“We are one now, you and me,” she said. “Our burden is the same. If we keep things from each other, how will we ever get through this? I don’t want to be alone in this, Jackson. I want to know we’re a team. You’re always thinking about my heart, my fears. Always trying to protect me. But I want to protect you, too. You shouldn’t bear this alone.”
I put my hand on hers and closed the small gap of space that remained between us.
“I don’t deserve you,” I whispered, placing my lips against her forehead. She was still warm from the dream.
“Love isn’t about deserving,” she said. “It’s about being completely open to each other. It’s about needing and being needed. And I need you now more than ever. I think whoever this cloaked woman is, she’s been trying to warn us that the emerald priestess is going to attack. I think it’s going to happen soon. We need to be ready.”
She pulled back slightly and searched my eyes.
“I need to see those drawings, Jackson.”
I squeezed her hand and nodded.
I turned back toward my desk and leaned against the worn wood. I did not want to show her what I’d seen. The destruction would tear her apart, and no matter what we did, there was nothing that would change it. Her father’s domed city was going to be destroyed and people were going to die.
It was only a matter of when.
Reluctantly, I opened the notebook and slid several drawings across the desk, spreading them out from bad to worst. Harper came around beside me, the soft fabric of her nightgown brushing against my side as she studied them.
Her eyes dipped to the trash can and before I could stop her, she took the crumpled paper from the bin and smoothed it out. Her knees buckled.
I caught her just before she hit the floor and cradled her in my arms. She rested her head against my chest, still clutching the drawing in her hand.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered through her tears. “I didn’t know.”
I held her close to me and rocked her back and forth.
My eyes drifted down to the page, seeing again the unavoidable destruction that was coming our way, focusing on the hooded figure in the corner, her face just out of sight.
More Than Ever
“Ten minutes,” I shouted from the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m up,” Mary Anne called back.
“Be there in a minute,” Zara sang, her white-blonde hair hanging down as she leaned over the balcony.
Someone yelled a curse word and seemed to stumble and crash into something. I laughed. Probably Mary Anne. She hated mornings.
Jackson ran down the stairs. “Good morning, gorgeous,” he said. He pulled a fresh black t-shirt over his head and then kissed me on the cheek.
We walked back toward the kitchen together. Mordecai, Joost, Erick, and Cristo—demons demons who had originally come through to the human world with Lea about thirty years ago—were already sitting at the large farm table by the back door. The plates of bacon, eggs, and pancakes I’d set in front of them a few minutes ago had already been devoured.
“Hungry much?” I asked with a laugh.
“Perfect hangover cure,” Joost said, raising a glass of orange juice. “Thanks.”
“Did you guys leave anything for the rest of us?” Jackson teased. He stole the only remaining piece of bacon off Cristo’s plate.
“Hey,” Cristo yelled, standing and swiping at Jackson’s hand. He missed and the bacon disappeared into Jackson’s mouth.
“Mmm,” he said with his mouth full. “Delicious.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to the stove. With a wave of my hand, the spatula rose off the counter and flipped the pancakes. A fork moved through the air to pull the bacon off the pan. With my other hand, I directed the large pitcher of orange juice to fill six more glasses waiting on the counter.
“You’re getting so good at that,” Jackson said. He downed a glass of OJ and started filling his plate with food.
“With this many people living here, I had no choice,” I said. “It was either that or let you guys starve.”
“Who’s starving?” Mary Anne asked from the hallway. “Please tell me the demons didn’t eat all the food again.”
She peeked her head around the corner and her shoulders relaxed.
“Thank God.” She grabbed two plates and tossed a couple of pancakes on each of them.
Essex, her demon boyfriend, followed behind her, grabbing the extra plate from her and heading over to the table. “Thank you for this meal, Harper,” he said, taking a second to bow toward me before he sat down. “I am most grateful.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. I shot a glance at the four demons closest to the door and raised an eyebrow. “See how easy it is to say thank-you?”
Erick stood and smacked the back of Cristo’s head. “Yeah, man, where are your manners?”
“Mine?” Cristo said. He stood and chased Erick around to the other side of the table.
A blue butterfly fluttered into the room. Zara shifted back to her human form and giggled. “Good morning, everyone.”
She took a few steps and then seemed to stumble over her own feet. She caught the edge of the counter and paused.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She shook her head, worry flashing in her pale blue eyes for a moment. It wasn’t a look I was used to seeing from her.
“I’m fine,” she said, clearing her throat.
But when she pushed her white-blonde hair back from her face, a dark streak of black underneath caught my eye.
“What’s this?” I asked, moving to touch it.
She pulled away and readjusted her hair to cover it. “Nothing,” she said, her smile forced and flustered.
“I knew you always wanted to be more like me, but I don’t think you can pull off the goth look, so don’t even think about it,” Mary Anne teased as she walked toward the table.
Zara laughed, but it wasn’t her normal, carefree giggle. It sounded scared. I was going to ask her more about it, but Courtney and Aerden came through the door at that moment and grabbed some empty seats up at the counter. I floated three plates over and spooned eggs onto them.
“We’ve got less than five minutes before we need to leave for school,” I said. “Where’s Lea?”
Aerden shrugged, but a weird expression crossed his face before he could hide it. Guilt slipped through my stomach like a venomous snake.
I had heard them outside, training late into the night. I knew she was upset, and I completely understood it, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
I reached a hand up and slid Jackson’s engagement locket under the neck of my shirt. I hated the thought of what Lea must be going through. And I hated the fact that I was going to have to tone down my own happiness when it was the one thing that got me out of bed this morning.
But this is what it was to have twelve people living in the same house. Well, technically eight demons, three witches, and one half-breed. Every once in a while, you had to make sacrifices for the good of the group.
I needed to do whatever it took to make Lea feel comfortable. If she needed her space, I’d give it to her. I wouldn’t even say a word about her training in the woods, even though she knew I hated it.
Right now, more than ever, we needed each other.
I took a deep breath and tried to ignore the fear that knotted inside me when I thought of the war waiting for us on the horizon. I piled the remaining food on a plate and turned back to the group, planting a smile on my face.
“Who wants more pancakes?” I asked.
“Me,” Erick, Joost, and Mordecai all said at the same time.
Everyone piled into the white van. It used to say Shadowford Home for Girls on the side of it, but after I’d taken the house back for myself and invited my friends to live here with me, we’d decided to paint it fresh. Now, it had an ice-covered lightning bolt down the side, a joke from the demon guys one crazy night this past summer. It was kind of growing on me.
Before
Erick and the others climbed in, I held them back and slid the door closed.
“Would you guys mind missing school today?” I asked.
“What? Miss a riveting day of human high school? I can’t bear the thought,” Cristo said.
I smacked him on the arm. “I’m being serious. I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything,” Mordecai said, his black dreads sweeping his shoulders.
“Go through to the domed city and just keep an eye out,” I said. “Make sure the guards are all on alert and patrolling the area throughout the day.”
Mordecai’s eyes grew dark. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing, yet,” I said. “Can you do it?”
“Of course,” he said.
The four of them shifted and headed toward our secret portal near the lake.
It wasn’t unusual for them to be missing a few days of school. We had gotten good enough at altering records and memories here in town that it didn’t matter anyway.
Sometimes, they went out of town, splitting up to go help demons who had been freed from the sapphire gates acclimate to the human world. When we killed Priestess Winter, we performed a ritual that broke the Peachville demon gate and freed all the demons and witches attached to it.
Afterward, when things settled down, we started the large task of going around to all of the remaining sapphire gates throughout the world, performing the same ritual. It had taken two full months of nonstop work over the summer, and after school started, the four demon guys had helped pick up the pieces.
Most of the demons who went free chose to return home to their families in the Shadow World, but some wanted to stay here in the human world, feeling that they had nothing left to go home to. Either their families had all been abducted by another color gate or they simply felt too broken to face their past. They all had their reasons, and we respected their wishes, helping them find jobs and homes when we could.
A lot of the witches from the sapphire gates had been angry, which made the transition even more difficult. The Order of Shadows had a lot of flaws—to say the least—but many witches loved the unstoppable power their demon slaves gave them.
Witches were recruited young and trained in basic magic. In demon gate towns, cheerleading teams served as the front for the Order’s recruiting program. After school, instead of practicing cheers, though, they retreated to a secret room inside the gym to practice basic spells and learn the history of the Order. Most of them came from long lines of witches and simply followed in their mothers’ footsteps. When they turned eighteen, though, they were officially inducted into the Order.
For most, this was a terrifying and eye-opening experience. They were dragged down into a ritual room below ground, naked, and placed above the portal stone, the binding ritual pulling a kidnapped Shadow Demon through the portal and forcing them inside the body of the young witch.
The demons became slaves to the witches from that moment forward, bound together, the demon’s essence acting as a type of battery for the witch’s power, making them many times more powerful than they otherwise would have been.
At first, a lot of witches rebelled against the idea of having a demon locked inside of them. Over time, though, most became addicted to it. Greed was a powerful sin, and when you could use unlimited glamours to make yourself beautiful, and had practically unlimited power to get anything you wanted, most initiates accepted the Order’s ways.
Our ritual to free those demons meant stealing power from the witches, and the majority of them didn’t like it much. Some fought back, but with the demons on our side and the witches’ strength weakened, we had been able to kill most rebellions before they truly started.
It had been a chaotic and exhausting summer, but when the last of the sapphire gates had been closed, we had all returned here to Peachville, turning what once was Shadowford Home for Girls back into Brighton Manor, the home of my family for generations.
Courtney had been an orphan like me, brought here by the Order when they were searching for their lost Prima, the head witch of the coven. Which turned out to be me. Mary Anne, a member of an ancient race of crow witches, had been sent here disguised as an orphan for the same reason, the Mother Crow hoping to find and kill me so that she could transfer the power of my bloodline to her own.
Zara, the youngest daughter of Priestess Winter, had left her home in Washington, DC to join us here after her mother died. The four of us were the only humans living here, although I was also half-demon on my father’s side.
Mordecai, Joost, Erick, and Cristo were some of Lea’s best friends. They lived at Brighton Manor off and on, depending on whether they were needed by other demons.
Essex and Mary Anne had fallen in love back in the Shadow World when we had been hiding out there last year. Jackson, Lea, and Aerden completed our group of twelve.
Most weekdays, we piled into the van and went to school, but we had three full training days a week when we descended into the secret training room below the gym and practiced our magic.
Today was a training day.
I looked up at the house. Lea had never shown for breakfast, and I asked Jackson if we should wait for her.
“I don’t want to be late for school today,” I said.
Jackson looked back at Aerden, but he shrugged. “Just go,” Jackson said. “If she wants to come, she’ll meet us there. She has her bike.”
I bit my lower lip and nodded, climbing into the driver’s seat and closing the door. All of the demons had motorcycles, which continued to surprise me. I guess it was just the cool thing to do when you were a demon. Maybe someday I would get one for myself. Lord knows, Jackson looked sexy on his.
I put the van into drive and pulled away from the house.
With the warning of a possible attack from the emerald priestess, the last place in the world I wanted to be was Peachville High School, but it was the best way for us to keep up our skills.
Since the demons in our group needed some kind of life force to pull from in order to cast here in the human world, Zara had taken clippings from the gardens and grown vines and flowers all along the walls in our training room. They were mostly destroyed by the end of a session, but she was able to grow them back in less than a day, meaning they were ready to go as a source of fuel the next time we met.
Also, with hundreds of students practically above our heads, the demons in our group could pull from them without making a noticeable difference.
No one had any idea about this room besides us. My half-sister, Angela King, had been the Order’s training coach, in charge of the cheerleading squad for years. Other than the higher-ups in the coven, she was the only one who knew about this room. And those higher-ups had either been killed by the Order or had died in the battle.
Angela still taught English classes here at the school and when she could, she joined us down in the training room.
Today was a Monday, which meant we only had to show up for homeroom and then we could retreat to the gym. When we parked and walked into the school, I headed straight for Angela’s classroom.
She was standing in front of her desk, talking to a student, and when she saw me, her face broke out into a huge smile. She excused herself and came over to meet me in the doorway. She wrapped her arms around me.
“I’m so excited for you,” she said. “Congratulations again on your engagement.”
“Shhh,” I said, pretending to be worried someone would hear her. “A senior in high school engaged? What will everyone think?”
She laughed. “As if you care,” she said. “Are you training this morning?”
“Yes,” I said. “Can you get away?”
She looked toward the ceiling, as if her schedule were written there. “Not today,” she said. “My schedule is packed.” Her features darkened. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” I said, wishing I had a different answer to that question. “I mean, I’m fine, but I have reason to believe the castle and the domed city might
be attacked soon.”
She looked behind her and closed her door, shutting us out in the hallway where there were less ears to hear.
“Harper, what’s going on? Why would you think that?”
“I’ve been having these dreams,” I said. “And Jackson’s visions line up with it, everything pointing to the emerald priestess attacking the dome.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Soon, I think,” I said. “What should we do?”
Technically our father had left the kingdom to me, but Angela was older than I was, and we had basically shared the responsibility.
“I’ll talk to someone and see if I can get a substitute for the rest of the week,” she said. “I’ll pack my things and head to the dome in the morning.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m going to visit Eloise in Cypress. I would think she’d have contacted me if she’d heard anything, but I want to warn her to be on alert, just in case.”
The bell rang and several students pushed past us, saying good morning to my sister. No one here knew she was my half-sister. We shared the same demon father, but had different mothers, a secret that had been well kept for a very long time until I’d discovered the truth earlier this year.
She was all the family I had left. By blood, anyway. And she meant the world to me. What I had seen in Jackson’s drawings affected her as much as it did me, and she needed to know what was coming.
“I’ve got to run, but keep me updated, okay?”
She nodded, her dark layers spilling over her cheeks. She pushed them back behind her ears and gave me a quick hug before returning to her classroom full of students.
I adjusted my backpack and made a run for my homeroom.
Point Made
I sat on a stool in the corner, watching as the others threw everything they had at Zara.
She looked like some kind of little fairy, hovering a few feet above the air, her legs folded beneath her. She wore a blindfold, and her hands rested against her knees, palms up.
Zara’s focus was amazing. She had Harper, Jackson, Courtney, and Essex all throwing various types of magical attacks her way, but she never once showed any sign of fear or hesitation. Her face was entirely at peace, her shoulders relaxed.
Emerald Darkness Page 3