Rival Demons

by Sarra Cannon

  "The war, as we know, is far from over, but we can all take inspiration from these two who both were willing to risk everything for their kingdom and their people. Your parents may have made some mistakes in their existence, but promising you to each other was one of the best decisions they ever made. Here's to Princess Lazalea and her chosen mate, the future King and Queen of the Northern Kingdom."

  The demons rose to their feet, clapping, but the sound was muffled. In my own ears all I could hear was the sound of those four words. Future King and Queen.

  I felt the breath knocked out of me.

  Jackson and Lea were promised to each other. They were to be married. Jackson was her future king. The truth of it tumbled over me like a rock rolling down a steep hill.

  It all made sense now. Why he had to break up with me before we got down here. Why he couldn't be seen kissing me or even getting too close or showing too much interest. As far as these demons knew, he was meant for their princess.

  And wasn't he?

  I certainly didn't hear him denying it. In fact, he stood there at the front of the room with her now, smiling and playing his part. He was never planning to be with me long term. Once his brother was saved, he was always going to come back here, wasn't he? And why not? Who wouldn't want to marry a beautiful woman and lead a kingdom?

  My heart shattered in my chest. When he first told me we couldn't be together down here, I think I always assumed it was a temporary situation. Even if he planned to stay down here, I knew I wouldn't stay. And in my heart, I felt that when I left, he would follow me. We would be back to our old relationship eventually. We just needed some time to get through this, right?

  But Jackson had come back here knowing he was taking up his old place as Lea's betrothed. Her future husband.

  Just thinking it made my chest tight. I saw my hand flicker in front of me, visible for a split second.

  I clasped my hand over my mouth to keep from crying out. I was scared to even take a step, afraid I would collapse then and there. And when Jackson took Lea in his arms and kissed her forehead the way he'd kissed mine countless times, I felt my knees begin to buckle.

  The demons in the room took their seats again, waiting for Lea to address her people. For one moment as the crowd adjusted and settled, Jackson's gaze moved to the back of the room. He looked straight at me, his eyes widening. We stared at each other through the crowded space, the moment becoming a breaking. A shattering. A painful awakening. A goodbye to all we'd known together.

  I don't know how I found the ability to walk, but I knew I had to get out of there.

  I broke away from the wall and took it one painful step at a time. By the time Lea's voice sounded in the room, I was halfway down the hall, finally finding the strength to run.

  We Can Never Be Together

  I couldn't stay.

  Whatever safety the Underground had provided was gone now. There was nothing left for me here. No knowledge to gain, no protection from hurt.

  I burst through the door to the suite and ran straight to my room. I picked up the backpack Essex had given me and began stuffing it with clothes and anything I could think of that I might need. Surprisingly, there were no tears, just the knowledge that I had to go.

  Mary Anne stepped through the doorway to my room.

  "What happened?" she asked. "What are you doing?"

  "I'm leaving," I said, testing the words on my tongue. I disappeared into the bathroom to collect my toothbrush and other toiletries that would fit into my bag.

  Mary Anne followed me. "Leaving? You mean the Underground? No, you can't leave. Where will you go?"

  "I don't know yet," I said, storming back into the bedroom. I didn't even want to stand still in any one place for more than a few seconds, scared that if I stopped moving, I would have to face what had just happened.

  "Is it really that bad?" she asked, her face twisted with worry.

  "It's worse," I said. "He's going to marry her."

  Mary Anne gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. "That can't be true."

  "I heard it with my own ears," I said, a slight tremble in my voice that only made me angry. "He's apparently been promised to her since they were born."

  I shoved the last of my things into the backpack and zipped it up, having to squish it down to get it to close.

  "You would think he might have mentioned that at some point before he told me he loved me," I said. "I love you, but oh by the way, here's yet another reason we can never be together."

  I picked up one of my notebooks and tore a page from the back, then carried my backpack out to the living room and set it on the table.

  "I don't think you should go," Mary Anne said. "You're not thinking clearly. It's not safe out there."

  I thought of the hunter who was waiting for me. She was absolutely right, I was not going to be safe out there. But I wasn't safe in here either. At least out there, I knew who my enemies were.

  I sat down at the table and did my best to steady my hand as I wrote. I didn't get any farther than his name before I paused and felt the hot tears bubbling toward the surface. What could I possibly say to him in a note that would let him feel even a tenth of what I was feeling inside?

  "I'll come with you," Mary Anne said. "Just give me some time to get my things together.

  I grabbed her arm before she had a chance to walk away.

  "No way," I said. "You can't come. You can't even cast right now, and who knows how long before your injuries totally heal. Plus, you can't leave Essex."

  "Maybe he could come with us," she said. "We'll stop by the marketplace before we go. He had to head back to the shop to help his mom with something."

  I shook my head. "You know as well as I do that you can't come with me. It's way too dangerous."

  Mary Anne slumped into the chair beside me, tears in her eyes. "I don't want you to go either."

  "I can't stay," I said.

  My hand trembled as I turned back to the blank page. I wanted to say that I hated him for what he'd done to me. I wanted to say that I never wanted to see him again. But in my heart neither of those things were true. The truth was that I loved him and he had broken my heart with his lies.

  So in the end, that's all I wrote.

  Trying to Make Sense of The Scene

  I'd heard Lea once mention that she kept a spare crystal to Jackson's room in her drawer. Thinking of it now made me feel disgusted and sad, but I walked straight to the drawer of her desk and reached in for the small stone that opened his room.

  I wanted him to come back from his date with Lea and find my note on his bed.

  And I needed to hurry. He'd seen me there despite the crowd of demons in the room. I knew he wouldn't be able to get away from the party, but as soon as he had a chance, he would probably come looking for me. He'd probably have some explanation as to why he hadn't told me yet, but nothing he could say could change the truth of it.

  I wanted to be gone by the time he came looking for me.

  I hugged Mary Anne and promised her that I would find a way to contact her when I got settled somewhere. To be honest, I had no idea how I would get word to her or where I would go, but if I managed to survive the hunter at the gate, I knew I would find my way somehow.

  The hallway was deserted when I left the suite, and I ignored the fact that a shiver of disappointment jabbed through me. So what if he hadn't rushed away from Lea's side to come find me? This was how it was now, and I needed to find a way to understand it.

  I walked to the door of his small apartment and pressed the stone into the symbol on the wall. The door clicked open.

  I'd never been inside his room before. As far as I knew, he didn't spend a lot of time here except to sleep at night. I expected to see a smaller, simpler version of our own rooms with maybe a few of his clothes strewn about or something. I flipped on the light and froze.

  What I never expected in a million years was to come face to face with myself.

  Covering every inc
h of every wall in the entire one-room apartment were drawings of me. Confused, I let my bag fall to the floor. I stepped to the nearest wall and put my hand on one of the pages. The scene was gruesome, yet beautiful. He'd put so much time and detail into my face, I might as well have been looking in a mirror.

  I pulled several from the wall, only to realize that underneath were more of the same. He'd drawn the scene from every possible angle, from every distance. Some in pencil, but most in horrifying color.

  Each drawing was some version of the same story. Me laying in a sea of white snow, bright red blood splattered in random patterns against the white. My blonde hair was sprawled out against the snow, my eyes closed as if I might just be sleeping. The white strip of the ritual dress clung to my wrist, but there was fresh blood staining it now.

  Slowly, I walked around the apartment, pulling several of the drawings from the wall to study them. In one, he'd drawn a close-up of my hand, my fist closed around something I couldn't quite make out. In another, he'd pulled back from the scene as if he were hovering above me. There was so much blood, much of it seeming to pour from a wound in my back as I lay against the pure white snow.

  Overwhelmed, I fell to the floor, spreading the drawings out before me in a circle, trying to make sense of the scene.

  He must have seen this over and over in his visions to have recreated it each time in such excruciating detail. In some, I could almost count the number of eyelashes on my eyes. What had he been looking for? Some clue he could use to protect me from this fate?

  Hadn't he learned anything in all the many years of his immortal life?

  Nothing he drew could be changed or prevented.

  My eyes filled with tears, blurring the pictures before me into one unavoidable mass.

  When the door to the apartment swung open a few minutes later, I looked up, a single tear escaping down my cheek. Jackson stood in the doorway and as our eyes met, all the walls we'd been holding up since we'd come here crumbled swiftly to the ground.

  I'd Almost Forgotten

  "Why didn't you tell me?" My voice cracked with tears. I motioned to all of the hundreds of drawings spread around the room.

  Jackson moved to me, the door closing behind him. He fell to the floor in front of me, the papers crackling beneath the weight of his knees. "I wanted to find a way to make it change," he said. "I won't let this be your end."

  I shook my head. "You know better."

  He gripped several papers up and crumbled them into a ball. "No," he said, the green of his eyes stormy and dark and wet. "I can change it. I just have to find the secret, the weak spot. There's no way it ends like this. I can keep you safe here until I find a way."

  I placed my hand on his knee, touching him for the first time in so long I'd almost forgotten his warmth. "There's no escaping these things once you've seen them," I said. "And you know it just as well as I do. Trying to protect me from it is only going to pull us further apart. And I never wanted to feel this apart from you."

  He looked away, not meeting my eyes.

  "I don't know what's been going on with you since we got to the shadow world," I said, all the things I'd been holding back rushing to the surface. "I don't understand what's going on with you and Lea, but I thought you knew by now that keeping secrets from people you care about only leads to sorrow and loneliness. Why can't you just be honest with me?"

  He looked down. "So you really were there tonight?"

  I nodded. "I had to know."

  He threw the balled up papers across the room. "I never wanted you to know about that," he said.

  I laughed, then felt the sting of tears in my nose. "Didn't you know I would eventually find out? What was your plan? To see if I would help you free Aerden, then let me just watch all of you disappear back through the portal, never to be seen again? Were you just going to marry her and take your place by her side on the throne and never tell me?"

  Jackson studied my face, his eyebrows drawn together. "How could you say that?" he asked. "How could you even think that?"

  "What am I supposed to think, Jackson? You've done nothing but lock me out of your life for the past how many weeks?" I said, standing. I walked toward the back of the apartment. "You lied to me."

  "I didn't lie," he said. He stood and moved a few steps behind me. "I just didn't tell you everything."

  "You did lie," I said, turning to face him. "I've asked you before if there was more to your relationship with Lea than just friendship and you said no."

  "That's the truth," he said.

  "The truth?" I shook my head, furious. "Then how do you explain what I just saw back there? How do you explain the fact that everyone down here believes you to be her future king?"

  Jackson ran a shaky hand through his hair and turned around, pacing. "Yes, when I was born, I was promised to Lea," he said. He paused as if trying to figure out what he wanted to say. "My father is the king's most trusted adviser. He sits at the head of the king's council, and apart from the king himself, he's the most powerful man in the Northern Kingdom. My brother and I were born before the king and his mate had any children. Twins are extremely rare among my people, so when the king's daughter was born, as a sign of loyalty, my father offered to give one of his twins as husband to the princess."

  "Why you?" I asked, my heart beating so hard in my chest.

  "Because technically I was first-born," he said. "I had absolutely no choice in the matter. I was promised to her before I even understood what that meant."

  I sat down on the edge of his bed, taking it all in. "You never tried to get out of it?"

  "I never had a reason to try," he said. "I understood it as my duty to the kingdom, and I didn't question it. But when Aerden disappeared, I expected my father and the king to go after him. To do something about it."

  "But they didn't," I said.

  He shook his head. "No, my parents mourned his loss, but they accepted it. The kingdom is so full of fear when it comes to the Order of Shadows. They would rather try to outlive the Order and accept the sacrifices than fight them directly. The king believes that if we wait another few hundred years, the Order will die out on its own without violence."

  I frowned. "But demons go missing nearly every day, don't they even care about what's happening over in my world?"

  Jackson's jaw tensed and he continued to pace. "A small price to pay in the long run, they say. The king believes many more demons will lose their lives if we fight," he said. "I couldn't just sit back and let my brother's memory fade away. I didn't know exactly what they were doing to Aerden over there, but I knew it was some form of torture. I couldn't live like that."

  He sat down next to me, so close our legs almost touched. I felt his closeness like an ache in the pit of my stomach. I had no idea if I was losing him forever or finally understanding him for the first time.

  "Lea, she tried to talk me out of it at first," he said. "She cared for Aerden, but she did everything she could to convince me that it would be better for me to wait until we became rulers. She said that when we took over the kingdom, we could build our own army."

  "She was in love with you, wasn't she?" My voice trembled.

  Jackson paused. "She's always loved me," he said. "She was terrified that if I went after Aerden, she would lose me forever. So when I finally did cross over, she followed me. Once she got over there and saw what was happening to the shadow demons, she was ready to join me and fight back, but by then anything there was between us was dead."

  Silence filled the room as I let his words wash over me.

  I stared up at the drawings of my death and wondered where that left us. He brought me here to protect me, but had also stepped right back into his role as Lea's future king. Had he traded his own future for my safety?

  Jackson shifted on the bed, turning to me with eyes so clear and focused, it took my breath away. "I have never loved her. Harper, I swear, you are the only one I have ever loved."

  His words hit me with the weight o
f the weeks I'd spent alone down here, and I was helpless to even respond. Did he still love me? I wanted to ask, but was too afraid to know.

  "I am not marrying Lea," he said. "She knows that, but the demons down here see us as the future of their kingdom. If I had come down here telling them the truth about you and me, they would have hated you, trusted you even less. They would have seen you as an enemy to their own hopes. I couldn't let that happen."

  He took my hands in his.

  "But I also knew this was the place where you would be safest," he said. "I'm sorry I couldn't tell you the truth, but I needed you to believe things were over between us. One look or touch at the wrong time would have been disastrous. Harper, I need you to understand that I never stopped loving you."

  All the doubt and fear I'd been holding onto released in that moment. I choked on a sob, unable to stop my emotions from pouring forth.

  "Don't go," he said, glancing at my packed bag on the floor. He moved down to his knees in front of me on the floor, clutching tight to my hands. "Not a moment goes by that I don't think of you and long to be with you, kissing you, sharing everything with you. It's been torture being apart from you, but as long as you were safe, I knew I was doing the right thing. When I sensed your pain at the dinner tonight, it broke my heart."

  Tears filled his eyes and I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I had thought all hope of his love was gone, but with him on his knees before me now, I knew I'd been so wrong.

  "Stay," he said. "I'll find a way to make them understand, I promise. I can't live without you, Harper. Please, stay."

  Divided Far Too Long