by Gwen Hayes
He finally shook his head in disgust at me and turned around.
“Excuse me,” I told the blokes at the table. “I really should go.”
Pete stood. “Haden seems kind of mad, Theia. Maybe you should let me walk you home.”
I had to laugh at the idea that Pete thought he could protect me from Haden. “I’m fine, but thank you. I just need to be alone.”
“Did you guys break up?” he asked, hopefully.
It occurred to me that the pass he’d tried to make earlier had come before he thought I was even unattached. Pete seemed like a nice boy, but I didn’t like it that he would put moves on a girl he thought had a boyfriend. He was still waiting for an answer, so I just told him, “It’s complicated.”
I pushed my way back to the front room, the bass throbbing uncomfortably in my belly. The party had seemed fun at first, but now it was assaulting all my senses. A whiff of brimstone tickled my nose. I raised my eyes in alarm.
Haden was talking to a girl in the arched doorway, only he was looking right at me. The girl was beaming at him as if he’d given her a dozen roses. She leaned against the framework while Haden had one arm over her head, caging her in slightly. He looked back at her and I thought she would swoon.
He was using the Lure on her.
Whenever he used his demon charm, something passed over his face that only I could see. He ceased to be handsome to me in those seconds—instead it brought out his demon looks and I always smelled the sulfur scent of brimstone when he changed. And that was when the other human women liked him best. They didn’t know how vulnerable they were—they knew only that he was impossibly charming and handsome.
I glared at him until he looked at me. There was a time when I would have meekly shied away from an altercation. The girl raised by my father wanted to go home and hide her head under a pillow, but the girl who shared her mother’s wild heart and the cursed blood of a demon was in control these days . . . for better or worse.
I ignored the way that everyone’s auras began to shine again and I pushed my way between Haden and the hapless girl. “May I see you outside, please?” I inquired sweetly, but I felt the blade of tension in my throat like a knife.
“Certainly. If you’ll excuse me,” he said to his newest victim. I half expected him to bow.
As soon as we were in the yard, I spun on him. “Turn it off, Haden.”
“What, you don’t care for it?”
I ground my teeth. “You know I hate it.”
He shook his head as if he was disappointed in me. “Don’t be such a hypocrite.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why is it okay for you to set your beacon to high but not for me to employ the same?”
I rubbed my temples but found no relief from the tension. He wasn’t making sense. “You shouldn’t use the Lure. You’ve got a better handle on your demon side than that. You’re mad at me, but it doesn’t excuse your behavior.”
Two of the streetlights popped and burned out. Haden was struggling to keep his emotions in check. “Excuse my behavior? What about yours?”
“What about mine?”
“You can’t be serious.”
My mind retraced the beginning of the conversation. “What did you mean about my beacon?”
“Are you going to continue to play the innocent?” He was accusing me.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand?” He closed his eyes, scrubbing his hands through his hair. He looked back at me. “Oh, God. You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
He swore. “In the hallway at school . . . just now at the party . . . you were luring them to you.”
I sucked in a shocked breath. “No, I wasn’t. I don’t even have the Lure.”
“You were employing the Lure. You may not know you have it, but you do.”
“I don’t believe that. How is that even possible? Wouldn’t I know?”
“It may be that you can’t control it . . . though I hope that’s not the case. It’s something we will need to work on.”
Is that why those boys were so interested in talking to me all of a sudden? Because I was using demon powers? I thought—I had thought—that I was just coming out of my shell and that my new confidence made me seem more open. I sat on the curb. “I feel sick.”
And stupid.
Haden joined me and put his arm around me, drawing me in. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Navigate my life. Everything is upended. I have no control over my new demon attributes that seem to crop up daily. . . . It’s just that everything is so mixed-up.” I leaned on his shoulder. Just for a minute, I promised myself.
“I handled it all wrong. I’m not good at controlling my jealousy, and when I saw you enticing them . . . it untied every tether I have on my emotions.”
“Not every tether. A few months ago, when you got jealous, you set the school bell to a hell noise pitch and deafened the school for a few hours. This is progress.”
He snorted. “Ah, the glass is half full, I see.”
We were quiet for a few minutes, though the party in the house behind us remained raucous.
“How is your father?” he finally asked.
I sat up straight. “The same. I should go.”
“I’ll take you home.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I need to learn how to handle things without you, Haden.”
“You can’t be serious.” He reached for my hand, but I moved away from him. “Damn it. You know we need each other now more than ever. I can’t believe you’re being so stubborn. This breakup is ridiculous.”
“It’s not. It’s what I have to do.”
His eyes blazed. “Fine. I’m going back to the party then.”
I swallowed the tears. “Good. Have a nice time.”
“Theia . . .”
But I turned and ran. As it turned out, I had one more demon attribute I hadn’t yet known about until I felt the wind rush through my hair. I had demon speed now too.
CHAPTER TEN
Sunday was another afternoon at the hospital, and I had the joy of dealing with a social worker. Her original plan was to put me in a foster home, but I was able to get through to my father’s assistant, who was able to put the social worker in touch with Father’s own legal counsel.
My father had planned well for many eventualities—just not this one. The social worker was satisfied that Muriel would be a suitable temporary caregiver for me until the doctors had a prognosis. The alternative was unthinkable. Father’s will dictated that I be sent back to England in the event of his death, to be raised by his cousin and her husband. His will didn’t address what should happen to me if he was in a coma of unknown origin when I was almost done with my schooling.
I couldn’t leave Serendipity Falls. Not until I’d put back together all the damage I’d caused.
On Monday morning, Muriel talked me into going to school. I’d assumed I would spend the day at the hospital, willing my father to wake up, but she felt I should try to get back into a normal routine. Donny agreed with her, which is why she was in my bedroom shoving my backpack straps over my arm and pushing me out the door at seven thirty in the morning.
“You have your phone,” she said. “If there is a change in his condition, they will call you. Plus, I bought you a coffee but I left it in the car. You can’t have it unless you get in.”
It wasn’t just that I worried about my father. I worried about running into Haden and I worried about accidentally using the Lure on my classmates and stealing their souls. My life was so out of control, and the more I worried about it the more stressed out I got and the more likely I was to lose containment of my emotions.
But Donny was stubborn.
“All right. You’re so pushy.” I got into the car and waited until she got into the driver’s seat. “Also, your skirt is t
oo short.”
She winked at me.
I sipped at the now-less-than-piping-hot brew. “I saw the newspaper reported that a woman had a psychotic breakdown at the bowling alley. They said her screaming caused a mob effect but everything was fine now.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Everyone is buying it too. They don’t want to see the scary stuff, so they just won’t, I guess.”
The small town whizzed by as Donny drove too fast through the streets. It all looked so cozy and quaint—it was hard to believe that the dark secrets could stay so well hidden. “Do you ever think we should try to make people understand about the dangers of living in Serendipity Falls? Tell them about the things Varnie talks about and Mara . . . and that demons go to their school and various other assorted horrors?”
Donny checked her face in the rearview mirror. “Nope. Nobody would believe us anyway.”
“But don’t they deserve to know?”
“Look, I don’t know all the lore that Varnie refers to, but he says it’s been going on for centuries. If we’re all supposed to know, I’m thinking we would have figured it out by now. Especially with all the collective-unconscious stuff he was rambling about.”
It was a great time to open up to her about my part in that over the weekend, that I had participated in a young girl’s nightmare, but I didn’t. I tried to. I wanted to. But I just couldn’t.
I also didn’t tell her that Haden and I had broken up.
If she could tell that I was hiding something, she didn’t let on. “Besides, Theia, if you started telling people what you know, they would medicate you and lock you up. You can’t help anyone that way.”
I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled.
I didn’t think we were early, but Donny got a prime parking spot. The hallway wasn’t nearly as crowded as it should have been either—and the students that were left seemed . . . tired.
“Something isn’t right.”
“What do you mean?”
We stopped at my locker. “Look around.” She shrugged and waited for me to explain. “It’s the sneetches, mostly. They look . . . sick or something.”
Donny rolled her eyes. “They had a banner weekend. Some of their parents went on a cruise together, so there were parties all weekend. I’m sure their hangovers will be legendary.”
I didn’t tell her that I already knew that because I had been to one of the parties. Instead, I watched Noelle, one of Haden’s admirers and Brittany’s best friend, groggily make her way down the hall. Like Brittany the other day, Noelle looked like she’d rolled out of bed and gone straight to school. No carefully choreographed outfit, no shampoo-commercial hair—it didn’t even look like she’d bothered with a bra.
Other sneetches shuffled along looking more than hungover. The corridor also smelled wrong to me. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Gabe and Mike joined us, but after he got a look at Donny’s skirt, Gabe stuttered a few times and pushed her towards the janitor closet. Which left Mike and me blushing and awkwardly alone together.
Mike rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, trying to look at ease. “How was your weekend, Theia?” he asked.
My upbringing required me to answer with a polite, pleasant reply. But that was ridiculous, given the circumstances. “It was awful, actually. My father is in the hospital. He’s in a coma.” I left out And Haden and I broke up, so I went to the underworld and fed nightmares to a child as if they were candy, and then I found out I have demon powers that I don’t know how to control.
He seemed shocked by the news of my father. “Wow, sorry. That sucks. Hey, do you want to go do something tonight? Coffee or something?”
“What?” I asked, stunned. Surely I wasn’t using the Lure just then.
“I mean, you know. . . . I just thought . . .”
The muscles between my eyebrows pinched painfully. Was he serious? “No, sorry. I can’t. I have to stay at the hospital with my father.”
He nodded, oblivious. “Maybe some other time.” Then he ducked into class.
I stood there for another moment, trying to figure out what had just happened. Had Mike meant to ask me on a date? Was my use of the Lure that strong? I couldn’t even tell when I was doing it.
“You okay, Thei?” Ame said from behind me.
“Yeah, sure.” I tried to shake it off. I didn’t tell Ame about Mike. There was no point in hurting her feelings. She’d spent years waiting for him to invite her to coffee . . . or anything, really. “I have to get to class. See you later?”
I hadn’t seen Haden yet, and I was grateful. I didn’t want to face how awkward it would be. We had only one class together and he often skipped it.
I was one of the last students to take my chair—but I noticed that Brittany’s seat was still empty. One of her sneetchy “friends” told another one how she wasn’t surprised by her absence—Brittany had really looked awful that weekend. The other girl barely looked up from her phone but made a comment about it not stopping Britt from getting laid Saturday night, which apparently was just gross since Brittany hadn’t even washed her hair.
I didn’t understand their friendships. If one of my friends was sick, we’d be worried, not snarking about how bad she looked. Of course, I had little room to talk about being a good friend. I hadn’t been honest with my friends lately.
The teacher was taking her time starting class. We were so close to the end of the year, it really didn’t matter anyway, so I doodled while trying to listen to the conversations around me without looking like I was listening. It wasn’t difficult—my classmates had been ignoring me for years. Once they’d settled down from my reappearance, their interest in me had dwindled back to normal except for the odd moments when I employed the Lure without my knowledge.
I heard snippets about the parties, complaints of feeling groggy still, horror stories about vomiting, and one hushed whisper that Haden Black had looked really good Saturday night.
My stomach flipped.
I felt sick.
The bell rang and I packed up my backpack. A piece of notebook paper was hanging out of the zippered pocket. I pulled it out and had begun to unfold it when a girl I barely knew stopped at my desk.
“You’re holding up really well,” she said.
“Excuse me?” I answered.
She blushed. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” Her voice was rushed and the rest of her words tumbled out like a river breaking over a dam. “I just mean, like, I know you and Haden were really tight and it sucks that you guys broke up.” I swallowed hard, trying to find words, so she filled the silence some more. “I was kind of rooting for you. I mean, you kind of gave the rest of us hope. If you could hook a guy like that, then there’s hope for us all, you know? And it wasn’t cool that he moved on to Brittany so quickly after you left on Saturday.”
The world stopped moving. He’d already moved on to Brittany?
“Theia!” Donny charged into the room, grabbing me before I could respond. “We need to talk.” She said something to the girl that made her run off—scurrying like her life depended on it. Donny had that effect on people. She then turned me to face her. “Where’s Haden?”
All I could do was shrug while burning tears threatened. I was upset and I was angry. I forced myself to speak. “I don’t know. We broke up.”
“Yeah, I heard. Thanks for sharing with your best friends.”
My emotions were swirling in a soup of ugliness in my stomach. Kids were filtering back into class for second period. Auras became more pronounced as my emotions became more confused. This couldn’t be a good thing. I really didn’t want to become aware of my unnatural hungers in the middle of a classroom full of students.
Donny didn’t realize my dilemma, though. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shone a royal blue color today. It was lovely. I wanted to touch the color and wrap it around—“Earth to Theia,” she said, exasperated, as she waved her hand in front of my face. “So the rumors might be true? Every
one is saying he took a very drunk Brittany home Saturday night and neither of them has been seen since.”
My thoughts began to jumble and my body temperature rose uncomfortably. In between spikes of anger and confusion, pangs of hunger stabbed me from the inside out. I clutched her arm fiercely. “Get me out of here, Donny.”
“Jesus, Theia. Your eyes are black.”
She pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and pushed them haphazardly onto my face. When we got to the hall, the sensory overload was worse. With the sunglasses covering my eyes, the hall seemed so dark, and yet the darkness seemed to move, as if it was gathering into a shadow. Whispers assailed me from every direction, mocking and disorienting me. Some were the kids in the hall, but some—some came from someplace dark and evil, someplace inside me.
“Make them stop,” I whimpered.
“Make who stop?” she asked. “Thei, you’re scaring the crap out of me. Are you about to get all wear-a-hockey-mask-and-kill-my-classmates?”
I was sucking in air, but it wasn’t going to my lungs. People were staring at me—I could feel their eyes on me. I was scaring them—I was scaring Donny too. That much I could smell.
She pulled me down the hall, and people parted to let us through. She was dialing with one hand. “I got one whacked-out demoness on my hands. Meet me at my car. And find Ame,” she said into her phone while I continued to wheeze.
The more I tried not to lose control, the more I felt my grasp on it loosening. “Go faster,” I urged between clenched teeth. The whispers grew louder. Make them pay. Ease the hunger. Do it.
We skidded around a corner and out the door, but Donny didn’t stop until we got to her car. “Are you going to try to eat me?” she asked. “Because I have to tell you, I’m totally freaked out right now. Your pupils took over most of your eyeballs in there and it’s not an attractive look. Also, I don’t have a problem punching you in the throat if you try to absorb my essence or whatever—just so we’re clear.”
I saw Gabe running towards us, and Donny looked relieved. Was it because she was happy to see him or because she didn’t want to be alone with me?