The Nightwalkers Saga: Books 1 - 7

by Candace Wondrak

  We both must realize it at once.

  I stared at her, wondering if that was the reason I was so drawn to her, why Gabriel needed her, why she smelled like candy to Demonkind. She met my curious stare with wide eyes—an older version of her childhood self, naive and innocent all the same. Was it the reason Raphael compelled Michael and Koath to let him train her? Did his Demonic side seek absolution?

  Instead of saying it aloud, we were silent. That was, until Kass shook her head. “No,” she muttered. “No. It’s not—it can’t be. That’s impossible. I’m not—I’m just a Purifier. And a bad one at that.”

  “If Gabriel is—”

  She waved a hand in the air. “No.” And then, in typical Kass fashion, she stormed away.

  Chapter Twenty-Two – Kass

  I spent the rest of the day in denial. I didn’t even realize Max and Claire had a date until Claire’s car horn honked in the driveway, and Max hesitated at the front door. Liz told him he’d do fine, while Michael dozed off in his arm chair in the living room.

  Michael. The poor man never looked so haggard, so beaten and exhausted. I was reasonably sure that Gabriel was his first Purifier. Not that I expected Gabriel to die. If he was what Crixis said he was, if he was anything like the other world’s Gabriel, he’d wake up, soon enough.

  He wouldn’t die. A soul like his was too old, too powerful to just die.

  Me, on the other hand? Apparently my soul was just too angelic to stay dead.

  Trying to keep my mind off the conversation I had with Crixis, I watched Liz come back from wishing Max luck. “Did I hear right? Someone has a date?” I was rooting for those two for a while now, and I was happy for them, provided it went well.

  If it didn’t go well…then it’d just make things awkward, wouldn’t it?

  “If you were here today, you would’ve heard it, too,” Liz quipped as she sat on the opposite end of the couch from me, closest to Michael. “Though, if you’d been here, maybe Max never would’ve gotten the nerve.” She grabbed her mug on the coffee table and took a sip of her green tea.

  I couldn’t help but be shocked. Max was the one who asked her out? The kid’s got more balls than I gave him credit for. And, okay, I might not have ever given him credit for anything, but that’s because he’d kind of been the weird one of the group. Granted, he came in right after the Osiris/John ordeal, which was just a huge mess, so the odds were stacked against him from the start.

  “I can’t believe Max asked her out,” I muttered, mostly to myself. I plucked at the fuzzy blanket on my legs, incredulous and, strangely, sad. Max and Claire as a couple had been something Gabriel and I talked a lot about. Now that it happened, Gabriel wasn’t here to witness it. I was no good with sarcastic one-liners without him.

  Liz sighed into her tea. “I can. The boy’s practically been drooling over her since I’ve known him.” She gave me a warm smile, but to me, it felt empty. Everything was empty without my best friend.

  The time crawled by.

  The TV was on to some rerun of a nameless sitcom with a laugh track whose jokes weren’t even that funny. Nothing was ever on Saturdays. It was a long while after we ate a tiny dinner (I mostly played around with the food on my plate), when I broke the silence again.

  “Do you believe in Angels?” I questioned.

  Neither one of the adults in the room answered me.

  “To anyone who’s listening, do you?” I said again, frowning to myself. I got more out of Crixis than these two.

  Michael mumbled something that sounded like a no, and before I could ask him on it, Liz spoke up, “Of course I do. I think we each have our own personal Guardian Angel.” She smiled at the thought. “What do you think, Kass?”

  Was that a trick question?

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you guys.”

  Michael mumbled into the chair, without bothering to turn and look at me, “I think you’re old enough to have your own opinions.” He carried on, “And I think that if Guardian Angels were real, then Gabriel would be here with us, and none of the blasted stuff that’s happened to us would’ve happened.”

  Liz inched closer to me, whispering, “Ignore him. I think they help us be exactly where we’re meant to be.” She wrapped an arm around me, and for the first few moments, I blinked, thinking how weird it was, but after a while, I got used to the heat from her arm, to the gentle side-hug she gave me. “Everything will be okay. Gabriel’s strong. He’ll make it out of that coma, and things’ll start to settle down around here.”

  A lie, but a nice one. I tried to take it as merely comforting words and nothing more. Not a promise of a good future. Not a promise of anything.

  It would never settle down. Even if he did wake, we were Purifiers, regardless of the state of his soul, and whatever I was. Things for Purifiers never settled down. It was go, go, go. Run and fight until you’re dead. And even then, even after we gave our lives for the mission of purifying evil and saving the world, what did the Council do for us? Did we get headstones? Did we get a memorial? Or were we just put in the incinerator and forgotten as the next crop of young’uns took over?

  “Thank you,” I whispered, “for lying to me.”

  Liz looked at me, then, like I said something totally off-base. As if she truly believed what she told me. As if she didn’t look at me, Gabriel, and Max as soldiers in an endless war, like we weren’t expendable.

  “Have you found out anything about the body in the school?”

  She glanced to Michael’s chair, waiting to hear his snoring before answering, “I know what type of Demon it is. It’s one the Council claims to be extinct, but there’s no other possible culprit. It’s a Skinwalker, and we have to be careful come Monday. It could be anyone.”

  “A Skinwalker?” I spoke its name, figuring it fit.

  “The last one was thought to have been purified in Central America over seventy years ago. A dangerous breed of Demon. The Council added it to their extinct directory fifty years ago, even though there has been some evidence that they are not quite as extinct as they say.”

  I held in a disbelieving chuckle. “Clearly.”

  The Skinwalker could be anyone?

  That’s a frightening thought, and I wasn’t the type to scare easy.

  I was more like the kind of girl who laughed in the face of danger.

  “So, I’m assuming they wear bodies like suits. What do they look under it all? And how can I tell a Skinwalker from a civilian?”

  Liz shifted in her seat, taking her arm from me. After sipping her tea, she answered, “You can’t, unless you’ve known the person for a while. They have the same voice, the same muscle memory. Same memories in general. Hopefully there’ll be a sign, something in its mannerisms that’ll clue us in.” Her eyes were heavy on me as she added: “It’s why we must be careful on Monday. It could be anyone. If you notice anything suspicious, head to the office straight away.”

  “What if the Skinwalker’s the principal?” It was a fairly reasonable question, considering how past principals had a way of not lasting long around here.

  “Let us hope that’s not the case,” she said simply. She said no more, turning her gaze to the television.

  Once I shook off the nagging feeling that the Skinwalker would end up being someone I knew, I looked her in the eyes and said, “Thank you for telling me the truth.”

  Liz gave me a soft smile. “Like the grumpy one said, you’re old enough. You can handle the truth.”

  The truth.

  If only she knew how wrong she was. I ran from the truth. I’d rather be spoon-fed lies if it meant that I could go on thinking Gabriel was just Gabriel and I was just me. I didn’t want to face the truth. Truth and I, we weren’t buddies like me and danger (and bad decisions).

  The truth?

  The truth could hurt worse than danger.

  Me. The daughter of an Angel. It wasn’t possible, was it?

  Chapter Twenty-Three – Gabriel

  A playro
om surrounded us, full of blocks and toy vehicles and foam puzzle pieces. Its walls were a bright yellow, the ugliest color I’d ever seen. Well, the ugliest color I remembered seeing.

  Maybe the other me thought that seeing all this stuff would bring my memories back. Or, more likely, since the other me was kind of mean, he didn’t care either way. He was just showing me what he had to show me before I made my choice. Whatever that meant.

  What choice did I have to make? A choice to wake up from this never-ending nightmare? A choice to run away from the other me, screaming and raving about his lunacy? Eh. I’d settle for waking up.

  “Well, this is a nice empty room,” I remarked, shooting the scowling me a glance. “Are we here for playtime? It’s been a while since I’ve played with building blocks, but it’s got to be like riding a bike. I’ll figure it out, and it’ll be like I never stopped.”

  His blue eyes burned into me, narrowing. “Your glibness does you no credit.”

  “Neither does your weird way of talking.”

  He held in a sigh, motioning to the room.

  Even though I was certain we were alone, when I glanced back to the space of toys, I saw a little girl sitting amongst them, driving around a plastic fire truck. She giggled to herself when she hit the toy police car, as if the imaginary crash was the funniest thing she’d seen.

  That laugh—so sweet. So pure and innocent.

  As I thought it, the girl with the hazel eyes suddenly looked upward, scanning the room, as if she could see us. Her eyes stopped on me, and I felt my heart nearly stop. Just when I was about to ask the other me why she was staring at me, I felt someone whoosh through me, realizing that a man had entered the room. He was what she stared at, not me.

  “Hey, Kassie.” The man knelt beside her, reaching around her to pick her up. “Your playdate’s here. Do you think you can play nice with him?”

  The girl, Kassie, who was no older than three or four, shrugged her small shoulders, like she couldn’t make any promises.

  The man, who must’ve been her father, smiled, and for some weird reason, I couldn’t help but smile, too.

  Kassie. Did I know this girl?

  “She affects you, even now,” the other me hissed, clearly unhappy with my smiling face. “Come. There is more.” He turns and walks through the door Kassie and her father left out of, and I spin to do the same.

  The other me didn’t like Kassie. I started to say something, but was stopped by the area around us. A field of grass, a house’s backyard. A boy and girl, around ten, sparring as two older men looked on from the porch. She was taller than the boy, smug as she kept pinning him to the ground. Throughout it all, the boy’s face was obscured to me.

  The boy laughed and motioned to his chest, pretending to cup two breasts. He said something to the girl, which infuriated her instantly. She tackled him, and together they rolled and wrestled, even after she started laughing at his actions in spite of herself.

  “I hate you,” the girl said, once they were untangled, laying side by side in the rough, dried-out grass. Though she voiced her hatred, it was evident—beyond evident—that she did not actually hate him.

  “Like I said,” the boy mused, resting his hands under his head as they gazed up at the sky, “just wait until we’re older. I’m going to be bigger than you, and I’m going to kick your butt.”

  “Nope. I’ll always be better than you.” She shot him a toothy grin. “Bet you I can make it to the house faster than you, too.” And then, without warning, she took off running to where the two men sat.

  “Hey, no fair!” the boy called out, struggling to stand and race after her.

  Both kids were laughing by the time they jumped up the wooden stairs.

  I turned to the other me, seeing that, once again, he wore a look of disdain. “Touching. So very touching it makes my insides curdle. Seeing an interaction like that makes me want to vomit and then die.”

  “That seems just a tad extreme,” I told him. I didn’t see what was so awful about it. A boy and a girl were friends. At their age, that was special, wasn’t it? Weren’t boys and girls too scared to touch each other because of cooties or something?

  His head gestured behind us, and when we turned, I saw a graveyard, at night, shimmering in some kind of portal. I let him go through it first before following him. I was getting tired of this, I had to say. What was the point of showing me all this? Why did it matter?

  We heard sounds of a fight, and as we walked through the rows of headstones, the grunting grew louder. We came upon a mausoleum with its door ajar, and within the next second, Kassie hauled herself out of there, clinging to the same boy she was fighting with in the previous space. They were older now, teenagers, though both still had some chub to their faces. The boy’s face was hazy, and tried as I might to recognize him, I couldn’t.

  And they were both beaten to a pulp. The boy was unconscious, hanging limply from her shoulder, his feet dragging on the dewy grass. Her skin was broken in half a dozen places, her breathing labored. She looked horrible, and I felt a pang of something. I didn’t like seeing her hurt.

  After a while of standing there in utter silence, another presence from the mausoleum caused me to turn, tear my gaze from the two tiny teenagers on the horizon. A man stood, leaning on the doorway, a wooden spike in his chest. His eyes were blood red, and my blood boiled at the mere sight of him. He smirked as he yanked the stake out. He was unharmed, despite the big hole in his chest.

  His fiery eyes stared at the bloodied stake, and then glanced up, at the direction of the kids. “Interesting,” he said, vanishing with a gust of wind.

  “I don’t like him,” I muttered, feeling the strange urge to beat the crap out of the red-eyed man. Although, if he could act like nothing was wrong when his heart was impaled with a spike, maybe getting into a fight with him wasn’t such a good idea.

  The other me chuckled. “Most don’t.”

  Then he took me on a roller coaster of a ride.

  We saw the red-eyed man beating Kassie again and again. We saw a dark-haired boy bite into her neck with vicious intent. And, lastly, a shirtless man in a church, straddling her, extending his teeth.

  My fists clenched. I went to stop him, for I’d had enough, but the other me held out a hand in front of my chest.

  “You cannot stop them. This has already happened.”

  “You’re showing me the past?” I asked, confused. Why?

  “Knowing the past is necessary to understand the present.”

  We walked into a house, finding a bloody scene. A man, dead, in the kitchen. A man I recognized as Kassie’s father, though older. His throat was torn and his eyes were glassy and open. It was a horrible thing to see. Even worse to witness Kassie’s trembling hand reaching for him as she sat on her knees in the blood. The red-eyed Demon sat at the table, smiling at his handiwork.

  Okay, now I really wanted to beat him up.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” The other me remarked, “How much chaos he’s brought her, and yet…”

  I glared at him, at me. “And yet, what?” Did I even want to know?

  He made a face similar to that of the Demon sitting at the table. “It’s better if you see for yourself.”

  The house around us was no more, as was the body. We were in a nightclub, music pounding loudly around us. The club’s attendants, mostly women, danced with each other and laughed as they ordered drinks. I glanced all around, not sure what I was supposed to be focusing on.

  That was when I felt him touch my arm, and he pointed toward the dance floor. And then my heart stopped. Kassie and the red-eyed Demon, dancing together. Close. Too close. So close that there was no space between them. His hands on her waist, touching her in ways he shouldn’t. The look on his face told of his thoughts, of his intentions, and the look on hers said she was enjoying it, too.

  I felt hurt. I didn’t know why I felt so close to Kassie, but I did, and seeing her with him, after seeing everything he’d done, was the worst kind o
f sight.

  I was pulled away from the dance floor, through the club’s side door. We emerged in a house, in a bedroom. Kassie had her arms crossed, her expression unimpressed. Her gaze lingered on—of course—the red-eyed Demon. He stood before her, shirtless, his body glistening water as he rubbed a towel on his hair.

  They looked chummy. They looked close.

  I hated it.

  I hated him, the red-eyed Demon, and, for a moment, I hated her. How could she get so close to such a monster?

  Suddenly we were in an attic, and the Demon had her pinned against a beam. Frozen like that, paused in that position. My skin felt hot, my anger rose. I did not like seeing this. This was awful.

  At first, I felt the urge to protect Kassie, to keep her safe, but it was clear that she enjoyed putting herself in danger, that she liked being with him, with the red-eyed Demon, even after everything he did to her.

  The other me studied my reaction intently, egging me on, “Does it make you sick, seeing them together? Does it make you angry?”

  Was I walking into a trap? Was this what the other me wanted? Did I play exactly into his hand?

  Still, I couldn’t lie. I said a low, “Yes.”

  He smiled. “Good. Are you ready for the future?”

  My jaw set, and I said it again: “Yes.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four – Kass

  I must have fallen asleep sometime during the sitcom-watching extravaganza, because the next thing I knew, I was woken up by an energetic and excited Max. My head felt like a million pounds as I lifted it from the pillow it rested on, glancing all around the darkened living room. Liz and Michael must’ve went to bed. I glanced at the clock on the mantle. Fifteen after ten. Max was out late.

  Not late for a Purifier, but late for a first date.

  Or maybe he wasn’t. I wouldn’t know. I never really went on dates. All my romances seemed to be cursed. But that’s neither here nor there.

  Max sat on the edge of the couch, just where my legs ended. If he had been Gabriel, he would’ve lifted my legs and sat under them. But he wasn’t. He was the awkward, nerdy yet loveable Max. His expression practically begged me to speak first.