“Show off,” I muttered. Just because he actually had wings and knew how to fly. Sheesh.
Of course, I was glowing with an eerie silver light and floating even without wings, so I should probably have had a little more confidence. Actually, though, I was terrified. I had called him out, but I didn’t know how I could possibly defeat him.
So I did what any sane person would do. I closed my eyes and wished as hard as I could that he would just disappear.
Instead, when I opened my eyes a moment later, he was right in front of me, still out of reach but now at eye level. His hand was raised toward me, palm out, and he was chanting in the language I had come to associate with demons.
All the fighting in the auditorium had stopped, and demons surrounded us, watching—some from the ground, others hovering around us in the air, and still others I could see sliding behind this world in the ethereal plane.
None of them intervened. I saw Mason and Mr. Bevington still on the stage, blocked from joining me by the demons they’d been fighting moments before. And I could see Josh’s body sprawled below me, pale and perfectly motionless.
Bartlef waved his hand and gathered ether around him so that it formed a barrier between us, solid and cold as ice, glittering in the auditorium lights. I could feel the frigid ether rush past me as it pooled around Bartlef’s hand before leaching into the barrier. And I could feel the warmth of Josh’s kiss still radiating out from the pit of my stomach, where it had warmed the frozen places Biet had touched.
That’s when I knew what I had to do. I knew it in the same way that I had known the demon words moments ago.
I held out my own hand so that it mirrored Bartlef’s, each of us touching one side of the smooth, frozen barrier between us. Where my hand met the coldness of the solidified ether, steam rose into the air.
Bartlef redoubled his chanting, getting louder and louder. I simply hovered in the air in front of him and let my hand burn away the chill of his shield.
With our palms only millimeters from touching, Bartlef suddenly stopped chanting and dropped straight down to land on the stage. He stood directly over Josh’s unmoving form.
Without thinking about how I was doing it, I followed him, not quite touching down.
“Stay away from me, bitch,” Bartlef hissed. He pulled a small, sharp object from the inner pocket of his blazer and held it threateningly over Josh’s chest. “Or I’ll push cold iron through his heart and he’ll die here.”
So Josh wasn’t dead yet. Part of my mind heard that with an inner whoop of joy. And an analytical voice in the back of my mind announced that it was storing that piece of information away for later examination. The rest of me knew I couldn’t be distracted.
When I didn’t answer, Bartlef crouched swiftly and pressed the tip of the object—what I now recognized as a letter opener—against Josh’s shirt.
Still without thinking about it consciously, I flipped my orientation so that I now hung upside down over Bartlef. My hands reached out and grabbed the old man’s arms, pulling him away from Josh. When my hands touched him, silver light flared around us and Bartlef screamed, his high-pitched, gravelly voice echoing through the auditorium.
And the longer he screamed, the stronger I felt. I pulled Bartlef up toward the catwalks over the auditorium, toward the upper stage lights.
His voice gave out, ending in ragged sobs. The light surrounding us flickered, then steadied, burning more brightly silver than it had before I grabbed Bartlef.
When I was as high as I could get above the stage, I opened my hands and let go. Bartlef crashed to the stage, unconscious. He landed with a satisfying crunch, his arms and legs splayed around him in unnatural angles.
I glared around the auditorium, looking for my next target. Everywhere I looked, demons stared back at me with wide, unblinking eyes. They were waiting to see how this played out, I realized.
No one was going to try to stop me.
I scanned the crowd again.
There. Below me. Hazel Biet. She was holding the chalice, swiping her finger through the blood inside it and licking it off frantically. I couldn’t see the knife she’d used earlier.
I dove back down toward the stage, felt the air rush past me and blow my hair out of my face.
Biet dropped the cup, reached behind her and pulled Sarah around to face me. Sarah was still handcuffed to Quentin.
“I’ll kill her if you touch me!” Biet screamed.
I don’t know what I would have done—I honestly don’t know if I could have stopped at that point. But Biet didn’t even give me time to react. She yelled her warning, then she grabbed Sarah’s chin from behind and twisted.
I heard Sarah’s neck break with a pop and a crunch.
And something inside me broke, too.
I screeched wordlessly and grabbed Biet by the hair as I swooped by, pulling her off her feet and throwing her to the ground. I landed on top of her, my hands around her own throat. She stared up at me, her buggy brown eyes wide and her mouth working noiselessly. I loosened my grip on her neck long enough to let her pull in a single, uneven breath, then closed my eyes and concentrated on pulling her power into me. Through my closed eyelids, I could see the light around me get brighter.
Like Bartlef, Biet’s voice gave out before she was done screaming, leaving her gasping out rough noises with little relation to normal vocal sounds.
When I let go of her, she slumped to the ground, shoulders shaking.
One more, I thought. One more to go. I turned in a slow circle, rising in the air as I did so. I could feel power crackling all around me, shooting through the silver light as threads of lightning.
All around me, demons backed away. I heard them muttering, heard one word as it passed from one person to the next: “Nala!” I reached out and grabbed the closest demon.
I barely had a moment to recognize Oma Raina, but I didn’t care. She was full of life, full of power. She had participated in the world that had taken Josh’s life and power, so she deserved to die. I don’t know if I would have been able to take her down if I had aimed for her first, but with Bartlef’s and Biet’s power spooled inside me, she didn’t have a chance. She fought, but I held her and pulled the power out of her until she could no longer scream, until she went limp in my arms. Then I dropped her. Like Bartlef’s, her body snapped and crunched as it landed on the stage below.
Sims was next. If I could just find him, I would drain him, too. Leave him in a useless pile on the floor. And if I couldn’t find Sims, anyone else would do.
My heartbeat filled my ears with a thrumming noise.
As if from a distance, I heard someone calling my name. When a hand touched mine, I grabbed it and spun to face its owner. The silver light around me flared.
Mason’s face contorted in pain and he gasped. Still, he didn’t try to pull away from my grasp.
“Laney!” he wheezed. “Laney! You have to stop!”
“I have to find Sims,” I said grimly. I let go of his hand, but he clung to me stubbornly.
“If you’re going to keep doing this, you’ll have to do it to me, too,” he said, his voice uneven.
“Let go of me, Mason,” I said. “I’ll just hurt you.”
“No, you won’t,” he said. Pain laced his words.
“Dammit, Mason!” I said. “Let go!” I pulled my hands away from his, but he wouldn’t loosen his grasp.
“No,” he gasped. “If you’re going to hurt someone, it’s going to be me. But I don’t believe you’ll do it.”
The silver light crackled around us with the smell of ozone, and for a heartbeat I felt myself pulling Mason’s power out of him.
But in the end, I couldn’t. He wouldn’t let go and I couldn’t hurt him. So we fell from the air and landed on the stage. He wrapped his arms around me while all the other demons backed away slowly, hands in the air as if to ward me off. Without speaking, they began filing from the auditorium as quickly as they could. The few who looked back avoided making e
ye contact with me.
In the end, I was left on the stage with Mason, Mr. Bevington and my friends. The bodies of demons sprawled around us. I sobbed into Mason’s chest while Josh’s father rushed over to his son, gathering him up and holding him close.
“He’s alive,” Mr. Bevington said.
I stared at him, incomprehension clouding my mind.
“Josh is alive,” he said more slowly. Then he winked out of our world, though I could still see his gauzy form outlined in ether as he held his son in the plane that might heal him.
* * *
Four days later, I stood in the Texas September heat at Sarah Watkins’ funeral. The landscape around me was burned by the sun to a sere brown, the end of a long, hot summer.
The end of any chance I’d had of happiness in Fairy.
Bartlef and Biet were dead. So was Sarah. And Oma Raina. Quentin, Sarah’s boyfriend, was emaciated and ill.
Mr. Bevington had taken Josh to a hospital with a demon doctor and left him, then had come back to help with the clean-up. He had mind-wiped my surviving friends and family.
Except it hadn’t worked on Kayla. So in the end, we told her the truth. When we were done talking, she stared at all of us for a long time and then burst into tears and flung herself into Mason’s arms.
He looked at us helplessly over her head, his hand absentmindedly stroking her hair.
I shrugged. “Your problem, Mase,” I said.
He looked down at her, and his eyes grew gentle.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess she is.”
In the end, Mr. Bevington had staged a car crash. Josh, Kayla, Sarah and I were supposedly in Josh’s car, Bartlef and Biet in the other.
A head-on collision had killed the counselor, the teacher, and Sarah. Josh had been severely injured.
Miraculously, Kayla and I had walked away with only a few minor bruises.
In the hospital, Mom clutched me and sobbed in relief. I had wrapped my arms around her waist and laid my head on her shoulder, wishing I could cry, too. I wanted to ask her if she knew about the demons of Fairy. I didn’t. I was afraid to hear the answer, I think.
At Sarah’s funeral service, Natalie tried to speak but broke down sobbing and had to be led from the pulpit. At the graveside, she glared at me while Scott and Andrew avoided looking at me at all. I knew they didn’t remember what had happened, but it didn’t matter—they still blamed me.
I didn’t go to Bartlef or Biet’s funerals.
At school, the human students offered awkward condolences. The demon students avoided me. Except Mason, who followed me around telling me that what had happened wasn’t my fault. And there was always at least one adult demon hovering near me, supposedly hidden in the ethereal plane.
But I could always see them.
And Josh lay silent and still, not waking. The huge gashes on his back where his wings were once attached had been stitched closed. The faint silver light that had always surrounded him was gone, transferred to me. The doctors at the hospital didn’t have any explanation for his continuing coma.
None of us did.
His father sat at his bedside, watching and waiting.
I joined him in the afternoons, after school let out. Mr. Carlson had excused me from selling any more ads.
“What does ‘nala’ mean?” I asked Mr. Bevington, about a week into our vigil.
“Vampire,” he said. His voice held no inflection whatsoever.
I nodded. That was as good a word as any for what I had done to the demons. I could still feel their power crackling inside me. Mr. Bevington said he could see it when he looked at me. He wanted to find someone to teach me how to use it; although he had more Power than anyone had known before, and had taken over the Fairy conclave, he didn’t have the skills to teach me himself. A teacher from another enclave offered to take me in, and I agreed to meet with her once a week, albeit grudgingly.
I had a lot to learn about being a demon. Half-demon. Whatever.
“So am I the Yatah?” I asked the new teacher, Oma Elaine, the first time I met her. She was old and small, like Oma Raina had been.
She shook her head. “I do not know.”
“Am I human?”
She shrugged. “Not anymore.”
“Am I a demon?”
She shook her head again, and squinted her eyes as she peered at me. “Unlikely, child. I see no part of you in the ethereal.”
“But I have power.”
She nodded.
So I belonged in neither world.
Perfect.
And life moved on. I went to classes, did my homework, visited Josh at the hospital. In yearbook, Mr. Carlson assigned another photographer to teach me how to develop black-and-white film. I was glad to get away from Mason and his anxious reassurances, and more than glad to get away from the way he and Kayla had started cooing at each other all the time. She still snarled at me, though. Same old Kayla.
* * *
Josh finally woke up almost a month after Sarah’s funeral.
His father and I were in his room, sitting, as usual, in silence. I had my homework out in front of me. Mom had stopped trying to convince me to quit spending so much time at the hospital. I bent over my geometry book, trying to remember the formula for finding the hypotenuse of a right triangle, when a scratchy voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Hey, Laney,” Josh said.
My head jerked up and I stared at him.
“So are you going to talk to me, or what?” His eyes sparkled.
“Josh!” Mr. Bevington said. “Hi, son. How are you feeling?”
“Um, a little strange,” he said, rolling his shoulders.
All the color drained out of his father’s face. “Josh, there’s something I need to tell you,” he said.
Josh nodded. “I know, Dad,” he said gently.
Mr. Bevington glanced around furtively to make sure no humans were listening when he whispered, “It’s about your wings.”
Josh placed his hand over his father’s. “I know, Dad,” he repeated softly, soothingly. “I know.”
Mr. Bevington’s eyes filled up with tears.
“Can I have a moment with Laney, Dad?” Josh asked.
He nodded and moved out of the room, dashing the tears away with the back of his hand.
I moved closer to Josh.
“How you doing?” he asked me.
“I think that should be my question,” I responded quietly.
He smiled. “Yeah, maybe so.”
“So what do you remember?” I asked him.
His face grew solemn. “Everything, I think.”
“They’re calling me ‘Nala’ now,” I said.
“But not Yatah anymore?”
“No.”
He grinned, that slow, sure smile I remembered from before. “Well. We don’t have a prophecy covering a nala,” he said.
I smiled back. “That’s one good thing, then.”
His smile faded. “Yeah. One.” His shoulders twitched again.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Only when I realize they’re gone. I try to move them, and nothing.”
I swallowed. “I am so sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner, Josh,” I said.
“Don’t, Laney.” He reached out and twined his fingers in mine. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”
I looked at him quizzically.
“We’re in this together. Both of us. Half of the same whole.” His fingers tightened around mine and his voice grew hoarse. “And as long as you’re here, it doesn’t matter whether or not I have wings.” He pulled me down until our lips met. “I love you, Laney Harris.”
“I love you too,” I whispered.
Epilogue
The next afternoon, I developed the canister of film from the night of the attack. On the roll was one picture of me and Sarah. She had leaned over the concrete barrier, I had stood on my tiptoes. I swished the photographic paper around in the developing solution, watc
hing as the image faded in, becoming darker and darker. Our faces smiled back at me. In Sarah’s eyes I imagined I could see a hint of worry, of fear as she prepared to betray me in her attempt to save Quentin.
“It worked,” I whispered to her. “He’s alive.” I paused. “I hope it was worth it.”
And in the background, I saw the smudge of a shadow. I watched as the image resolved, cleared into a definite shape looming over us, sweeping out from my back and stretching behind me in a clean arc of darkness, highlighted against the white of the concrete barrier. Undeniable.
Wings.
***
Read more from Margo Bond Collins:
Website: www.MargoBondCollins.net
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Margo-Bond-Collins/e/B00EOU9DEG/
Dust and Moonlight
by Keta Diablo
Chapter 1
Kingdom of Locke Cress
In the year of the King, 1179
Nightmares snaked through Balion's slumber like tentacles on a sea monster.
The Pantherinae struck its massive paws against the earth, tossed its head in a savage roar and charged the forest nymph. A tumble of copper hair and eyes the color of heather framed her heart-shaped face. So did terror. Balion raised his crossbow and prayed the Gods would favor him this day.
Above her frantic screams, the wind keened through the trees and the song birds screeched their outrage. He scanned the vast distance between him and the predator with sinking heart. Onward he ran, searching for her in the dense forest. Where are you goddess of my dreams? Not a physical remnant of her presence remained, not a blade of flattened grass or a print from the beast's massive paws. Only the omnipotent scent of her skin—crushed violets and wild honey—seared his brain.
Another dream surfaced, harder to dispel than the first. Balion had entered the dark confines of a cavern where death hung in the air. His forest nymph huddled in a corner, her lovely, pale face masked in horror. Relief came to him in crushing waves as she crab-crawled through the dirt and clung to his calf.
Paranormal Magic (Shades of Prey Book 1) Page 41