by Robin Thorn
Leonard returned his attention to me and his scowl melted into a smile. “I must apologise for my sweet Collette,” he said fluidly. “She’s new, and she struggles to follow even the simplest of orders. In fact, if she had been wise enough to obey my instructions last week, then you, my friend, would not be here. So, you can thank her for that.” His eyes were glowing, like molten lava.
“What are you?” I asked, biting my lip to still the urge to scream.
He only laughed. The sound was so loud that I clapped my hands over my ears. Collette, however, was unaffected by the noise. She clambered to her feet and stood at his side, her head still bowed.
“Monsters, demons, creatures of darkness,” Leonard went on. “We have many names. Names that you will soon become familiar with if you survive the turning. I think I’ll let Collette explain since she is your sire.” He bent down before me, and I gagged at the ashy scent that rolled off him.
“Please, don’t kill me!” I cried.
“No no no,” Leonard was so close now. His breath smelt of mint, with an undertone of something unpleasant. I couldn’t place it. “You are very special my boy, very special indeed.” I tried not to listen to his songful voice. I felt his words as if they were trying to lull me into sleep. Suddenly, I snapped out of it, and Leonard was standing away from me again.
“It was a pleasure meeting you, Stefan. I hope that the next time I see you, your heart will still be beating.” He looked to Collette, “I trust that you will keep own new member alive and show him kindness as I have shown you.”
Collette cowered away but nodded.
Leonard walked up to her and patted her head. “Just as I thought.”
Turning back to me a final time he waved, a smile so wide his white teeth seemed to glow. “I am going to have a lot of fun with you, boy.”
With a cracking sound, he was gone, dissipated into the shadows of the room. I choked out a breath. He had just evaporated into thin air. He vanished, just inches from my face, as though he had never been there at all; as though he were just a trick of my delirious state.
My focus went to Collette. She wouldn’t look back at me.
I knew at that moment that if I wanted to leave, now was my chance.
I jumped to my feet and sprinted across the room. My knees were sore, and my face throbbing from Amerie hit. I didn’t look back to see if Collette was following, I just ran. Glass cracked under my sneakers as I trampled over broken shards. I reached the iron door and rattled the handle, but it was locked.
“Please,” Collette whispered from across the room. “Please don’t run.”
I blocked out the sound of her voice as I scrambled for the nearest window, one with a shattered pane. I kicked at the few remaining fractures of glass that clung to the frame and lifted myself through the gap. Shards nipped at my palms as I heaved myself up, but I pushed back the pain and jumped down into the overgrown marshland below.
“There’s no point in running.” Collette was suddenly standing before me in the tall weeds. “There’s nothing around for miles.” I stopped in my tracks, turning frantically in a different direction. Turning away from her, I set off again, sprinting through the boggy marsh and fighting my way through the overgrown nature that swamped the warehouse. My heart was pounding so fast and cold air seared as it siphoned into my lungs. I rounded the corner of the derelict building and stopped again. Collette was already on the other side, waiting for me, black hair billowing in the breeze.
“Let me go!” I rasped. “You can’t keep me here.”
“Please calm down, Stefan,” she said softly. “Please listen to me. It’ll be worse for you if you run.”
I grimaced and turned towards the infringing warehouse. If I could just find a road, I thought, I’d wave down a car for help.
“Even if you do get out,” Collette went on, “do you believe Leonard won’t come after you again? Trust me; you don’t want that.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” It was more of a plea than a question.
She shuddered. “I couldn’t control it. I never meant to leave you alive; I should have killed you.” Her lips turned purple from the cold, breath escaping in mist.
“You’re not making sense!” I yelled, knotting my fingers through my hair. “None of this makes sense!”
“I was supposed to kill you…” Her words were detached; empty of emotion.
“But I don’t even know you,” I shouted, and my voice bounced across the run-down building. “Why would you want to kill me? I’ve never…” I raked my hands through my hair. “Why?”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t!” I exclaimed. “So, tell me! Tell me what I’ve done to make you do this to me!”
“A few days,” she murmured. “That’s all you have left.” She fixed her gaze on me, her eyes turning almost amber in the slanted light.
“A few days?” I echoed. “What does that mean?”
She opened her mouth to respond, but before she could respond, she flew backwards. Like a rag-doll, her body slammed into the brick wall of the warehouse, and she slumped to the ground.
“Stef!”
I spun around to see Phoebe running towards me. Her arm raised, her palm directed at Collette, who lay groaning on the ground, and the air seemed to ripple in iridescent waves between them.
I looked back at Collette one final time before sprinting towards Phoebe.
“Are you okay?” I asked, pulling her into a hug.
She nodded, breathless. “I’m fine. But we need to get out of here, now. There’s a road up ahead.” She gestured behind her.
“She said she meant to kill me,” I huffed as I chased behind Phoebe who led the way through the tall reeds as we fumbled our way towards the road and distant treetops marking the start of a woodland.
“How did you find me?” I yelled as we sprinted for the trees. My jeans were already soaked to the knee from the muddy ground, weighed down by the murky ice water.
“Educated guess,” Phoebe called back. “Was there a guardian with you?”
I sprinted next to her, almost falling at her question.
“A what?” I panted, scared to turn around and see Collette chasing.
Phoebe didn’t answer me, and I didn’t care. I wanted to get as far away from this place as possible.
We reached a chain link fence, cordoning the warehouse and marshland from the road. The crisscross wires had been cut open, and we slipped through the gap. The moment I left the boundaries of the warehouse; relief overcame me.
Ahead, Phoebe’s Chevy truck was parked on the gravel road
“Buckle up!” Phoebe shouted as she flung open the driver’s door.
I clambered into the passenger’s seat and stared out of the rear window as Phoebe pressed her foot down on the accelerator and we swerved out onto the road. Through the back window, I watched Collette stand in the middle of the road, between our tyre tracks, her black hair stirring in the breeze. I watched until she was nothing more than a dot in the distance.
I paced around Phoebe’s family’s living room, ignoring the concerned glances from May, Michael, and Phoebe as they sat together on the sofa. Their intense stares bore down on me. I was full of anxiety after what had happened I almost burst.
What I’d gathered from mine and Phoebe’s hell-for-leather drive across town, was that the warehouse was part of some abandoned factory that occupied the barren space on the borders of Briarwood. I’d never heard of the factory before, but it would not be a place I’d be forgetting anytime soon.
“You are ten steps away from wearing a hole in the rug,” May remarked from the sofa. “I wouldn’t mind, but that Persian belonged to my grandmother.” She offered me a shrewd smile.
I stopped, hands clenched at my sides. “Can someone please just tell me what the hell is going on?”
I didn’t miss May’s recoil from my curt tone. I didn’t mean for my words to bite out like that, but I needed answers. Now.
; “The girl from my dream is real,” I said in a ragged breath. “There people—these things—evaporate into thin air. And you,” I turned my gaze upon Phoebe. “I saw something… When you faced the girl, Collette, I saw something change the air between you. It…rippled.”
Phoebe stared down at her fingernails. “I would have told you. I wanted to tell you…”
“Tell me what?” I yelled.
Michael cleared his throat, and May let out a slow breath.
When Phoebe looked up at me, her jade eyes were glassy.
“Come on, Phoebe,” I whispered.
She stayed silent.
Suddenly Michael rose to his feet. “I can explain,” he said, his voice strange and hollow. “There’s more to this world than what meets the eye. There is an entire world of our own that most people simply do not know about.”
“The underworld,” Phoebe filled in, quietly.
“Yes,” Michael went on. “An underworld of beings that most humans will never have the displeasure of meeting. Unfortunately, you have met them, Stef. And despite our best efforts, it seems you will continue to meet them.” He gestured towards Phoebe’s mum, and said, “May foresaw your fate in the runes, and when we spoke with you at the house earlier, it only confirmed what we already believed.”
I was listening, but it was near-impossible to make any sense of what Michael was telling me. “Those people,” I stammered. “The ones who jumped me, they’re part of the underworld?”
“Demons,” Phoebe answered. “Children of Lilith.”
A week ago, I might have laughed at a statement like that. I would have laughed. But after what I’d seen today, demons didn’t seem so unbelievable.
And that name, I suddenly remembered. Lilith. That’s the name Leonard had used when he was talking to Amerie. He’d said, Lilith has her hands full with you. Like mother like daughter.
“So, they’re demons,” I said, swallowing. “These Children of Lilith, as you called them. And now they’re, coming after me?”
May inhaled slowly. “I wish it were that simple…”
I noticed Phoebe chewing her thumbnail. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Elaborate,” I said, my voice flat.
And May did. “We believe that your visit from the girl has proven to be detrimental to you. We believe that she was turning—transitioning from human to demon—and was required to take a soul that night, to take a life. But she failed with you when she didn’t complete the sacrifice. She left you in limbo, suspended between life and death.”
My mouth fell open as I groped for words. “But, I’m alive,” I said, dazed.
“Yes,” May’s voice was calm and even. “And now Leonard wants to find you. He wants to recruit you.”
Leonard? How did she know his name? I was certain I hadn’t mentioned it.
“You know him?” I asked, hoarsely. “You know Leonard?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, we do.”
I saw Stef’s face when my mother broke the news about Leonard. I saw that scared and helpless look as May served the harsh reality. Stef was as good as dead, even if mum hadn’t directly said so.
Mum had warned me though. She’d warned me about what could happen to innocent people if we didn’t do our job properly. It was a little over a year ago, during my senior year at high school, and the semester had barely begun when mum had first confronted me about Sam. For two whole years I’d been meeting with Sam in secret, and in all that time my mum had said nothing. I’d been dumb enough to assume that was because she didn’t know, that I’d somehow kept this under her radar.
But when she’d finally confronted me, I guess that was the moment I realised that my mother knew everything.
Well, not everything, exactly.
There was still one thing she didn’t know.
“Apparently I’m supposed to start applying to colleges. Can you believe that?” I laughed as I looked up at the half moon in the ebony sky, my head lolling back onto the gravestone and my fingers laced through Sam’s. It was balmy that night, still hot from the Indian summer we’d had in Briarwood. “Senior year has hardly begun, and already everyone’s preparing for next year. Crazy, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam murmured.
“Anyway,” I went on, tugging at the blades of grass growing over Maura’s grave, “if I do have to apply to schools, I’m thinking of majoring in Bio-Chemistry.”
When Sam didn’t respond, I turned to him. His eyes were almost closed.
“What do you think?” I prompted. “Do you think Bio-Chemistry would be good?”
“Sounds hard,” he answered without looking at me.
“Well, yeah. But it’s interesting, the science of our cells and molecular structure. Of all people, that should interest us.”
He flinched.
“Whatever,” I said, brushing over his terse reaction. “I think it sounds interesting. I’d like to understand you, and how you…” I let the sentence taper off. Changed. That’s what I’d wanted to say. And could he blame me? I wanted to study the science that explained how a once normal boy could change into an Incubus demon by the act of cell transmutation.
“It doesn’t interest me,” he said as if he were reading my thoughts. “I don’t care. We are what we are.”
We are what we are?
He was staring off at the constellations in the night sky. His mind was with the stars, not me. But this distance between us wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. He’d been distant for a while. Three weeks, maybe more. It made my stomach knot.
I squeezed his fingers. “Where are you?”
He turned to me, catching my gaze and smiling carefully. “I’m right here, Pheebs.”
“Physically,” I said, arching an eyebrow. “But where’s your mind?”
He sighed and rubbed his brow. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “It’s a lot, isn’t it? I mean, Phoebe, what do you expect me to say? You’re planning on going off to college. I’m not there. And I never will be.”
Oh.
“It’s just a thought,” I said. “I’m probably not going to college, anyway. I’m not there, either.”
“You could be.” His jaw clenched. “You should be.”
“You know that’s not how I see my life,” I snorted at the idea. “I mean, me? College?” Okay, so there’d been a fleeting moment where I’d envisaged myself pacing quickly through a brownstone campus with a harassed look upon my face as I strode between classes, lugging around heavy science textbooks, but really… it was all just fantasy.
“Why not?” Sam’s tone was serious, his shadowed eyes never leaving mine. “Why wouldn’t you go to college?”
“Many reasons,” I said. I shifted on the earth, letting my fingers slip from his.
“Such as?”
“My grades aren’t good enough,” I said; it was the truth. Balancing guardian training and school was hard. It was showing in my grade reports just how much effect it was having on me. “I have responsibilities here.”
“Like what?”
“This,” I said, patting the grass on the grave. “I’m a Guardian. And I’ve been responsible for this Saturday night shift for two years—”
“So? Your mum can take over.”
I sighed. “Sam…”
“Give me a better reason than that.”
“Fine,” I said. “You.” There. That’s what he’d been leading to, we both knew it.
He grimaced. “Exactly. I’m holding you back.”
“Only on Saturday nights,” I said with a quick smile.
“It’s more than Saturday night’s though, isn’t it? It’s life, mortality. All of which I have none of, and you have in abundance. It’s laying out before you, waiting for you to seize it.”
“I’m already seizing it,” I said. My chest tightened. I didn’t like where this was going. And it wasn’t the first time we’d been here.
“Maybe,” he said.
“My life is just fine,” I told him. “We’ll make it work. I have you
; you have me. I’m not going anywhere.” Even as I spoke the words, I felt something tug in my subconscious.
A gust of wind dragged through the trees in the cemetery, rustling their leaves as though they were laughing at me; laughing at us.
“Things are changing,” he went on, his tone altering, shifting in a way that I didn’t understand, his golden eyes glinting in a way that I didn’t recognise. “But there are options, Phoebe. There are options that we haven’t even considered yet.”
I stiffened. “Such as?”
He blew out a breath. “Maybe you need to meet with Leonard, and…”
Leonard. The name alone made my gut twist. Ever since the mysterious Incubus demon, Leonard, had shown up in Briarwood a few months ago, Sam had been acting differently. He was part of some weird community now, where this Leonard promised something to the undead. A life without meaning. But in my opinion, Leonard sounded like a creep, a cult leader that lost souls gravitated towards. Of course, I didn’t like the thought of Sam being alone, but I didn’t like the thought of him being headhunted by this Leonard guy, either.
“…and he already knows all about you—”
“Whoa.” I raised my hand, cutting him off. “You talk to Leonard about me?”
“Well, yeah,” Sam looked at the ground, then back up again. “I have to talk to someone, Pheebs. I’m going out of my mind; the thought that this could be your last year in Briarwood. You keep growing older and moving on to new stages of life, and I’m frozen. Forever stuck in the shadows of my demonic tendencies.” He pressed his thumbs against his chest.
Sam. My eyes wandered over him. He was still the same eighteen-year-old boy I’d met two years ago, totally unaltered. The only difference was me. I’d caught up with him now, and I’d keep growing, changing, ageing…
“You tell Leonard all of this?” I asked. A spike of apprehension moved through my veins.
“Yeah. Just about our situation, our lives together. You know, with you being a Guardian and me being an Incubus. He gets it, Pheebs.”