emily saw the idea taking hold, so she pressed on. “We just need to get through today. It’s obvious you need more rest to get to your full strength. I need more time to come to terms with the Adoption. Michael needs more time to learn. And we need more hands on deck.

  “You said it yourself,” Emily pressed. “It’s about winning. It doesn’t matter how we win. What matters is that we do win.”

  Anastacia nodded.

  Emily smiled, pleased with herself to have won that little battle.

  “I suppose we can sneak out the back.” Aunt Anastacia paused and thought of something. “I could cast a cloaking spell over us. Michael could cast a confundus spell to confuse the Alfreds outside. They’re already tired and weary from the all-nighter they pulled last night, so they won’t be able to see past the confundus spell until we’re safely away from here.”

  Emily smiled and nodded. Of course, she had no idea what Aunt Anastacia was talking about, or that she had a means for them to employ deception. She was just glad that Aunt Anastacia had a plan, and it seemed as though it was going to work.

  “It’s going to take a lot of skill and delicacy,” Aunt Anastasia said again, her voice carrying more confidence. “It’s going to take a lot of expertise on my part and deception on the rest of yours. Plus a healthy dose of luck, but I think it’s going to work.”

  “Great!” Emily clapped her hands together once. “Where are we going to go to? Obviously, some place the Alfreds can’t find us.”

  “I know just the place,” Aunt Anastacia said excitedly. “It’s like my secret end-of-days hideout. If we can make it there, we can definitely prepare for an offensive.”

  “If we time it right,” Emily added, “we can be in the castle while the Alfred kids are still here trying to bring down the barrier.”

  Aunt Anastacia’s smile faltered. “That’s stretching it too far. I don’t think these young roves outside are novices. For them to have brought down my barrier in twelve hours, they’re pretty good.”

  “Ah, we’ll figure something out then,” Emily faltered.

  “Stay here,” Anastacia instructed. “I’ll go arrange everything. I’ll send Michael to you with instructions for what to do next.”

  Emily nodded enthusiastically.

  “Our deception starts now,” she added. “You must act normally. They might not have been able to cast a monitoring spell, but they do have eyes, and they see keenly. We can’t give them any notion that we’re up to something.”

  “I understand, Aunty.” I brought up the idea! Emily didn’t add.

  Her aunt stood up, came over to her, and gave her a warm squeeze of her right shoulder before she went into the library.

  Emily didn’t really have anything to do after that. She couldn’t leave the house. So she remained where she was. It wasn’t hard to pretend she wasn’t doing anything because she literally had nothing to do. It’s one of the many reasons she hadn’t come to visit with Aunt Anastacia more often. There was just nothing to do in the house. No TV. No stereo. Nothing. And, of course, because she had thought Aunt Anastacia was weird and living in a delusion of being some priestess with powers. If she had known Aunt Anastacia was honestly a powerful rove, she might have come to her aunt with her problems.

  Emily must have spent close to an hour sitting there on the couch and staring into space. She could hear whispering coming from the library, but nothing concrete. She must have dozed off a couple of times on the couch. The next thing she was conscious of after one of her dozing-off sessions was Michael falling splat onto the couch next to her.

  Emily flinched out of her sleep, staring at him in surprise. He had a wide grin on his face, and he was looking straight at the wall. She looked around the room—no one else nearby. No sound coming from the rest of the house.

  Even the barrage outside had stopped. For a brief moment of panic, Emily thought the Alfreds had finally broken through. But then she heard a vehicle drive off outside.

  “Food delivery guy,” Michael explained. “They’re taking a break.”

  “Hmmm.” Emily wondered what the plan was.

  “Aunt Anastacia is just about to cast the cloaking spell,” Michael informed her. “I have to cast the confundus spell first, so that when she cloaks us, the Alfreds will see a version of us in the house still.”

  “Great, let’s do this.”

  “I’m not done,” Michael continued. He still had the smile on his face, which appeared to be plastic now and not-at-all genuine. And he maintained his expression even though Emily was staring right at him. Guessing it was part of the deceptive ploy, she looked away.

  “Once I cast the spell, we’re going to go out the back,” Michael explained. “Silently—we make no noise. There’s a back door in the library that leads out to the back. We’ll take that.”

  “Okay. . . ,” Emily muttered, committing the information to memory.

  “Your dad is upstairs in his room,” Michael continued. “He’s in clear view of the Alfreds.”

  “How will he know to come down?” Emily suddenly worried that her father might not make it out of the house with them.

  “Aunt Anastacia will come for him,” Michael replied. “They’ll come join us out back.”

  “How?”

  Michael shrugged. “She’s a witch. She’ll have her ways.”

  “Okay, I’m ready!” Emily felt excitement and anxiety boiling in her blood.

  “That’s the easy part,” Michael went on. “Th
e hard part is that we’ll have to go outside and engage the Alfreds in a discussion.”

  That was where Emily’s heart froze. “What?”

  “Aunt Anastacia’s idea,” he said. “No one has spoken to them since last night. They might get suspicious of a confundus spell. But if we engage them, even if it’s just for a few minutes, they’ll be reassured we are still in the house—”

  “—giving us more time before they realize we’re gone,” Emily concluded.

  “Obviously, the more time we have before they find out, the more time we have to get away from here and get to Aunt Anastacia’s hideout downtown.”

  Emily’s eyes widened. “She told you where it is?”

  “Of course, and she told me how to open it. Who do you think is driving the Beetle?”

  “Aunt’s Beetle?” Emily was getting offended that Michael seemed to know so much about the plan when it was her idea in the first place. And the fact that he seemed to have been placed in charge of the expedition when Emily had been on the team way longer than he had. Emily made a mental note to ask Aunt Anastacia about that. “Isn’t she coming with us, though?”

  Michael shook his head. “She’s the contingency plan. In case something happens, and they realize we’re making a break for it and we don’t have enough time to get out of here, she’s going to delay the Alfreds. Give us enough time to get to the Beetle and get the hell out of dodge.”

  “Fair enough, I guess.” Emily simply nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  23

  “And what if they get her?” Emily asked. She was genuinely worried about her aunt. Yeah, sure, she and Aunt Anastacia had their differences—but what family didn’t? If Emily had been in on the discussion, she would have argued that there was a better way than Aunt Anastacia offering herself up to give them a chance of escape.

  “If they get to her, they’ll have the fight of their lives.” Michael sounded as though they had a secret weapon. Emily’s heart skipped a beat when she remembered the tunnel through the land of the dead. The fact that Dad was going to be with Aunt Anastacia didn’t make things easy for Emily either.

  Aunt Anastacia was nothing if not practical. She was all about the end goal, and she wasn’t really one to fuss too much about the process. As far as she was concerned, the end always justified the means. As long as the world was safe, she was willing to make any sacrifice necessary. Would she give up Emily’s father to tunnel through the land of the dead?

  “Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?” Michael asked, his eyebrows arched.

  Emily hissed. “Aunt Anastacia is overly logistical sometimes. I hope she’s not hiding anything from us.”

  Michael frowned at her. “You’d be stupid if you thought she wasn’t hiding anything from us.”

  Emily was taken aback by the biting tone in his words. She looked him up and down, not sure whether she should be enraged or not. She remembered they’d not really had time to talk about the fact they were half-siblings. She might have informed him of what transpired between his dad and her mom, but they hadn’t really talked about how it affected them as siblings.

  Technically, he was her little brother. Just one year. Still, she felt a sense of responsibility for him. She was beginning to see him as the brother she never had. And being in the same class didn’t help matters. She was beginning to see him as her responsibility. That just put her in a confusing spot, because sometimes all she wanted to do was smack him in the head. Like right now.

  “What, no sassy comebacks?” Michael sounded surprised.

  “You’re my brother,” Emily proclaimed. Her voice was hollow and void of emotion.

  Michael rolled his eyes. “That changes nothing. We still hate each other.”

  “Is that what this is?” Emily asked. “Hate? You’ve hated me all this time?”

  “Stop acting like you didn’t know,” Michael replied, looking away.

  Emily was even more bewildered. “Know that you had an unfounded hatred for me?”

  Michael scoffed. “You started it.”

  “Started what?” Emily asked, genuinely surprised. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The night of Drake’s party,” he growled. “Last year. Summer. Ring any bells?”

  It did. One that Emily was not too proud of. She looked away from him, the nasty memories dredging themselves up.

  She and one of the other cheerleaders, Nikki Albright, drank too much and threw themselves at some senior boys from a visiting football team. It was quite the scandal. Although it was before Emily’s relationship with Jamie, it was still humiliating because these boys were from a competing school.

  And Emily had been the one to convince Nikki to take shots with her and also to approach the guys in the first place.

  Although, Emily had been wise enough to eventually leave the guys alone and go on her merry way. But Nikki . . . well, not so much.

  Emily’s eyes grew as round as saucers as understanding dawned on her. Nikki had a boyfriend at the time—who was publicly humiliated because Emily and Nikki did this in front of everyone. The boyfriend burst into tears when Nikki dragged her new boy toy off to one of the bedrooms.

  That boyfriend was Michael.

  Emily had totally forgotten that part.

  The entire football team—and several cheerleaders—made fun of him for weeks afterward. His entire reputation went to hell because of it.

  Emily hadn’t even bothered to learn his name at the time. After all, he hadn’t been of any importance to her . . .

  Apparently, she’d been wrong. Her own brother had been offended and humiliated. Not directly by her, but definitely as a result of her actions that night in Drake’s father’s mansion, and that had started this bad blood between them.

  How was she supposed to apologize for something she did a year before? No, that was the wrong question. She had no problem saying sorry. She had a problem with thinking Michael would believe her.

  I mean, he’s obviously developed a personal vendetta against me. It all made sense now. The desire to out her. The drive to want to make her suffer. Even looking for something where there was no obvious evidence. He wanted her to be an Owl because he wanted her gone. Dead and gone.

  Emily couldn’t even remember specifics of that night. Most of the night was a blur to her, but from the fierce fire in Michael’s eyes, she could tell it was still very much fresh to him.

  Emily hated herself in that moment. How could she have done that to him? Her brother?

  You didn’t know, Selena offered, but it wasn’t enough.

  Emily knew she shouldn’t treat people with such disregard.

  You’re a different person now, Selena countered. You’re a better person now.

  Am I? “Michael, I’m—”

  “Don’t!” Michael cut her off. “Don’t even dare.” His voice sounded choked. His eyes all blurred up with tears.

  “Let’s just do this and get it done,” Michael said after a moment. He puffed out a couple of breaths before looking back at her. The plastic smile was back on his face, but there were traces of hurt in his eyes.

  Emily had never felt this much longing before. She longed to hug him. She longed to make him feel better. She longed to scrub the memory of her error from his mind. Yet, she could do none of these. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she had no such ability, and she didn’t think Michael would appreciate being touched, especially by her.

  This was not the last of it, anyhow. They would revisit this issue, especially when they weren’t trying to escape the Alfreds.

  Biting her tongue—literally—Emily said, “Walk me through the plan again.”

  Michael obliged. The trickiest part of the plan was going outside to engage the Alfreds. Michael was supposed to cast the confundus spell as Emily talked with the three just before they restarted bombarding the barrier with magic.

  Emily didn’t want to ask Michael if he was capable of such a level of magic. She knew he’d only
say yes, and her reticence would not do anything to improve their relationship. So she simply nodded that she was ready and decided to put her faith in him. It was the least she could do after what she’d done to him.

  Michael led her outside. The safest place to be was the porch. According to Aunt Anastacia, that was where the internal barrier began.

  The Alfreds were laughing about something. All hunched over the Land Rover’s hood, munching on burgers and fries and drinking from large cups of what looked like soda. Just enough sugar and carbs to replenish their energy.

  The moment Michael and Emily stepped into the light, Alice looked up at them. “Well, look who it is,” said the vampire girl. A feisty look on her face. “The warlock brother and the Owl sister. This is going to be fun!”

  Emily glanced at Marion, who looked wary. “Did you know?” she asked. “That we’re siblings?”

  Chandler and Alice both glanced at Marion.

  Marion clearly didn’t like the attention cast on him, but he didn’t shy away from answering. “Yes, I did.”

  Emily would have asked him why he hadn’t told her, but then he would have replied that they weren’t friends, so he wasn’t obligated to tell her anything. Which was valid. Or he would have told her that he assumed she already knew Michael was her brother.

  So Emily asked the next question that popped into her head. “Why are you doing this?” Of course, it was a dumb question, seeing how Chandler had all but told her their full-blown manifesto. World domination and the whole shebang, but, hey, this wasn’t about asking intelligent questions. This was about keeping them preoccupied.

  Alice growled and slid off the Land Rover. “How many times are we going over this?” she asked, rolling her eyes as she marched up to the house. “We are doing this because we want to—”

  “Okay!” Emily cut in before the girl could say the Na-Ma word. She hoped Alice didn’t catch on to the reason she’d cut her short. “But why kill us?”

  Alice paused and looked at Emily as though she’d said something stupid. “Um, because that’s the only way it works . . . duh?”