by Gwen Hayes
I saw the flash of red again from the corner of my eye. It was a cloaked person darting between the humongous trees. Theia maybe? I hoped it was, so I followed the figure. I had to stop several times, when I lost sight of the red, and listen for snapping twigs. I got a glimpse of the cloak and realized it was a girl for sure, but she reappeared behind trees she couldn’t possibly have reached without me seeing her. She just kept popping up here and there, and whenever I would get close, she’d be behind me instead.
I began losing my patience as well as my breath, and stopped to lean on one of the massive trees. As my heart slowed down, the bark changed beneath my fingers. Strange, I thought, and looked closer. It morphed into a human face and I snatched my hand away and stumbled backwards.
The entire tree was made up of faces pressed into the bark like masks. Angry, sad, and mean faces glared and snarled and screamed at me with no sound, moving around in a macabre fashion while trapped on the surface of the tree. Fear gripped me and I ran blindly away from the tree, bumping into another, realizing as I hit the trunk that it was the same. All the trees around me were the same.
The bark writhed and pulsated like the faces were moving beneath a blanket. Their pain and anger consumed me. Madness descended over me, drowning everything but the kind of fear that made a man saw off his own leg to flee a trap. Everywhere I looked, the faces haunted me. I’m ashamed to say I curled into a ball on the ground. I didn’t want to see what they were going to do to me. I couldn’t look at them anymore, and with my eyes open I couldn’t see anything else.
I sensed someone else then, in front of me. I peeked and saw black riding boots. I followed the leather up a woman’s calf until I got to the hem of a red cloak. I sat up quickly.
“My, Haden, what big eyes you have.” Theia removed the hood and crouched down to my level. “You shouldn’t have come back.”
She looked so cool and collected amidst the horror, and there I was, hyperventilating and dripping in the cold sweat of fear. I could barely breathe. At least the faces were gone. For now.
“This is no place for you. Not anymore.”
I swallowed. “This is no place for you either.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” She looked around like she was appraising a house she was thinking of moving into. “It has a lot of promise. I kind of like it.” Theia stood up. “The neighborhood is a little rough sometimes, but it’s got good bones.” She laughed at that.
I didn’t know why.
“I’d help you up, but it’s probably best that I don’t touch you.” While I was getting up, she walked over to a tree and touched the bark lightly, reverently. “They were human once. All of them. She drove them mad and collected them like bugs in a jar.” Theia glanced at me. “I’m speaking of your mother. You don’t remember her, do you?”
I shook my head.
“You don’t remember me either?” She looked away before I could shake my head again. “It’s for the best, I suppose.”
“I don’t remember you, Theia, but I still have feelings for you. Feelings I can’t explain, I just know they are there.”
“Get rid of them.” Her answer stunned me. “Feelings like that won’t help you. Not now. It’s best if you just move forward from here.”
“I can’t move forward knowing you’re trapped here. Tell me how to get you out.”
Theia clucked her tongue. “I chose to stay.”
“Why would you do that?” And then, just by looking at her face, I knew. “It’s because of me.”
She shrugged. “I made a bargain.”
“For me.”
She sat down on a log, wrapped in that hooded red cloak from a fairy tale. Only I wasn’t the wolf. Not anymore. I think maybe she might have been, though.
“Mara, your mother, was going to do something to your soul. I don’t know what. It didn’t sound good. We made a blood oath—I thought it meant you and I would be together. I thought it was the only way. And then while I was swearing my life to her and she was giving me the blood of demons”—Theia scrunched her eyes tightly at the memory—“they found a way to bring you back. But I have to stay.”
I joined her on the log, looking first for trapped souls in the wood. “They exorcised the demon. Varnie and Amelia. And when it was out of my body, my soul came crashing back into it. I woke up and didn’t remember anything. I mean, I know some things . . . I know I hate rap music and I remember what the world was like during World War II. But I have no personal memories. Like the slate was wiped clean.”
“How are they—my friends?” Her voice was so small. I wanted to pull her into my arms and never let anyone hurt her again. How I was going to do that, I didn’t know. But the feeling that settled in my heart wouldn’t accept any other outcome.
“They miss you. They miss you like crazy.”
“Mara told me I could watch the world, like you used to, through the looking glass you had. But I just can’t. It would hurt too much.”
I reached an arm around her, but she jumped away. “Please,” she begged. “Please don’t touch me.”
“Why?”
“You had decades of practice being a demon and a human, and it was still hard for you to control your urges. I don’t have the benefit of time. I could hurt you. . . . I could kill you even if I didn’t want to.”
“Theia, what are you saying?”
“I took a blood oath with a demon.” She sent me a look like I should have understood, like I was missing a big piece of the puzzle. “What do you think happens to someone with the blood of such a powerful demon inside her, Haden?”
She raised her brows, and it hit me. What I hadn’t wanted to accept, but had suspected since she first warned me away from her. Blood drained from my cheeks. “Oh, no. Theia, no.”
“It happened so fast. At first I thought it was just the blood ritual that made me feel strange ... foreign. I promised her I’d never escape.” She held up her hand and stared at it. “But I can feel it inside me, separate but one. It’s always there, waiting for me to be weak.”
I closed my eyes. “I’m sorry. I wish I’d never darkened your door.”
“You see now why I can’t leave.” She leaned away, to put more distance between us. “The demon is inside me. It wants unspeakable things. It makes me want unspeakable things.”
“We’ll get it out of you. Just come back with me. We’ll find a way.” I rubbed my face to keep myself from reaching out to her, but I wanted to touch her so very badly to reassure her, reassure myself. “Please, Theia, let me hold you. You won’t hurt me.”
An exasperated gasp left her lungs. “I wish that were true.” She laughed, the way people do when something is the opposite of funny. “You don’t remember, but we’ve had this conversation before. Only it was you telling me to stay away and me thinking that love could conquer all.”
“You don’t believe that anymore?”
Her gaze snapped to mine with a ferocious intensity. “I would do it again. To save you. I don’t regret that you have a chance now. Go away. Go be the bloke you’ve spent your whole life wishing you could be.”
“Not without you.” I let her roll her eyes before I asked. “Has she hurt you . . . Mara?”
“Surprisingly, no.” Theia began walking away from me onto the trail, so I jumped up to join her. The woods were peaceful again, now that she was with me. “She’s actually been quite accommodating. She misses you, I think, though she’d never admit it. She knows I can’t leave, but I think she wants me to want to stay. I mean, we’re not exactly friends, but we have fallen into a strange kind of coexistence. She thinks it’s only a matter of time until I am just like her.”
“Don’t trust her.” She looked at me questioningly. It also surprised me that I said it. “I don’t even recall what she looks like. But just ... don’t trust her.”
She inclined her head slightly. “Don’t trust me either.”
I gulped. There was something very hot about being a little afraid of a girl.
“I’ll
never trust Mara,” Theia went on. “Don’t worry. Even when she’s being accommodating, she’s not exactly pleasant. Besides, I don’t think she’s given up on getting you back here for good. We can’t ever let that happen, Haden.”
She began walking again, and I stumbled on my feet a little to catch up. “Nobody has given up on you,” I said when I reached her. She needed to understand that we all wanted her back. “Every day we try to find a way. We’ve met some really interesting . . . people . . . during some of the séances and locating spells. It’s just never you.”
“Tell me about them. My friends . . . not the people you meet during the séances.”
“All right. Donny still won’t admit that Gabe is her boyfriend.”
“Has she hooked up with anyone else?”
“No, though she threatens to all the time.”
She considered that carefully. “Well, that’s good. He’s good for her. What about Ame?”
“I think Amelia would surprise you. Varnie calls her a raw talent.”
Theia stopped walking. “Varnie is still around, then.”
“Yeah. He’s making sure I don’t fall on my ass. I’m sort of like a newborn these days, only I have to go to high school and act normal. Anyway, he put a roof over my head. And he works with Ame, developing her psychic abilities.”
Theia wrapped her arms around herself, but smiled. “God, all her Hello Kitty readings were horrible. I’m glad she’s coming into her own.” She paused. “Mike?”
I blew out my breath. “Still hungry.”
“Are they dating?”
“Not really. It’s hard for her. She can’t really include him in the stuff we do. He doesn’t get it.”
She nodded. “But Gabe knows.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty open-minded. More than Donny. They all help me. You’d think they would hate me, but they all try to help me adjust. The school, everyone else, thinks I was in an accident and that I have amnesia.” I waited for her to ask, but she didn’t. “They think you ran away.”
She looked down quickly. “My father?”
“He’s distraught.”
“He believes I ran away.”
“Yes. He calls Donny and Amelia every day to see if you’ve called them. He doesn’t know about me. . . .” My voice trailed off. “You shouldn’t be here, Theia. It’s all my fault.”
She began walking again. “I found your truck.”
“My truck?”
“You have one here. It’s pretty beat up. If I had seen what you’d done to it before you asked me to go stumping with you, I might have said no.”
I’d taken her stumping?
A tear rolled down her cheek in a slow trail that made me feel fierce and weak at the same time.
She wiped her eye and pressed her lips together. “I sleep in your room. I’m fairly pathetic about it, really. I wear your T-shirts to bed and watch your movies.” She paused. “And you don’t even remember me.”
This time I stopped walking. “Do you think it’s easy for me?” She had gotten a few steps ahead and turned to look back at me. “No, I don’t remember you. I don’t remember holding you or talking to you or falling in love with you—but I walk around with a giant hole in my heart all the time. I feel your absence every second of the day. It aches and nothing soothes it. Losing you is bad enough, but I don’t even get the comfort of remembering that I had you once.”
I thought she understood, for a second. And then something crossed her face, an expression I couldn’t name; maybe it was hopelessness. “It doesn’t matter.”
I closed the distance between us. “It does too.”
“I think you’ve always been the loneliest boy in the world,” she said softly. “When you lived here and watched the world you wanted so badly to be a part of—and now, you’re still not a part of it, are you?” She pulled her hood up. “You don’t want to be a part of my world anymore, Haden. Trust me.” She yanked on the necklace around her neck until it broke free. She held it out to me until I put my hand out. “If you have the feelings you say you do, you’ll tell the others to stop trying to find me.”
“Theia—”
She dropped the necklace into my hand. “Show them this. Tell them I’m happy here. That I don’t want to come back. Not ever.”
I clasped my fingers around the jewelry. It was warm. “I’m not going to give up on you.”
She surprised me by grabbing my shoulders and stretching to me for a kiss. The press of her lips on mine energized every cell in my body. It was like coming home, only I’d never felt what that was like before now. My blood pulled in and out of my heart with a different rhythm, one that I knew instantly matched hers. I clutched her tighter, determined not to let her go. Not ever again.
And then I woke up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I didn’t know if I’d ever been to a high school dance before, but I was pretty sure I would never go to another one.
The four of us—Gabe, Donny, Amelia, and me—stood in a corner holding cups of warm orange juice and praying for the clock to move.
“At least we look good,” Donny conceded before she sipped her juice.
We did look good. Exceptionally good. Donny wore white—her idea of a joke, but the long dress molded to her body in all the right places with a slit up one leg and a dip so low in the back that Gabe made sure to stand behind her to block the view from other guys. Amelia went with an electric blue dress shorter than Donny’s. Instead of jewelry, she dyed the tips of her hair blue and affixed some kind of sapphire jewels to the skin near her eyelids.
Ame was my date. Mike never manned up to ask her, and I knew Donny wouldn’t go if Ame didn’t have a date. And if Donny didn’t go, then Gabe couldn’t go, and as far as I could tell, Gabe was the only one who really wanted to be there in the first place.
“Do you want to dance?” I asked Amelia.
She shrugged. “I suppose.”
“Ouch.”
She looked at me sideways and a small smirk curled her lips. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . .”
“I know.” I wasn’t the date she wanted, and Theia was still living in a realm of the underworld.
After I came back with Theia’s necklace and the unsettling news about the demon blood inhabiting her body, Ame had begrudgingly admitted she might have been a little hard on me. I obviously wasn’t cheating on Theia—I was too busy staring at the talisman that had done nothing to protect Theia to even think about other girls. I put her pendant on a black cord and wore it every day. I didn’t recall loving her, but I loved her all the same. It wasn’t something I questioned anymore, not after that kiss. My brain may not have remembered, but my heart did.
“This is stupid,” Gabe said, and we all looked at him. “This is probably as good as the four of us are ever going to look, and we can’t even enjoy it.”
“Theia would want us to have fun,” Ame offered quietly.
“Theia would have hated this prom just as much as we do,” said Donny.
The gym had been transformed into—well, not much. The music kept cutting out, the decorations consisted of a few banners with glitter paint, and the adult-to-student ratio was getting pretty close to two to one as the crowd thinned out.
“So, what do you want to do?” Gabe asked.
“I could eat,” I said, reminding myself of Mike, but it was true. Food seemed like a really good solution.
“Pancakes would make this night salvageable,” said Donny
“Oh, man . . . I could eat a pancake,” Ame agreed, shocking us all—I’d only ever seen her eat salad.
Half an hour later, we stormed Varnie’s front door in formal wear, carrying grocery bags of breakfast items. He came out of his room looking confused.
“Did I miss something?” He looked down at his shorts and tee. “Should I go put on a tie?”
“Please tell me you know how to cook,” Donny said to Varnie, and he laughed when he took the bag out of her hand. Varnie ate a lot of sandwiches.
> Instead, I answered, “I know how to cook.”
“Riiight,” Donny said.
“No, really.”
It seemed odd to me too. Why would I know how to make pancakes? Were all demons fans of breakfast, or just me? But the knowledge was in my head, and so I put Donny and Ame on frying bacon, which might have been a mistake, Gabe on mixing batter, Varnie on setting the table, and I rolled up my sleeves and heated up the griddle.
Something happened in that kitchen as we worked around one another and tried to keep from spilling food on the girls in their pretty dresses. Donny kicked off her heels, making her look even hotter somehow. Ame chattered and giggled, unaware that Varnie stole awkward glances whenever possible, and that every time she laughed he smiled. Gabe and I played catch with a roll of paper towels in between my awesome flapjack flipping, and Donny kept telling us to knock it off. We all felt Theia’s absence—but at the same time, I felt a part of something. I had a place where I belonged.
We sat at the table like a family, passing things and joking. I ate until I was so full I thought the button on my pants would give way. Everything just tasted so good.
Ame sat back. “Jeez, I’m stuffed.”
“I don’t even want to think about all those dishes,” Donny said. “Hey, now that I believe in demons and magic spells, who’s going to tell me about little dish elves that come and clean your kitchen while you nap?”
“There is a class of fairy called Nibs that will do it, but they come with their own set of issues. It’s never worth the hassle of summoning them,” Varnie answered.
“I was totally kidding, but . . .” Donny eyed him suspiciously. “Wait, are you punking me? There really is no such thing as Nibs, is there?”
Varnie smiled noncommittally.
“Ame, is there such a thing as Nibs?”
Amelia bit her lip to keep from laughing. “I’ve never heard of them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“Amnesia boy?”
I held up my hands. “Yeah, sorry. Amnesia.”
“You guys suck.” She pouted.
It was fun to get her worked up. Donny lived so close to the surface that a few well-chosen words could spin her into a frenzy. Of course, sometimes that was a curse too.