The Vengeance Demons Series: Books 0-3 (The Vengeance Demons Series Boxset)

by Louisa Lo

  I was trapped, both in the box and in my own body, unable to escape whatever was ahead of me. I had no power. I couldn’t even see what was going on, save for the cutout. I was so royally screwed.

  Then little by little, the anesthesia-induced numbness in my body dissipated, burned off by the intense fury running through my veins. I clutched my fists so tightly all my knuckles popped with a resounding crack, tears threatened to blur my eyes, and I was almost too tired to blink them away.

  I’d trusted her, loved her, and she’d betrayed me. Deep down, I’d always feared that I would never be good enough, normal enough to be accepted. But this still hurt like hell.

  I would always be a freak, an afterthought.

  Now that the little sideshow of love and treachery was over, the monks shuffled about, their focus turned to the harp in Damarion’s hand. Their whispers grew louder by the minute.

  “Alright, Megan, why don’t I get your death over with so I can welcome Absolute Good home?” Damarion passed the harp to Taurean and laced his fingers together, all businesslike.

  Dan leaned forward with an air of anticipation. Damarion covered my cardboard prison in a silver net and proceeded with the same chanting he’d done when he’d attacked me in the Shadow World.

  But this time, he was joined by all his followers.

  And this time, Dad wasn’t going to come to my rescue, because Grandma wouldn’t even let him know I was in danger. I didn’t want to die. If I died here, even my body might never be found. I wanted my life to mean something, not to be wasted as some soon-to-be-forgotten sacrifice. I wanted to fight, to wail. Anything but to face how alone and helpless I was feeling. My parents, Esme and all my half-brothers were going to be devastated. And I wouldn’t be alive to warn them about the apocalypse that was to come.

  That thought pissed me off so much that I pushed the last of the anesthesia out of my system and flexed my wrists. These people dared to threaten me and all that I held dear. They wouldn’t get away with this.

  Then my thoughts circled back to Grandma, and I was filled with unadulterated rage. All the love I thought she had for me was fake. The warm and fuzzy alternate memories she’d filled my head with had been fake, every single last one of them. I guess if I’d never thought she loved me, it would’ve been easier. Now I was disappointed, embarrassed, and just plain mad. The anger mingled with my fear of death. It was a bitter taste in my mouth.

  With my necklace gone, there wasn’t an instrument to properly keep my emotions in check, let alone amplify the magic it triggered. My trickery magic was unchecked, raw and temperamental, and I was too mad to keep a grip on it, too mad to be logical.

  I had always relied on my vengeance side to pull my trickery tendency back, to act as a sprinkler system to my fire. Now with my emotions running wild, I felt like a house with the ground floor engulfed in flame and the basement completely flooded.

  My trickery magic, which was controlled by my emotions, said screw it.

  My vengeance magic, which was controlled by my brain, said screw it as well.

  My competing natures clashed inside me, threatening to disintegrate me atom by atom with their intensity. Blood roared in my ears, and my heart beat as wildly as the chaos within me.

  Never mind Damarion and his friends, my own selves were doing a fine job of killing me without them.

  I roared in pain. My two opposing magics rushed out of me and filled the room, like molten lava bursting out of a volcano.

  Once they got away from me, I felt light and strangely elated. It was as if I was in a drug-induced high, and I thought I could do anything, get away with anything. I could invoke terrible vengeance on anybody with no regard to the rules, because I made the rules.

  A faint humming started in my head, but I ignored it. This girl was in too good a mood right now to care about a little annoying sound.

  I called to the twin magical forces zooming around the room, and they responded to my command like a dream, even more so than when they were within my body. Chortling with delight, I directed my powers towards Damarion and made his robe catch on fire. He screamed and rolled on the ground. I proceeded to do the same with the other monks in the room. I felt no remorse, no hesitation. The roaring in my ears ceased, and my heartbeat was as steady as a rock. Dishing out vengeance had a way of making a person focus.

  And boy, did I get more to focus on. Shadowy figures of those who’d been mean to me all through my life—Madeleine, Cousin Fred, and even my biased first grade history teacher— materialized before me, their bodies not entirely solid. I didn’t care. I didn’t question where they came from, why they didn’t look right, or why they weren’t saying a single word. They were here to harm me. They were here begging to be harmed. I pulled the power around me once more.

  “No!” Esme screamed in my head. Esme? I thought she was long gone. What was she wailing on about when I already had that annoying buzzing sound to deal with? She’d better stop if she knew what was good for her.

  The humming in my head wasn’t unpleasant. It was almost like a long-forgotten friend I never knew I had. I wasn’t having a migraine or anything like that, but my eyes seemed to be having trouble seeing properly.

  You know how if a person crosses her eyes hard enough, her brain can perceive two images instead of one? It was somewhat like that for me, but not quite. I could see one single room in front of me. The wall and the furniture were exactly the same, yet two very different scenarios laid out before me.

  On one hand, there was Damarion on the ground, frantically trying to put out the fire on his clothes along with the other monks, while various bullies from my life waited patiently for my torment. On the other, a small wind tunnel was opening up right in front of me, yawning wider as the humming continued. Somehow, I knew that the tunnel was there because of the humming. In the second scenario, Damarion stood right at the edge of my blind spot, looking very much untouched by fire and victorious.

  There was something hanging on my neck.

  I reached up and felt the familiar weight of the pearl pendant necklace. The pearl vibrated slightly under my touch. That was strange. When had I gotten it back from Grandma? Had I ever lost it to her? What was real and what wasn’t? I couldn’t tell anymore.

  It was as if I was in the Shadow World again, living two overlapping realities, each of them feeling as genuine as the other. While in one I was the mighty avenger, in the other Damarion was calling the shots, and Esme was still trapped in enemy territory along with me.

  And she was horrified by what I’d just created, which was some kind of weird inter-dimensional tunnel. Fuelled by my anger, it was amplified by my very-much-there pearl pendant necklace.

  What the hell was happening?

  They want something from you, Megan.

  The first sacred duty of the Greys is to bring back Absolute Good…

  Absolute Evil hadn’t been heard from since almost the Beginning, just like Absolute Good.

  Fleur was the one who’d trapped Absolute Evil.

  Then the room, the tunnel, Esme, Madeleine, Cousin Fred, Injured Damarion, Smug Damarion…they all faded away. The two competing realities dissolved, and all that was left was a pure white background and the silhouette of a woman I’d dreamed about all my life, but never remembered during consciousness.

  ***

  As I approached her, more details of the woman revealed themselves. She had lustrous dark hair all the way to her waist and was dressed in a white top and a pair of jeans that looked oddly familiar. I squinted. It was one of my pairs of jeans. Last I checked, it was in the laundry pile waiting to be washed, not clean and on someone else’s body.

  “That’s because I’m taking elements from your life to create this time out of time, so we can have a chat. Don’t worry, you’ll return to where you need to be with only seconds missing.” The melodic voice of the woman rang around me. “I am Fleur, the First Trickster.”

  “Why did you—”

  “Shh. Don’t you
remember this?”

  I found myself crouching on the edge of a cliff beside her, overlooking a barren landscape of red rocks and volcanoes.

  Before me was a scene that had unfolded a million times in my forgotten dreams. Dressed in a deep purple floral gown, another Fleur stood at the foot of a cliff lower than the one I was on. Her hair was blowing all over her determined face. Next to her was a long-haired vengeance demon, his green-scaled wings gleaming in the waning sunrays. They opened their minds, letting the two very distinctive resonances from their brains merge into one single pattern. The vibration opened a tunnel in midair, dragging two bright bulbs of energy that were Absolute Good and Evil to their prison.

  The humming was similar to the one I’d unwittingly produced before entering this time out of time. So if Fleur and the vengeance demons’ combined vibration was equivalent to “close sesame” to the tunnel, did that mean mine would open it?

  “That’s right,” the jeans-wearing Fleur confirmed. Surrounded by an infinity of bright nothingness, her voice echoed as if she was from far away and everywhere, though by all appearances she was right next to me. “In the beginning, the world was a lot more black and white. Absolute Good was straight, and Absolute Evil was, well, evil. When Absolute Good wasn’t busy fighting with Evil, it was hunting all creatures it deemed too impure to exist. Eventually I befriended a vengeance demon who was willing to stand up to them. After Absolute Good and Evil were gone, we created a justice system that would encompass creatures both naughty and nice. Not too straight-laced, yet not too loose. It was the birth of the—”

  “Cosmic Balance.” Most supernaturals assumed that the Cosmic Balance had always been there. We took it for granted. We moaned about its glitches and inefficiencies. But now that I thought about it, it almost always came through in the end.

  “Justice arrives on a wooden leg. Slowly but surely,” I repeated the age-old adage.

  Fleur nodded. “Whenever injustices pile up, vengeance demons make sure the wrongdoers get their comeuppance; whenever we become complacent with the status quo, tricksters throw in the randomness that’s the spice of life, and by doing so, push forth creativity and innovation.”

  “I don’t get it. That sounds like a good partnership. So what happened?”

  “Somewhere along the line, the tricksters’ role of recalibrating the Cosmic Balance was forgotten, and my kind’s flamboyancy began to be seen as graceless and uncivilized. In time, prejudice became presumed wisdom, and the gap between the two races grew ever wider.”

  “Hence my crappy childhood.”

  “Because you are unique.” Fleur placed her hand over mine for emphasis. “And more vital than you could ever imagine.”

  So I was the real target all along. Fleur’s harp from the legend wasn’t a physical thing—it was in the very blood passed down from my mother’s line. Mix that with my dad’s vengeance genes, and voilà, I was a damn get-out-of-jail free card for Absolute Good and Evil.

  “That Grandma who betrayed me, she’s not real, is she?” I came to realize.

  Fleur tilted her head. “No. Neither was the Serafina who came along with her, or the Fred and the Madeleine afterwards. That entire reality was constructed for one purpose and one purpose only: to induce your loss of control and take advantage of your anger. That was the end game all along. That’s why you managed to stay just a little ahead of Enid’s whip, and why the heat bubble in the Shadow World didn’t move too fast towards you.”

  A ridiculous sense of relief rose within me. It was a little shameful that in the face of pending cosmic disaster I should spare any thought to my own puny feelings, but I couldn’t help it. I felt like a little kid who wanted to jump up and shout, “Yay, Gran does love me after all!”

  The moment passed, and I turned my focus back to what I had to do. I had to go back. Because it wasn’t just Mom, my trickster half-siblings, and countless other “imperfect” creatures who would be purged in the new order. Dad and Grandma wouldn’t survive, either, given their support of me.

  “Then go, love,” Fleur said.

  With those words, my ancestor and the bright surroundings around us started to juxtapose with, then slowly be replaced by, the cardboard prison that was my reality.

  My real reality.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A THRONE ROOM FULL of monks? Check.

  Esme trapped beside me in a fridge-sized cardboard box identical to mine? Check.

  Damarion standing around with a shit-eating grin on his face while the humming grew louder and louder? Check.

  Since it was the worst-case scenario, of course it had to be the real one.

  The tunnel had expanded dramatically during my mental absence, though it was only a few seconds in actual time. Every inch that the passage gained in diameter was a step closer to doom for everyone I loved.

  With a racing heart and a parched throat, I tried to swallow my panic. I knew I said I’d stop Damarion, but I had no idea how. I didn’t think they’d ever taught us how to close the gaping hole of Absolute Good and Evil in school.

  Use your logic. Fleur’s musical voice was like bells over a waterfall, so tranquil it was almost painful for my chaotic mind to process.

  Alright, if anger and fear had opened the tunnel, then the opposite of them should close it, right?

  Problem was, negative feelings had a way of getting ahead of a person. In my case, my anger had burst out of me and my cardboard prison and taken on the physical form of a relentless force of nature. Though it was no longer in my body, my anxiety was still feeding it. The throne room became a wind tunnel, if wind could be scorching against the cheek like we were at ground zero of an intense forest fire.

  Rationally I knew Grandma hadn’t betrayed me, so I couldn’t be mad at her anymore. But I’d gotten so angry I had an almost painful need to stay angry. So I shifted my wrath towards Damarion, Dan, and the other monks. The tsunami of my emotions trapped them and crashed them against each other as if they were nothing but turned over boats lost at sea. They deserved it, for what they’d done to me, were still doing to me. Those assholes were not leaving until I said they were leaving. I wanted them and everyone associated with that blasted secret society to pay.

  The worst thing about being angry was how angry it made me feel, and my inability to control myself only pissed me off more.

  I wanted the pounding in my head, which intensified along with the humming, to stop. I squeezed my hands on my thighs, willing the tingling feeling in my fingertips to go away. I wanted to hit something, anything, if it would take the pain away. I wondered if this was what going insane felt like. Calmness seemed so far away, it might as well have never existed in my life.

  Visualize.

  Screw you!

  Despite my defiant words, the note of alarm in Fleur’s voice got through to me. I cannot, cannot mess up. This is too important.

  Alright, let’s see. The opposite of anger and fear…

  Love.

  Esme, her concern for me apparent. To her, I was a confounding puzzle, in everything from my love-hate relationship with chocolate to being the poster child for unpopularity. She could’ve acted high and mighty just like Cousin Fred did, but she stood by me.

  My parents. Mom could’ve disappeared after giving birth to me, as it was in the nature of her race to do so, but she’d stayed. Dad could’ve been promoted to senior arch demon by now, if he’d hidden his new family from polite vengeance society, but he was proud of us.

  He was proud of me.

  The air around me cooled by several degrees. I continued to visualize.

  My pain-in-the-ass half-brothers, who might be wild and crazy, but always shared their new inventions with me generously.

  Grandma, whom I’d doubted all my life, whom I’d doubted again just now. I wanted to make up some quality time with her. I wondered if in her private life she was a chocolate fiend, like me.

  And last but not least, me. My fun-loving and much-neglected trickery side. Come to
think of it, much of my passion and warmth came from that part of me. I couldn’t wait to get to know myself more, to see what kind of woman I’d turn out to be. If anything, Fleur and her vengeance demon friend showed me just how important it was to embrace both sides of myself.

  By the time I finished counting out all the things I had going for me, my elevated heart rate slowed down. The humming and pounding in my head faded. Exhausted, I slumped against the inner wall of my cardboard prison and struggled to catch my breath, as if I’d just run a full marathon. In a way, I had.

  I opened my eyes, which I hadn’t even realized I’d closed until now.

  From my cutout window, I could see Esme dueling with Damarion. A small fireworks display of spells was dancing at their feet. At one point, while I was struggling to get myself under control, she must’ve broken free of her restraints and taken on our enemy alone.

  And he was winning.

  And that wasn’t my only problem. I might’ve stopped the humming, the driving force behind the opening, but the tunnel created thus far didn’t go away. From its depth I could vaguely see two balls of energy, one in red and one in blue, attempting to widen the tunnel on their end.

  Desperate to do something to help, my fingers fumbled around the inner top of the cardboard box, hoping to tear my prison apart by pressing my palms up and stretching to stand on my toes. But of course, deep down, I knew better. Strengthened by magic, the box was beyond sturdy for mere cardboard materials.

  Then my fingers came across a wide range of round little bumps, some sort of beads that were glued onto the ceiling of the box. Further exploration told me that the beads were all over the inner surfaces of the box except the floor.

  Now why hadn’t I noticed them before? Perhaps I wasn’t meant to.

  And wait, they weren’t beads. They were pearls. Rows and rows of them. I could feel the residual power pulsing through them. My own power.

  So my prison was actually a gigantic amplifier, built to enhance my agitation, and the resulting dissonance, to the Greys’ end. Maybe the table could be turned…