“It’s her,” Maureen said and glanced at me. “Are you sure you’re ready to do this?”
Why was she doubting me now?
“I am.”
“Let me do the talking, though,” she asked. “I am pretty sure she’ll try to manipulate you again.”
With a nod, I confirmed. I wasn’t going to let the girl change my mind. Not this time.
When she was almost at my grave, Maureen stepped around the tree that was providing cover, into the growing darkness, back straight, head high. A proud demon girl, facing the enemy.
“I see you got his message.”
The girl turned around at Maureen’s words, staring into the night, eyes searching until they finally stopped on her.
“Maureen.” Her voice was shocked.
She seemed to realize something, as she kept glaring at Maureen. Whatever it was, now there was another emotion coming from her. Did she feel betrayed? Hadn’t she understood last time what I was? What had she expected? After our last encounter, she must know I was in for the kill this time.
“How nice of you to come,” Maureen chirped. It was obvious how much she despised the girl. She would probably enjoy very much eradicating her herself.
“What do you want?” the girl’s voice went up an octave as she spoke. Fear?
“Well—there is a small thing I need you to do,” Maureen asked.
The girl—I could see her eyes reflecting the dim light of the graveyard lamps—would refuse any favor Maureen would ask, there was no doubt.
“You need to stop thinking about him.”
What? What was she talking about? Hadn’t we come here to destroy the girl?
The girl shook her head wildly, as if offended by Maureen’s request, and turned around to leave.
As she started walking, she kept shaking her head, but this time it was more as if she was wondering about something.
She was leaving. I couldn’t let her leave. Something resonated inside my chest, and it was connected to this person. I needed to understand. No, I needed to kill her. That was what we had lured her there for.
“You came,” my mouth spoke before I could consciously decide whether or not to interfere.
The girl glanced back at the sound of my voice, eyes searching frantically.
“Adam, where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter where he is,” Maureen reminded her. “The only thing that matters is that you came. You are making it so much easier for all of us.”
The girl stopped, struggling, wondering, debating with herself. She looked lost, and I felt like I wanted to be the one who found her…whatever that meant. Something was going wrong in my mind. There was this pull toward her, and I couldn’t stop myself from stepping out of the shadows so I could see her more clearly.
“Adam.” Her voice was a whisper. Relief, fear, wonder, all of it combined in a quiet sound that had been my name.
I stepped closer. She would be able to make out my face by now, that’s how close I was.
“Are you alright, Adam?” she asked and I was confused why it would be any of her concern how I was. What game was she playing this time?
“Don’t bother talking to him,” Maureen interfered and walked to the girl, looking exactly like the terrifying demon she was.
As she stepped to her side, the girl nodded at something. An inner monologue? Who knew how her strange human mind worked? And Maureen leaned closer, using the girl’s petrification to deliver a message I hadn’t known was part of the plan.
“You destroyed everything,” she whispered. “You took him from me. You made him your pet-angel.”
Who was she talking about?
“Maureen, I didn’t make him anything,” the girl replied in a low voice, cautiously, but determined to speak her mind. “I didn’t make him love me.”
Maureen laughed at her words, sounding a lot sweeter than she had before. I wished I could see the expression on her face, but her features were hidden behind a curtain of bluish-black hair.
“Whatever you did or didn’t do doesn’t matter now, does it?” She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder the way she had with me before, only the girl flinched under her fingers.
“He doesn’t remember any of it. Your great, epic love. It was for nothing.” Maureen’s words were a mere whisper, icily-cold, deadly. But what she was saying didn’t make any sense. Hadn’t we come here so I could finish what I had failed to do earlier? Now it seemed that she was on a personal vendetta, fueled by jealousy. Were they talking about me? Was it true? Had I really loved the girl? Claire?
“I want you to know, that there is nothing left of the Adam you knew,” Maureen continued and ran a finger down Claire’s arm, as if she wanted the fingernail to cut right into her skin. “He is all mine. His love is mine.”
Love? What was going on? I didn’t love anyone. Demons didn’t love.
Instead of shrinking away from Maureen’s words, the girl seemed to find some unknown courage because her face defied everything she had said. With a quick movement—quick for a human—she knocked Maureen’s hand off her arm and turned to face her. “You don’t know love. Love is the one thing that survives the darkest times.”
Maureen glared at her for a long moment. “You make me sick,” and walked away, pointing at the girl over her shoulder. “She’s all yours.”
What angle was she playing? She winked before she slid back behind the trees, out of the girl’s view. The girl. With a glance at her face, her light caught my interest. Wasn’t that the reason why I was here, to draw that spark from her? My hand wandered up, palm directed at her chest, and the longer I kept looking, the stronger the pull of her soul was, and the more insignificant her words, Maureen’s words, and my doubts became.
“Adam, what are you doing?” the girl asked, alarmed.
I ignored her. What difference did it make if I talked to her? If I wanted to redeem myself with my family, I had to go with the original plan this time. As I searched for the end of the strings to her soul, her eyes widened in horror. Pain was written in her features, but she didn’t make a sound. It was oddly pleasurable—for a moment. Then she unfroze and stumbled away from me before she ran. Petty little human. Desirable light. Intriguing person… I was still making my mind up if I should mock her attempt to get away from me or be grateful she had decided to try, as I followed her at a slow speed. I could have outrun her within a fraction of a second. I could have teleported right in front of her face. She didn’t stand a chance. And so my dragging this out was my way of torturing her, letting her think, letting her hope I’d let her go.
She slipped on the loose gravel and hit the ground with her hands. Like a deer with a broken leg, she crawled further until she was able to get to her feet again, and she kept running. And I kept following her, pulling on the strings a bit here and there, steering her along the gravel path, making her slow from pain and releasing her for a flicker of hope.
The girl was almost at the gate when Maureen called from behind me. “Let her go.”
Was she serious? She had wanted me to kill the girl. It would secure her spot alongside Volpert and the others.
The brief moment it took me to try and understand her motive was enough for the girl to slip into her car and start the engine.
“She’ll get away,” I stated the obvious.
“Maybe,” Maureen popped up beside me.
“We want her dead, don’t we?”
“True.” She rubbed her chin. “It’s just so much fun to see her suffer. It would be a pity if it was over.”
“I don’t understand you,” I snapped at her. “Don’t you want to return to our clan?”
“Of course I do,” she said, offended.
“Then let me finish this already.”
She didn’t hold me back when I started running after the car.
“Be careful!” she called after me. “And remember, you can’t be seen.”
The car was turning the corner ahead when I got to the parking lot.
Glad about my demon speed, I caught up with the vehicle before it had turned down the next street. I didn’t dare teleport, though, anxious to keep my eyes on the car, so I wouldn’t lose it.
She sped up and turned left, cutting off my view for a moment, and I dodged the headlights of a car coming from the other direction. It was late at dark and quiet on the streets. Nobody would notice me if I moved smartly.
Slipping around the corner, I saw the car pull into a familiar place. The parking lot of the public library. Images of the dead librarian popped into my mind. Of course, there had been a connection…
There was a low bush on the side that gave me cover, but allowed me to watch the girl duck out from behind a row of parked cars, fumbling for her keychain. I dropped to the ground, making sure I was invisible as her eyes glanced left and right, scanning the area for me. I was safely hidden, observing my prey like a lion in the grass as the girl sought cover in the library. It wouldn’t be smart to attack here, in the light of the street lamps, but I had been inside that building and I knew exactly the spot…
The moment the girl closed the library door behind her, I straightened, intending to teleport in between the bookshelves, the same aisle where Blackbird and I had hidden before, but then decided my entrance would be way more effective if she heard me coming. She would fear me the way she was supposed to, not run away, or try to make me look like a fool. Not again.
The sound of her breath was loud and uneven as I stepped inside, coming from behind a shelf closer to the door. I let the sound guide me until I couldn’t only smell her sweat and blood, but also catch a glimpse of her shimmering light between books and wood.
There was no rush, she wasn’t moving, probably hoping I wouldn’t find her here in the darkness. Some animals did that—act dead when a predator approached them.
When she came into view, she was sitting on the floor, clutching her ankles, as if trying to keep herself from moving. Long streaks of blood and water were there on her face. She must have ran her hands, covered in tiny cuts from falling on the gravel, over her cheeks. And as she noticed me, fear added to the forlorn look in her eyes. Her head, which had been resting against the shelf a moment ago, was now straight, turned in my direction. She was alert, but there was something going on inside of her, which I didn’t quite understand. Yes, I had felt betrayal before, coming from Volpert when he had realized I wasn’t going to kill the girl. I had been angry and felt others’ anger, fury, rage. But this was different. It was as if she had reached the capacity of emotions her heart was capable of. She was resigning. Or was she? Her eyes, so calm a second ago, suddenly flared in fear as I took one more step toward her, and there it was again, that need to understand her. What was she expecting from me? Why had she come back to meet me? Who was she? Better, who was she to me? What had she been to me?
I shoved the questions aside, taking another step. If I needed to kill her, I couldn’t afford to think like that. But if I killed her, I would never get my answers. I wanted to lift my arm and reach out for her soul, pull it into me, but the way her eyes kept staring from her pale, tear-stricken face, it touched something inside my chest, I couldn’t name.
She leaned forward a bit, as if she wanted to tell me something, but didn’t speak, just kept staring at me, fear slowly turning into fascination. It was difficult for me to remember who I was—and I wasn’t thinking of before I’d died, but the demon I was supposed to be. Was that truly who I was? The connection to the girl seemed so strong, now that I was there with her, unobserved by Volpert or anyone else. Not manipulated by her guardian angel, or my fellow demons.
And she shrank back into the shelf as if she remembered who I was now, new tears in her eyes.
“Adam.” Her voice was hoarse and toneless. It was painful to listen to. Had I done this to her? Had I been able to harm her?
Something flickered to the surface, an echo of someone I might have been once, someone aching to help her, console her.
“Why are you so scared?” I didn’t sound like myself. Maybe a bit similar to how I sounded when I was tricking a human into coming with me willingly. But then, there was an authenticity to the sound I never had when I was hunting. I was sincerely concerned about the girl.
She didn’t seem to care. Instead, she shrank further into the shelf and screamed at me. “Do it! Do it, if you have to, but don’t play with me like a wolf does with a wounded doe!” She straightened up, eyes fierce.
Do what? Harm her? Never. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t wanted to rescue her. She was the one who had been calling me in my dreams, in my visions. Always looking at me from a distance, untouchable. But now she was here, and I was, too. I could finally close the distance and feel her. Maybe I would understand once our skin touched, the way it had in the dream…
I lifted my hand under her chin and ran a finger down her throat and collarbone. Nothing happened, except for the memory of a touch. I had felt her before.
“What’s wrong, Claire?” I murmured as she shrank away from me. “Why are you so afraid?”
Hadn’t I just proven I wasn’t going to hurt her? Hadn’t she realized I had left that other Adam outside the door? Now that we were alone, it was so much easier to give in to the lure of the intriguing human.
“It’s me, Adam,” I tried to remind her. She had talked to me like this when I had tried to kill her in the graveyard, hadn’t she? And it had shown an effect on me. It would certainly have an effect on her. She was the weak human.
I realized my hand had tightened around her throat as she gasped for air and I loosened my fingers. Her reaction was a deep breath and the attempt to move even further into the shelf, away from me. I hadn’t hurt her, had I? Just touched her skin, appreciated there was a true connection between us. Wasn’t that what she had asked for in the graveyard the other day?
“What happened to you that makes you so afraid of me?” I knelt down and dropped my hand from her throat, taking her hand instead. She stared at me as if I had lost my mind. What had I done?
I cursed myself for having lost my memory. If I could only remember what had happened, who she had been to me before my death…
“I’m sorry I was gone so long,” I tried a different angle. Maybe if I acted trustworthy, she would help me figure out the truth. “I should have taken better care of you.” I should have simply approached her in the school parking lot that day, and figured out for myself what was going on with my visions.
She shuddered and tried to pull her hand away from me.
“What’s wrong, Claire? What happened?” I was trying to make it up, wasn’t I? I had let her go twice. I had risked my position with my family to get a chance to figure out what was going on…
“Are you honestly asking me this?” She stared at me, rage in her eyes and voice cold as ice.
Yes, I was asking this. How could I know? I could only be held accountable for what I remembered, and that was a span of a couple of weeks.
She turned away from me the second I let go of her fingers.
“What have I done to you, that you are afraid of me?” My voice was so gentle now, I almost shrank back from it myself. I was a demon, right? I wasn’t supposed to show mercy, and most certainly not to plead.
The girl slid away further, trying to get away from me, now that I had become too soft. Without a second thought, I cut her path off, teleporting right before her feet.
“You are going to tell me what’s wrong!” I yelled, not seeing another way to make her speak. I needed to know the past. If I had that, there was a chance of untangling this mess. She seemed to be the key.
“Why don’t you just do it?” she yelled back at me.
“Do what?” I grabbed her shoulders, trying to shake the answer out of her.
We had tortured countless angels and humans, maybe she would respond to a little stronger incentive… I was still thinking about how to approach this when she screamed. “Kill me! Get on with it and do it!”
Kill? Had there been a
time when I had wanted to do that? I couldn’t remember. Everything was blurry. The memories of my clan, the girl, the urge to console her, her tempting light… Who was I again? A demon? Why did I feel so many emotions at once, then? There was some sort of affection breaking through. For some reason, I couldn’t put my finger on it, I liked the human. I teleported away, preventing myself from crushing her in frustration.
“Kill you—” I mused. There was a voice in my head that insisted it was the right thing to do, but I couldn’t remember what the benefit would be if I listened to it.
The girl found me with her eyes, standing a couple of feet away in the darkness, and her gaze, also full of frustration, made me want to embrace her.
“Why would I do that?” How could I possibly do that—kill her?
“You already tried earlier today, remember?” she reminded me.
Had I? The same I which I was now? Something had changed…was still changing… I tried to remember, but everything was a haze. What exactly had happened? How had we gotten to the library? Why was I talking to the girl? My chest was almost exploding with unknown feelings. Was it the girl’s influence? The girl. There was something about her. Hadn’t someone warned me I should be careful around her? She would try to manipulate me…
“Oh, no!” I jumped up and stepped closer to the girl, taking a good look at her face. The girl-monster. Volpert. Maureen. My clan. “Damn!” I had to kill her. The memories of the past days came back as the haze lifted.
If I didn’t kill her, Volpert would probably kill me. Or I let her live and ran away…
When it finally settled in, I looked back at the girl, who was watching me with curiosity and worry. I walked toward her, human pace, unable to make up my mind. And repeating Maureen’s words to myself. I was a demon, I didn’t show mercy, I didn’t apologize for anything, I didn’t have emotions such as love…
“What is it, Adam?” the girl interrupted my thought process with her innocent voice, and again it triggered that urge to hold her.
I took a deep breath, something my body didn’t need, but my lungs, so I could speak, but this time it was more. I needed it to mentally prepare myself for the decision I was going to make.
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