Rival Demons

by Sarra Cannon

  Disoriented, I closed my eyes, enjoying the feel of the wind while the world stopped spinning.

  The Ring

  Jackson's lips descended on mine, so warm. I leaned against him, enjoying this peaceful moment.

  "We should go," he said softly.

  I opened my eyes and looked around. We were standing at the top of a moonlit hill, the black roses circling us. Above our heads, the sky boasted three moons – one pink, one blue and one lavender.

  "Weren't there only two moons before?" I asked.

  Jackson laughed and took my hand. "There are seven moons total," he said. "How many you can see depends on the time of the year. Three moons means warm weather. Sort of like summer here."

  "Summer sounds good to me," I said. "No snow in summer."

  We stepped out of the ring of roses and onto dark gritty sand. The sand slipped beneath my feet, and I nearly lost my footing. Jackson held tight to me, keeping me from falling. Carefully, we made our way down the hill and onto a more flat, beach-like surface. In the distance, I could hear the sound of the sea.

  The cave took another half-hour to get to, and I spent the entire time looking over our shoulders to make sure we weren't being followed. Once we were inside, I was glad to be out of the sand and out of view. Jackson had picked up bits of driftwood along the way and he immediately set to making a fire. Our no-magic policy was in full effect, hoping not to alert any hunters of our presence.

  I was completely exhausted, but right now nothing short of death could keep me from reading the book Andros had given us. As soon as the fire provided enough light for me to see by, I untied the package and lifted an old leather-bound book from the cloth. The leather was soft and worn, the binding badly cracked from age. A blue butterfly was embossed onto the front cover. I traced the image with my fingertip, my teeth grinding together as I thought of the one family I knew with an affinity for butterflies.

  The Winters.

  Zara had told me her ancestors were members of the Order of Shadows for a long time, but until this moment, I hadn't realized she meant they were founding members. Judging from the age of this tome, it was possible someone in the Winter family had been around since the beginning.

  The leather cracked as I opened the book. The pages were yellowed and worn, but thankfully, the writing was all in neatly handwritten English. I skimmed each page, searching for the information Andros had been talking about.

  The first several seemed to contain basic information about how to feel connected to your power, how to control a flame, how to move an object across the room. It wasn't until after the basics that things started getting interesting.

  "Look at this," I said to Jackson. "A witch may perform many spells on her own power, but with the collaboration of a shadow demon, a witch's power grows exponentially."

  Jackson sat next to me, taking part of the book into his lap so that it was shared between us.

  "I think we're looking at one witch's schoolbook of sorts," I said. "These read like lessons at first, right? I mean, these basic spells looks like handwritten notes on how to perform simple things. But as you move further into the book, it becomes more complex, as if the witch was learning more as she advanced through the Order or whatever it was that existed before the Order. This may possibly be her private journal or something."

  Jackson flipped through several more of the pages, stopping when he saw a drawing of a ritual room with a portal. "What does it say here?" he asked as he threw another piece of wood on the fire.

  I read from the page. "After Magda's journey into the shadow world, my sisters and I have discovered a way to pull shadow demons through so that their power may be used as a type of fuel for our magic," I read. "The secret is in the gemstones found all over the shadow world. They are as common there as simple rocks, but they absorb magic like no stones we have ever seen. Using these stones, we have built a portal to the other side which can only be controlled by the master of the stone."

  "The master of the stone?" Jackson said, looking over the page. "That must be the person who controls the stone? What else? Read it out loud."

  "We are unsure how it works exactly, but the first stone we mined from the shadow world was a deep blue sapphire," the journal continued. "We found a location at the edge of town where the stone seemed to vibrate with a special power. There, we placed it into the ground, and here, after much experimenting, we created a spell that opened a gateway to the other side. Eloisa, the eldest, was the first to claim the title of master. After several months of trying different techniques, she finally chipped a small piece from the stone and created a powerful ring. She imbued this ring with a powerful spell designed to control a demon's power.

  "The control spell worked beautifully! Within a week, she had returned home through the portal with a demon under her command. After many months, we developed a special spell that trapped this demon into her body. You wouldn't believe the effect! Eloisa is by far the most powerful witch in the history of this town, possibly the world. We now know there is no need to make a demon fall in love with you in order to join with his powers. With this new magic, we can summon the demons and make them into our very own personal energy pool without so much as asking their permission.

  "Of course, many of the witches in our town do not approve of these techniques. They call us cruel and evil and say we are using dark magic, but I see it as survival of the fittest. The most powerful deserve the best, and we are by far the most powerful witches in the world. We have decided to call ourselves The Order of Shadows since we now control these shadow demons, and soon, we will have each created our very own demon gates. I for one, am looking forward to feeling the rush of power Eloisa brags about ever since her demon entered her."

  I stopped there, my hand shaking. In my hands I was holding one of the first accounts of the formation of the Order of Shadows. I wasn't familiar with the names Eloisa and Magda, and I was unsure exactly how many witches had been involved at the start of the Order, but none of that was as important as understanding the origins of the demon gates and the purpose of the gemstones.

  I turned the page and froze. More drawings of familiar items. A dagger with a stone embedded in its hilt. A chalice. A gemstone necklace. The fourth item was a ring.

  "Have you ever seen this ring?" I asked.

  Jackson shook his head. "The rest of these things we're obviously intimately familiar with," he said. "But the ring is new to me. Does it say anything else about it here?"

  I shook my head. There were no notes on this page, only drawings.

  It was on the next to last page that we finally found what we were looking for. "Here," I said excitedly. "This is it, Jackson, oh my god."

  "What?" he asked, gripping the side of the book.

  I pointed to the text at the top of the page. "The magic that binds a Prima to the first demon is one of the strongest binding spells I have ever performed. To reverse this magic, you must perform the original initiation spell backwards, using all of the same original items that were used in the creation of the Prima's bond."

  "Harper, this is exactly what we've been looking for," Jackson said. He took the book into his lap and read the sentences again. Then, he backed up a few pages. "Do we have the steps of the original initiation spell in here?"

  "Yes," I said, feeling giddy, my exhaustion forgotten. "It's a few pages back, closer to the drawings."

  I flipped back and pointed when we reached the ritual. "What does it say were the items used?" I asked. "That's what we'll need to reverse the spell."

  "The original portal stone," he said. "Which is easy since it's in the ritual room. The master's stone."

  "Wait, isn't that the same thing?" I asked, peering over his shoulder.

  "I don't know," he said. "I would assume so. Whoever wrote this book called the person in charge of the gate the master of the stone, so I would imagine the master's stone is the portal."

  "Makes sense to me,"I said. "What else?"

  "The ritua
l dagger."

  "That's usually kept at Lydia Ashworth's house," I said. "I saw it there the night of the Homecoming dance. When Morgyn died. I doubt it's still there, though. Not after what happened with Mrs. Ashworth."

  I thought of how Priestess Winter's underlings had carried Lydia Ashworth away for her betrayal. If I had to guess, I would imagine all of those items had been given to Brooke's mother, Mrs. Harris. She's the one the Order wanted as their new Prima, so it only made sense.

  "The necklace," Jackson said next. "What happened to it?"

  I reached up to my bare neck. "They took it from me for the ritual," I said. "They placed it inside the chalice."

  "That's the next item," Jackson said. "Who keeps the cup?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I always assumed Mrs. Ashworth had that as well. Now, it's either Mrs. Harris who has it or Priestess Winter."

  "We'll hope for Mrs. Harris," he said. He traced his finger along the words, his lips moving as he read. "The only other item mentioned here is the ring."

  I leaned back against the wall of the cave. The ring. Neither of us had ever seen this item before. I was certain none of the other witches in Peachville had ever worn it. I would have noticed the stone. From the drawing, the stone was large and oval, definitely something that would draw attention.

  "Is there any other information there about the ring?" I asked. "It's the only unknown item."

  He flipped carefully through each page, then shook his head. "Nothing that I can see here," he said.

  I let my head fall into my hands. We were so close, but without the ring, the information was useless.

  "It's late," he said, closing the book. "Tomorrow we need to come up with a plan of where to go and how to stay safe out here on our own. You need to get some rest so you're fresh for whatever comes our way. For now, we should be safe here since we haven't cast any magic or left any kind of trail, but we can't stay in one place forever. It's too dangerous."

  I nodded. He was right. Without the safety of the Underground, we would have to be on our guard at all times. "What about you?" I asked.

  "I can survive with a lot less sleep than you can," he said. He pulled a blanket from his backpack and threw it over me. "I'll be your pillow."

  I smiled and snuggled into the space between his arm and his chest. After all the excitement, I wasn't sure I'd be able to sleep, but after a few minutes of listening to the crackle of the fire and the soothing sound of the waves crashing on the shore outside the cave, my eyes began to droop.

  "I love you," I said sleepily. Despite the possible dangers that lay ahead, I felt as if I'd never been happier.

  Jackson kissed my forehead.

  "I love you too."

  Places of Great Power

  "Harper, wake up."

  The urgency in Jackson's tone scared the crap out of me. I bolted up, ready to run or fight.

  "What happened?"

  He sat near the fire holding the witch's journal, his green eyes bright with excitement. "I think I found something," he said.

  I released a huge breath and waited for my shoulders to un-tense. "I thought we were being attacked or something."

  He smiled. "Not yet," he said.

  I cringed. He said it like it was only a matter of time.

  "Come here, I want to show you something."

  I looked through the mouth of the cave and saw that it was very early morning. The suns were just coming up on the horizon. "Have you been reading all night?"

  "Yes," he said. "I didn't sleep. I wanted to stay up and make sure no one had followed us here."

  I nodded. "So what did you find?"

  He shifted his weight and held the book out toward me. I sat down next to him and tilted my head to look at the open page.

  "It's just one little section here," he said.

  He pointed to a passage near the middle of the book. The witch wrote about how the hunters were created and sent to the shadow world to choose demons and bring them through the portal. I skimmed it, not seeing what it was he was so excited about.

  "Here," he said. He pulled the book back toward him and read. "Eloisa was reluctant to give up her favorite bauble, afraid it would be lost forever, but in order to create more demon gates from the blue stone, we needed the ring to stay in the shadow world as a sort of anchor."

  "The ring," I said. "It's here?"

  "It has to be," Jackson said. "From reading, here's what I learned. Originally, there was only one demon gate per sister, and one gate per gemstone. One blue, that was the first. Red, Yellow, Green, Purple, and Diamond followed."

  I listened, my body humming with excitement.

  "But after the Order had created those original gates, they got greedy. They wanted to expand," he said. "They started looking for ways to open more gates of each corresponding stone. But at first they failed. None of the new gates would stay open. Then, they discovered that the ring was the key. Somehow, the power of the ring is that it acts as an anchor, connecting all of the blue gates together and so on."

  I tried to put it all together in my mind. Peachville was a blue gate, but it definitely wasn't the first one. There had to be at least fifty or more blue gates in the human world by now. The same was probably true of all the other stones as well.

  "Does that mean if we find the ring, we can close all of the portals?" I asked.

  "I'm not sure," he said. "I think the demon gates themselves will still exist, but the portals there won't open anymore if the ring is brought back to the human world."

  "This is huge," I said. "We could cripple the Order and keep them from pulling any demons through. Does it say where the ring is in the shadow world?"

  "No," he said. "Not exactly. It only says that the rings were hidden in places of great power here in the shadow world. Places where each stone would draw power from sister stones. I'm not sure what that means."

  We were so close to something big. With the ring, we might not be able to close the gates for good, but we could keep the Order from opening them to bring more demons through. It would be a huge victory.

  "What about the other items?" I asked. "Does the journal say how each of those is important to the initiation spell?"

  "From what I understand, each demon gate has its own chalice, dagger, necklace and portal stone," he said. "But the rings are rare. Only one exists per colored gemstone."

  An excited chill ran through my body.

  "We have to find it."

  This Is What The Order of Shadows Does

  Jackson caught fresh fish for breakfast and cooked them on the fire. I had never been one to like fish, but this was delicious, almost sweet.

  "This is the first time you've ever cooked for me," I teased.

  "Not quite as romantic as it could have been I guess," he said, holding up a bright green fish head. "But it'll do."

  I smiled and shook my head. "I wish we could stay here," I said. "It's happy here. Like we could just forget the rest of the world."

  He looked out at the sea beyond the cave. "If we make it through this mess, I promise I'll bring you back here and we can stay as long as you want."

  If we make it through.

  "It's a deal," I said. "But what's our plan until then?"

  "I remembered this vendor when I was a little boy," he said. "My father used to take us there when he had business in the smaller villages. The shop was full of little trinkets. Mostly junk, really, but I remember this guy had a thing for rocks. He had a collection on display and was always looking to trade for rare gemstones or unique rocks."

  "Do you think he might know something about the blue stones?"

  "It's worth a shot, right?" Jackson finished his fish and threw the scraps into the fire. "This was a long time ago, so I guess it's possible the shop isn't there anymore, but I'd like to try."

  "How far away is it?" I asked.

  "Maybe a day's journey at the most," he said. "It's very close to the borderlands between the north and south."

  "We shoul
d get moving then," I said. I stood and packed my blanket and things back into my bag while Jackson put out the fire.

  Within ten minutes, we were back out in the open. The carefree joy I'd felt in the safety of the cave was replaced by tension and worry. We had to keep an eye out for Sentinels, hunters and anyone who might want to harm us. We trudged through sand for about twenty minutes before we finally reached a rough dirt road. For most of the journey, we didn't run into any other demons. The road to the south had stayed pretty deserted since the two kings became such rivals. Now, most of the cities along the borderlands had fallen into poverty.

  Somewhere just north of the vendor's city, we came across a small collection of thatched homes.

  "Should we find another way around?" I asked.

  Jackson stopped and looked around. Off to either side of the road were rough patches of woods or hills. "We'll waste a lot of time going around," he said.

  "But what if someone here is affiliated with the Order or has a problem with humans?" I asked. "Are you sure it's safe to just walk through?"

  Jackson took my hand. "I doubt anyone here has any love for the Order of Shadows," he said. "Come on, if anyone comes out to ask about you, I'll tell them you're an enemy of the Order. I think it'll be fine."

  I hesitated. There were about six houses still standing in what might have once been a flourishing village. It was difficult to say if anyone still lived there at all, but what if they were dangerous? I wasn't in the mood to get into a fight of more than six against two.

  I forced my feet to move. I'd faced much uglier fears lately, so I would just have to face whatever came our way here in this little village.

  We made it past the first set of little houses without seeing any movement or indication of life left in the village. Then, as we passed the fourth home, I saw a flicker of movement just inside the door. I clutched Jackson's hand tighter and tilted my head toward the house. Jackson kept walking, but turned his head to look. I surveyed the remaining houses, my body tense and my hand moving toward the silver dagger hooked to my belt.