April stood frozen with her arms still extended.
“Stay away!” She yelled as Ayil pulled her back and behind her.
“Stop demon!” Ayil warned with her glowing eyes.
The red haired demon stopped, smiled and then laughed. “Love your eyes, but they don’t scare me, and neither does your little stone.” She flicked her eyes at me and then suddenly laughed then stopped with a sour look. “How dare you come here, but I am glad that you brought my daughter to me.” She smiled as she crossed her arms and cocked her head to see April. “Yes, you April Snow, of room 23 at Sunrise Acres, I’m talking to you.”
April
“You are not my mother, demon,” I said, with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“I’m the one who bit you,” she smiled at me. “Your mother didn’t deserve you because she didn’t care about you nor did she want you. Things were that way without me, darling. If it wasn’t for that stupid gypsy, and your mother’s knowledge, I’d have you in my brood. It was pure luck that Benjamin found you.” She paced the floor as she walked through the hovering glass shards. “The serum… a daughter…what a nice little present for me,” she said with flickering eyes.
“Seth, the stone,” I could hear Ayil whisper as Eveie, the demon, began to sing a familiar lullaby—rock-a-by-baby—the one my mother used to sing to me.
“Your mother sang that to you, didn’t she?” Eveie asked as she walked around the room.
“You. Are. Not. My. Mother,” I said as flames now burned inside of me. I wanted her dead for all the years that had been stolen from me.
“She wanted to protect you, but at the same time, she didn’t. You had become a burden to her.”
Her words were like a squirming tentacle that grew into me like a choking vine. She was the demon, the darkness that had followed me all my life and she was standing in front of me.
“Why?” I asked staring into her human-like eyes. Was that how she always looked? Human? “Why me?”
Eveie smiled with delight at my question as if she had been waiting for me to ask it. “Why not you?” She asked. “You are special, April. You have things inside of you that you can’t even begin to comprehend—neither did your mother, and, your father…died too soon to reveal himself to you.”
“April,” Malachi said behind me, pulling me back. “Don’t listen to the demon; it’s playing on your emotions.”
Eveie’s eyes shifted to him with maliciousness. “You know that first-hand, don’t you Malachi.” She began to laugh. “So, really, is this the group of vigilante monsters sent to capture me?” Her eyes scanned us. “Pathetic.”
My body shook with fear and anger. She knew things of my past, my family…I had to know.
Malachi grabbed my shoulders and shoved me behind him. He pulled a dagger from his side and flung it towards Eveie. She caught it with her bare hand and then crushed it, releasing the black dust from her palm.
Something had to be done. Seth and Ayil both held the stone in their hands and were chanting something, but I knew whatever they were doing, it wouldn’t work, not on this demon.
Eveie stepped towards Malachi and lifted him by the neck into the air. “I should have killed you while I had the chance. I thought it would be fun to see what happened to a little, frightened monster boy as an experiment. And I can conclude that all you want to do is still kill me—only with more vengeance—interesting.”
The spell Ayil and Seth were making, was taking too long. I snatched the stone from them and held it my arm that had my hexmark, and aimed it at Eveie. Immediately, it began to glow in a bright light that curled around us like swirling fog. Gold, orange and white light filled in around us as I stared at Eveie.
At first, she smiled at me with amusement, but then as my power grew, her pleased smile faded. She let go of Malachi as her image began to fade like someone was erasing her.
“All I wanted was to be a mother, April…I,” her image then shifted into my mother’s as I remembered her the day I was taken away from her: outstretched hands, long brown hair, and except this time, she didn’t look relieved, she was filled with as much heartbreak as I had felt.
“Take her, she’s tricking you!” Malachi stood beside me as my arm began to shake.
“I love you, April,” said the voice of my mother.
I wanted to give in. “Mother,” I whispered as Malachi took my arm, wrapped his fingers around my wrist tightly and shoved the stone that I held in my hand into Eveie’s face.
My mother’s image shattered along with the screams of Eveie’s voice, and was sucked into the stone. The force pushed Malachi and I backwards to the floor as the last of the black smoke was drawn into the stone like someone had sucked it up through a straw.
I laid next to Malachi on the floor with our arms extended over our heads and his hand wrapped around mine holding the now black stone. I looked at it then over at Malachi who smiled back at me.
“Not bad for a spell-struck pet,”
Seth
“I’m not sure if she’s the demon or not,” Malachi said as he sat on the couch. “She had a familiarity to her, but it could have been one of her clan. They all like to claim each other’s accomplishments.”
“She knew your name,” I said, sitting across from him.
“All demons know my name, Seth. Don’t you know that? I’m the one-stop-shop for all of their needs and desires to rake havoc on someone’s life.” He threw his hands up in the air.
I fiddled with the empty mug I had in my hand and swirled the remains of the tea Ayil had served. The subject of demons was a tender one with Malachi, and I quickly changed it back to something more important at the time—our mission. “Don’t you think Benjamin would have noticed that Eveie was a demon?” I put the cup on the coffee table. “I think he would have been a little more cautious especially having made a serum.”
Malachi shrugged his shoulders and rubbed his neck. The purple-black bruise of the demon’s handprint stood out like a tattoo.
“Maybe he was a genius that chose the wrong acquaintances. You know, book smart, socially stupid.” Malachi stood up and grabbed my empty mug. “Demons can be very tricky, and if the one we captured is strong enough to run a B&B and all the spells that go along with it, then, it will get out of that stone of yours.”
Malachi was right. Demons were tricky creatures that preyed on emotions and manipulated humans as well as monsters for their every whim. And now they had a serum if used on humans, would make them an army.
Ayil was confident that the stone would hold the demon, but I wasn’t so sure. We needed to question the demon, but we’d have to release it to that. And it would never reveal anything to us anyhow. It knew about the serum and claimed April as her daughter.
I wanted to question April, but Ayil had already tried. The girl was still under the remnants of a spell that was mixed with her emotions. She flipped back and forth between her childhood memories and the present. And to top it off, we had contained a demon—its clan would realize something’s wrong when it didn’t come back.
Leaning my head back on the couch, I closed my eyes letting my own thoughts drift to Ezra. She was dying and even though I have archangel abilities, it wasn’t strong enough to cure her and keep her cured.
I woke to the sound of footsteps. Still in a sleepy haze, I stood up thinking the demon had escaped, but was quickly put to rest when a light flicked on and Ezra smiled back at me.
“You shouldn’t be up,” I said, walking over to her.
“I’m fine to get up, Seth.”
“Did you need something….I should have been in your room so you didn’t have to get up…or Nessa was watching you I thought.” She waved her hand at me to stop.
“It’s alright. I’m stronger than you think, and as far as Nessa, she’s been kind to me—which I can guess correctly is because you care about me and she cares about what you care about.” I nodded my head in agreement.
“Yeah, but she should have t
old me she wasn’t sitting with you.”
“I told her to go to bed. The mission is more important now, and many lives and realms are at stake. My life is no more than a drop of water in an ocean. But there is something I can do to help.” She gazed at me with her indigo eyes.
“The Taking, and no, you’re not going to do that.”
She smiled at me and wrapped her fingers through mine. “April needs me. She needs my strength. The demon will come out of that stone and manipulate her without breaking a sweat doing so. April has uncharted strength in her that I felt inside her when I entered her dreams.” Her enchanted eyes mirrored back at me almost as if she was begging. “I’m dying and there’s no way out of it, but my death doesn’t have to be a waste. Let April take my energy, and instead of fading to blackness, I’ll live on.”
I curled my fingers over hers wishing I could cure her, be with her forever, but fate had a different agenda in mind that I couldn’t change.
“I’m not afraid of the Taking,” Ezra said. “I’m afraid of the darkness that will follow my death.”
7
April
“Yolanda was to take Ben and me to sanctuary,” I said looking at Ayil, but everyone had their eyes on me. “She is probably looking for us right now, and I know we can trust her.”
“How do you know we can trust her?” Seth asked with his golden eyes on me.
I let out a sigh and let my eyes slip their gaze from him to the floor. I knew they thought I was weak and just used as a pawn, plaything, or victim, but I wasn’t. I had been a part of their world since I was little, only now I know what the darkness was and how to fight it.
“She doesn’t know, she doesn’t understand what’s going on here, and we can’t possible go by what she says.” Malachi waved his hand at me as he looked at Seth, Ayil and Nessa.
“I know more than you give me credit for.” I lifted my eyes like two darts towards Malachi. He smiled at me.
“No, spell-struck, you don’t. Have you ever been to Iethia, battled demons—before the incident with Eveie—or even know the slightest thing about monsters other than your hexmark emits an enormous amount of light?”
My gaze was steadily fixed on Malachi. “The darkness has followed me since I can remember. I have fought it off several times all by myself, and managed to keep it at bay for sixteen years. And,” I stepped closer to Malachi tilting my head to the side, “I did without the knowledge of who I was and what I have.”
“Instincts darling,” Malachi rebutted. “There is a little thing called instincts.”
I tightened my lips, clenched my fists, “Instincts…!”
“I’m sure whatever you’ve encountered in the past is nothing compared to what happened at the Ivy Inn.” Malachi raised his voice over mine. “Not to mention…”
“Enough!” Ayil yelled with a slam of her fist on the table that caught everyone’s attention. “April sit down, and Malachi, keep your mouth shut unless you are contributing important information. We have demons penetrating this world and inflicted humans as their army invades the Shadowlands.” She looked at each of us as I sat between Nessa and Seth. “Many things rest on our shoulders until help arrives.”
“Help, what kind of help?” Seth asked with concern.
“I’ve called for the assistance of the angels,” Seth started to say something, but Ayil cut him off. “They are trusted ones that I’ve worked with many times, and we need them. Once the demons get the serum right, there will be no stopping them. For right now the serum isn’t holding up. The humans are dying quicker than the demons are turning them.”
“How do you know that is what’s happening?” Seth asked.
“That is what my angel contacts are telling me. And April is right about her ring.” Her dark eyes gazed at me. “Demons need the last ingredient to hold their poison serum together, and April to go along with it. With both they will truly be unstoppable.”
“But some angels hate monsters,” Nessa said.
“I’ve known them for years, and so has your Uncle Hes,” Ayil glanced over at Seth. “I’ve informed them on everything that has happened and they will be assisting us.”
I looked down at my ring that was to be a tangible promise of a future with Ben. Even though I was now aware of the spell I was oblivious to before that was in the process of wearing off, I still felt something for Ben. He took me in and protected me and showed me who I was.
“What’s in the ring, and why do they need me along with it?” I kept my hands under the table safely on my lap and twirled the ring around my finger. I looked into Ayil’s dark eyes as they casted over with something I had seen before. My mother gave me the same look when she was getting ready to tell me something that would comfort me so I’d be easier to deal with.
“If we are right, it contains the magic of the angels, and you have a royal hexmark, April. That kind of mark doesn’t appear very often and what my contacts have told me is that you come from the lost line of ruling monsters—kings, queens, princes, princesses, the list goes on and hasn’t been seen for a long time.” Ayil looked at me with a mix of hope and fear.
“But a gypsy woman gave it to me. I wasn’t born with it.” I ran my fingers over it as I kept my eyes on Ayil.
She shook her head. “No one can give you a hexmark. It was there, only hidden. The gypsy uncovered it for you.”
“Who could have covered it up in the first place?” Nessa asked looking at my mark with an arch of her eyebrow. Her neon green eyes flashed at me then at Ayil. “We are born with these marks, and are there, on every monster, by the hand of demons. They can’t be disguised by any kind of magic.”
“Yes, they can, but it had to be someone of great power.” Ayil stood up and looked at me with her dark eyes.
“Eveie said that my father died before he could reveal himself to me, maybe it was him that hid it.” I let my eyes travel from Ayil to Nessa and then Seth and Malachi.
“Do you know how your father died, or was there ever any other family around that you knew?” Seth asked and I shook my head.
“No, it was just my mom until I was four, and I barely remember her.” I felt a bubble inside of me begin to rise of all the feeling I repressed throughout my childhood. I became good at controlling my emotions, and decided a long time ago that I lived to survive and one day, I’d be free. What that freedom was, I never knew.
“You’re trembling, April.” Nessa placed her freckled hand over mine. “Are you ok?”
I didn’t realize I was shaking. “Yes, fine,” I replied.
I felt everyone’s concerned eyes on me, but I didn’t look at them, I couldn’t.
“Well, for now we need to stay put and blend in with the rest of this sleeper town. We don’t need to bring attention to ourselves until the angels arrive.”
I lifted my eyes to Ayil. “When will that be?” I asked.
“Very soon,” she replied.
“I don’t care what Ayil says, marks can’t be hidden like that and then uncovered one day,” Nessa said as she sat on the sofa hugging a pillow. “But you said a gypsy woman uncovered it, or, did she put it there?” She asked with a raise of her eyebrows.
“Ben said I was bit by a demon and the mark,” I closed my eyes forcing myself to remember the day I went to the carnival. “It…”
I let the walls I had built around my vivid memories open like a chasm. I had to remember them, no matter how much it hurt.
“We went to a fair, but my mom called it a market. I remember arguing with her about it because it didn’t look like a market to me with the bright lights, music, and booths set up, but at the same time, there was something strange about it.” I still had my eyes closed and pushed myself to stay focused.
“What was strange about it?” Nessa asked.
“The smell…it smelled of sweet perfumes mixed with musky scents and something burning .” A sudden burst of smoke erupted in front of me and I let go of my mother’s hand.
“April, don’t let g
o of my hand!” Her voice echoed in my head.
Focus. I tried to stick with the memory that felt incredibly real now.
We walked down a row of tents all with markings outside of them. They were all different colors and some had flags of bright ribbon staked outside the door. Everything here was colorful and festive with people dancing around to the constant sound of drums and flutes that filled the night air.
I breathed in that air, and it was cool. Moisture from the dew on the grass soaked through my shoes, and made my feet wet. But it didn’t bother me because I was fascinated with the wildly dressed people dancing and laughing all around us.
“Are there any rides?” I asked my mom.
“No April,” she said in a dismissive voice. “We’re here,” she said with relief.
The drape of the tent door flipped open and inside was a small, round table covered with a burgundy colored cloth. Colorful tapestries covered the walls, and shiny beads looped all around the room. The beads glistened in the light, and I found my little self was mesmerized by them.
What else was in the room?!
“Who is with you, April?” It was Seth’s voice asking.
“My mom and…a woman…large woman with a dark veil…I’m scared…don’t want to get close to her!” I felt comforting arms wrap around me.
The past and the present were colliding. I wanted to see where I was, ask questions, but the memory I was so vividly witnessing was just that—a memory.
“What is the woman’s name? What is she saying to you?” Malachi’s voice broke through my vision.
“My mom is paying her…I have to hold out my arm…and…NO!!!” I cried at the top of my lungs as my arm felt it was on fire.
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