Staked!

by Candace Wondrak

  Somebody came in from the kitchen. At first, I thought it was Michael or Claire—where did the girl go? I wondered, but my thoughts trailed off when I saw that it wasn’t Michael or Claire standing there. It was the one person I’d wanted so desperately to return to me, the boy I missed with all my heart. The one I couldn’t stop thinking about, the one…the one Crixis said I was in love with.

  Running to him would just prove Crixis right, but I didn’t care. I whispered “Gabriel” and was off the couch, moving faster than I had in days. I flew into the hug, wrapping my arms around his stomach, putting my head against his chest. It wasn’t the first time we’d been in a position like this, but it was the first time he tensed up.

  It was the first time he muttered, “Get off me.” So low, so quiet, he didn’t even sound like the Gabriel I knew.

  Stunned, surprised, I stumbled back, gazing up at him. He looked different. His skin was free of the thin, intricate tattoos that had been on him, even in the hospital. His eyes seemed a darker blue, and his hair, which recently had been growing whiter and whiter, was now a dark, sandy blonde.

  He frowned at me before taking a bite of his sandwich. “Don’t touch me again.”

  The words hurt worse than any physical injury I ever got. The breath was knocked out of me, and all I could do was stare up at him, blink, and wonder why.

  I shouldn’t continue to stare at him, for he might just decide he didn’t like that, either, and walk out. So instead, I turned to where Crixis stood, near the windows to the backyard…or, where the windows used to be. I moved closer to study the broken wall and shattered windows, careful not to step on any stray glass. “What happened?” I asked.

  Gabriel was the one who answered, “Michael.”

  My head spun to him, and I opened my mouth to ask what he meant by that, but once more, the blonde’s appearance startled me into silence. This wasn’t the Gabriel I knew.

  “He was going to kill you,” he added, finishing his sandwich. Wiping his hands together, he sneered, “I should’ve let him.” And then, without another word, Gabriel went up the stairs, leaving me to wonder if I’d stepped into another alternate reality when I wasn’t looking.

  “Do not listen to anything he says,” Crixis advised. “He’s not—”

  “He’s not my Gabriel,” I whispered, feeling the bizarre, hormonal, teenage urge to cry. I blinked my watery eyes again and again, knowing that, while he wasn’t acting like my Gabriel, he was my Gabriel. That hurt worst of all. “And Michael? He really tried to kill me?”

  Crixis shrugged. “I cannot say. I got here after the fact.”

  I couldn’t even picture it. Michael, trying to kill me? Why? He was our Guardian. I’d known him for years. I trusted him. He’d never try to kill me; this had to be a huge misunderstanding.

  “You said you were at lunch when Gabriel fell unconscious.” Crixis narrowed his gaze. “Did he eat the school’s food, or…”

  “No. Michael packed our lunches.”

  “Do not mark my words, for I don’t know the entire story, but it never looked like you had a cold or the flu. It looked like you were slowly being poisoned.”

  “You’re saying that Michael poisoned us?”

  “Maybe, though I have a suspicion that you were his only target.”

  I grew angry. “Where do you get off saying something like that? How do I know that you didn’t do all this? How do I know that all this isn’t because of you?” I felt like a raving lunatic. If it was him, he’d had plenty of chances to kill me when I was alone with him in the attic of a house, and no one knew where I was. Poison didn’t really mesh with Crixis’s skillset, anyway.

  “I did not poison you, and I would never even dream of poisoning your boyfriend.” Crixis looked away. “I don’t have a death wish, unlike you.”

  Running my hands through my hair, I wanted to scream. “Why? Why would Michael do something like that?”

  “If I had to guess, it would be to awaken Gabriel.”

  Right. Because after I died last time, he went berserk. He turned into something terrible.

  I crossed my arms. “What are we going to do?” I didn’t particularly enjoy talking with Crixis, but now, who else did I have?

  “Your friends must be told of what happened. The house needs to be fixed. While that happens, I will take care of Michael.” The evil Daywalker was so assured in himself, and with everything I knew about him, I also knew that he was the right Demon for the job.

  Still, I found myself asking, “How?”

  His bright green eyes looked at me like I was stupider than a box of rocks, and his voice spoke as if it were the simplest thing in the world, “I’m going to kill him.”

  The Order

  Chapter One – Kass

  This was it. This was the end. Everything came crashing down around me. The whole house could fall on me, all the windows could shatter in my face and tear at my skin, and I wouldn’t do anything to stop it. It was too late. This was the end of everything I’d ever known. To think, how stupid I was for thinking the same thing when Crixis murdered Koath, my dad, my Guardian.

  No. It was nothing compared to the crap-show I currently lived in.

  Michael tried killing me. He poisoned me, came at me as I was half-conscious on our couch. He would’ve got me too, if Gabriel hadn’t miraculously woken from his poison-induced coma and saved me. And then he basically told me he wanted nothing to do with me.

  It hurt. Too much. I felt empty inside.

  I stood in the hall near his bedroom, standing straight with my shoulders slouched, my eyes staring holes into his door. The old Gabriel, my Gabriel, never would’ve had his door closed. Then again, he never would’ve looked at me the way he did either, or said the things he’d said.

  He shouldn’t have saved me.

  Well, maybe I was getting pretty freaking tired of people saving me anyway. I wasn’t a damsel in distress. I could handle myself. And if I died while trying to handle things on my own…then, I guessed, so be it. I was done fighting.

  Could this be fixed? If we survived this, could things ever go back to the way they were before?

  My feet moved me mechanically to the door, my arm outstretched, like I was going to knock. Even if I did, Gabriel wouldn’t answer. I just knew it. So my arm fell back down to my side, and I breathed a silent sigh.

  There had to be a way to fix this, to rewind time or something. I was thrown into another reality by a Sorcerer’s spell. Surely there were Demons like that who could make everything right? Who could…

  No. We couldn’t go to Demons for help.

  It wasn’t an exaggeration when I said my life was thrown upside-down. My best friend, Claire, was a Demon. If the Council had their way, she’d be purified just like the mindless Nightwalkers. No Demon had a right to live, according to the lovely Council.

  I was long past the point of starting to hate those paper-pushers.

  Instead of knocking on the door, I simply laid my flat hand against the wood, willing everything to go back to the way it was. A stupid, foolish wish. I was old enough and cynical enough to know it could never happen. My wishes would be unanswered, just like they always were.

  Happy thoughts, Kass.

  But I couldn’t be happy, because Max and Liz didn’t know yet. I’d have to tell them all about how Michael tried killing me, how Gabriel woke up and acted like another person. Just thinking of reciting the day’s events, of mentally reliving it all again so soon, made my stomach clench. I felt sick.

  I drew myself away from Gabriel’s door, plodding down the two flights of stairs to the first floor. I went into the kitchen. It was a cold, foreign space. This house didn’t feel like home anymore, the broken window in the living room notwithstanding. It would never feel like home again. Somehow, after finding Koath dead on the floor, it had still felt like a home to me. This was where Gabriel, Michael, and I lived, where we laughed together. But now, what little I had left in my life was gone.

  Reaching
for the phone, I dialed Liz’s cell. She picked up on the second ring, her English accent thick, “Michael, is that you? I was just about to call you—the hospital, the doctors—”

  “You need to come home,” I told her before hanging up. I didn’t give her a chance to respond; this wasn’t a story you could tell over the phone. It had to be done in person, preferably when both she and Max were here. And then, somehow, we had to come up with a plan.

  In a daze, I wandered back to the living, freezing when I spotted the broken window. Crixis was here; he’d be able to hear if Michael was nearby. He wasn’t. The man who was my Guardian was gone. If he’d gone through all this trouble for me, he’d come back. He wouldn’t leave a job half-finished.

  I sat in the recliner he always used to sit in. It was where he would read the paper while drinking tea, looking for any events the civilians of the town had mislabeled as freak accidents. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind Michael would return, and I swore to myself I would be ready this time.

  Was it all a lie? Had he always hidden a part of him so well neither Gabriel nor I knew? I’d known Michael nearly all my life; the betrayal cut deep, a sharp pain in my heart, one that seemed to intensify with each breath I took.

  We couldn’t see him for what he was. I felt deceived, betrayed, and sad. So freaking sad. The saddest I’d been in a while, which was saying something, given the constant crazy state of my life. Happiness seemed so far out of my reach, I was about to just give up.

  Even if we figured this all out, what did I have if Gabriel hated me? I had nothing. I was nothing. Just a girl with some muscle who could end a Demon with a pencil. It wasn’t really a life skill I could put on my resume. Hell, I didn’t even know what a resume looked like, because no Purifier ever made it that far into adulthood.

  Everything was so messed up. I felt—strangely enough—better with Crixis here. Which was dumb in and of itself. How stupid was it I felt safer knowing the murderous, conniving Daywalker was here? He’d done so many awful things to me, there was no redemption for him. But right now, I had a hard time caring about the past; the present was awful enough to hold my attention.

  My eyes scanned the room, instantly drawing to the mantle over the fireplace we never used. Why would we? We hadn’t yet lived through a North Carolina winter. So far it’d been nothing but humidity and heat.

  It wasn’t the fireplace that drew my attention; the pictures above it did.

  Pictures of Michael and Gabriel, of Michael and me. All three of us, smiling and laughing at birthday parties and holidays through the years. Such smiles, such fun. Innocence lost. Fools on display.

  Something inside me snapped. I jumped up, storming to the mantle, grabbing a random frame. My eyes studied it.

  It was Gabriel’s tenth birthday party. His cake sat before him, ten candles lit on top of the Transformers-themed cake. Gabriel was smiling, his teeth too large for his childlike face. Michael stood behind him, grinning. I was next to Gabriel, smiling widely like an idiot, one of my hands reaching behind Gabriel’s head, giving him bunny ears with two risen fingers. I remembered the exact moment this picture was taken, how Koath chuckled to himself behind the camera.

  Every memory, ruined.

  I immediately dropped the frame to the ground, stomping on the glass with my bare foot, shattering it. My heel wasn’t cut once. I bent to retrieve the picture through the broken glass, knowing I could’ve just opened it from the back.

  No. I had to vent some anger, and this—this was the only way I could think to do it right now.

  With the picture in my hand, I returned to the kitchen, flinging open the junk drawer. Various random things we never knew where to put elsewhere—batteries, chip clips, rubber bands—I dug through them until my fingers found what they were looking for: a lighter. The fluid was almost empty, but it would do.

  It would most certainly do.

  Heading to the sink, I held the picture in the opposite corner where Michael was, my other hand flicking the lighter. It took a few tries, but soon a steady flame hovered over the lighter, and I brought it to the picture, holding it right underneath Michael’s face. I didn’t even blink as the picture bubbled and Michael’s face started to singe, turning black before it caught fire.

  As the fire traveled across the picture, I thought about blowing it out, about saving the part of the picture with Gabriel and me. While I was depressed, Gabriel and I had so many good years together. Was I going to let this awful turn of events change it?

  The fire was nearly at my fingertips, and I abruptly dropped the burning photo in the stainless-steel sink.

  Yes, apparently I was.

  Did it matter anyway? Even if Gabriel was himself, surely he would understand the whole destroy-everything-Michael-touched thing. And if he never was his normal self again, if we managed to live past twenty, did I truly want reminders around? Reminders he wasn’t always aloof and cold and mean? It would hurt too much. It hurt too much now.

  No, I had to burn them all.

  I went back into the living room, leaving the lighter near the sink. My anger took over as I swept an arm across the mantle, knocking each and every picture frame to the floor. A few shattered on impact from the six-foot fall, but most didn’t. All the remaining ones took was a kick or a swat with my fist, and the glass cracked and fell apart. Tears of fury clouded my vision, but I blinked them away. I wasn’t going to cry. I was too mad to cry.

  My knuckles were scratched, a few cuts deep enough to bleed. I didn’t feel the pain. I was already numb inside. Gathering all the pictures, not caring as I stepped on broken glass, I returned to the kitchen, dumping them all in the sink. I held the lighter above them, flicking the flame.

  I stared at the wispy, small fire for a moment, not sure what I’d do next. Crixis was in Michael’s room. Should I ask him to help me bring all his clothes in the back? A bonfire suddenly seemed like a fun idea, even though I’d never been to one in my life. They looked fun in the movies. Or should I take a knife and cut them all up, knock over his furniture and stab his pillow while pretending it was his face?

  God. When did I turn into such a psycho?

  The sad thing was, I didn’t even care. If Gabriel could look like that, tell me such horrible things, that he shouldn’t have saved me, what did it matter? There was no one to pull me away from the edge, and honestly, the edge of insanity had never looked so appealing.

  I set fire to the picture on top, and I watched them all burn.

  My heart was ice.

  It hurt.

  Chapter Two – Crixis

  My senses were better than most. I didn’t just owe them to my Vampire side; I also owed them to Vexillion, the greater Demon who I’d bargained with so very long ago. In the beginning, I was a warrior. I had a wife, a child. And then they were taken from me by the original bitch herself.

  Sephira. I still could not think of her name without feeling a raging hatred rising inside me.

  I needed Vexillion to help me overpower her. As an Original, she was stronger than me, but with another Demon’s help, a Demon whom many used to worship as a god, I was able to. Still, I was nothing, Vexillion was nothing, compared to the boy sitting in his room. For such an ancient soul, he was certainly quite the moody teenager, wasn’t he?

  Kass was the daughter of an Angel, and he…he was one reincarnated. The worst one. The one whom every Demon owed allegiance to. If Gabriel commanded me to leave, told me to do anything, I’d have to do it. I would not be able to argue or deny him, nor would Vexillion. Compared to him, we were nothing.

  It was odd to think all the chaos, all the murder and mayhem I’d brought the world throughout the years would be nothing if Gabriel decided to end it. If there was one soul who could bring forth the true end of the world, it was him. No number of Purifiers would be able to stop him.

  So, despite the war raging inside me, I would have to keep a low profile while here. Even though I didn’t want to, I had to protect Kass. If there was one person who
could make Gabriel see, return him to his usual goofy and annoying self, she could. She would have to, otherwise those hunting her—for surely Michael did not act alone—would win.

  I did enjoy murder and all that, but I found myself suddenly a fan of living. Though it was not always so, I now liked the world and being in it. Without it, there would be nothing to do, no fun to be had, no people to eat.

  I heard Kass walk upstairs, I heard her sigh and touch his door. I didn’t need to be there to know she wanted to go in, to talk to him, to try and reason with him and ask how he could be so cruel to her. But she didn’t. It wasn’t for a lack of courage; the girl had plenty of that, I knew. She was tired, still. My blood in her system kickstarted her healing, but since it was in her system for so long and she was so near death, it would take a few hours for her to completely heal. And even then, there was no telling she would want to talk to Gabriel after.

  Hearing someone you love utterly dismiss you was the worst feeling in the world, or so I gathered.

  She then walked downstairs and called the councilwoman. After that, it sounded like Kass threw a fit, breaking things and such. What a drama queen. She should be accustomed to her life not being easy; I’d made sure of it all her life, at least until recently.

  I thought about going down and stopping her, but quickly decided against it. If anyone needed to release their anger, their disappointment, it was Kass. I understood it all too well, for even at its most bloody times, my life had never been good either. I gave up the foolish wish when I came upon my wife and my son dead.

  Standing in the center of the room, I surveyed it. Michael’s room was boring, to say the least. Watercolors of flowers hung on the wall, plain white sheets adorned the bed, neatly-folded stacks of laundry sat on his dresser, for he never had the chance to put them away. I went to the mattress, lifting it up as if it weighed nothing. There was nothing under the bed, nothing between the mattress and the box spring.