Demon (The Faery Chronicles Book 2)

by Leslie Claire Walker

  “You’re not afraid of us?” Kev asked.

  “Have you seen what’s going on out there? I’ve checked out, like, a ten-block radius, and there’s almost no one left. The ones that are still around? Hey, they’ve got similar problems to you guys, but they’re too freaked to do anything except run away from me. I got no idea how things got this way, but I’m betting a million you’re here to tell me. Right? So, yeah, re: afraid. But we got bigger problems.” She turned on her heel with a squeak of rubber sole on waxed hardwood and walked away.

  Melody followed. We followed Melody into the foyer, which had a spiral staircase and a thirty-foot ceiling. An enormous fireplace took up the far corner—maybe they used it in February, when it actually got cold around here. A thick Oriental rug and two small leather sofas took up the space in front of it. A low, cherry coffee table sat between them.

  Melody sat on the edge of the table. She was the only one who actually did. The rest of us loitered. Except the dog, who hung on Beth’s heels as she disappeared behind what looked like a glassed-in wine room and into the kitchen.

  “Y’all want something to drink?” she called.

  The sooner we got out of there, the sooner we could get home to Amy. Or find her. I wanted the book, and then I wanted gone. I could see from Kev’s expression that he felt the same. The Singer had other ideas.

  “Whisky,” she said.

  Beth’s giggle was full of nerves. “Irish?”

  “Is there any other kind?”

  “Technically, yes. But for today’s purposes…” Beth emerged from the kitchen with a tray stacked with five short tumblers and a bottle of Jameson. She set the tray down on the table and poured each of us two fingers.

  The Singer downed hers in one swallow. She balled her hand into a fist and popped her chest a couple of times—that whisky had to be burning on the way down.

  “Good?” Beth asked.

  The Singer set her glass down on the table. “Hit me again.”

  Beth raised an eyebrow, but she poured another shot.

  This time, the Singer sipped. “You know why we’re here?”

  “Miserable as Melody looks, I’m guessing it’s because you know she’s the source of all things screwed up. And you want our help.”

  “Hers, actually,” I said. “No offense.”

  “Who do you think found the book for her? Who do you think picked the lock on that house? Wasn’t her. She’s, like, helpless.”

  I stared at her. “You did those things?”

  “Stop looking at me like I’m some kind of alien. I was bored. It seemed like fun.”

  Kevin stretched his wings wide. And, to be honest, he looked kind of menacing. “Bored?”

  “Seriously?” Beth sighed. “I’m taking six classes this semester and I’m acing all of them. Plus the extracurricular stuff—Chess Club, Chemistry Club, volunteering at the food bank. Mom’s trying to keep me busy. And she’s trying to make sure that I get into the ‘university of my choice’. That’s exactly how she says it. Can you believe? Anyway, I’m bored to fucking tears. And Melody came to live with us, which was cool and all. And she’s got all this mad crazy stuff going on. So she asked me to solve a mystery with her—you know, about her dad—how could I say no? And if there was hacking involved, or a little B&E, bonus.”

  Now Kevin was the one staring. “What are you? Some kind of criminal mastermind?”

  “I’m seventeen,” Beth said.

  “Non-sequitur.”

  “It’s the only sequitur I’ve got.”

  “You didn’t think about the consequences?” he asked.

  “I was thinking about the fun.”

  “Demons aren’t fun.”

  Beth took a sip of her whisky and coughed like crazy. “Ugh. Embarrassing. Not much of a drinker, I admit. Though I’m practicing.”

  “That’s between you and your liver,” the Singer said. “Consequences. Actions have them. Since we know you’re part of this bullshit, you’re in for helping us fix it, whether you like it or not.”

  “Threats? I hate threats.”

  The Singer smiled. Not in a friendly way. “Then think of it as a promise.”

  Beth took another drink. This time, she managed not to cough, although her face turned two shades of pink. “Okay. Now what?”

  “We need to see the book,” I said. “Can you get it for us?”

  “Sure. It’s in my room. BRB.”

  In case she had no intention of being right back, I walked after her up the winding staircase and past the family room with a big screen TV large enough to take up most of the wall and into a maze of bedrooms. The lights blazed bright in every one of them. I guessed her mom didn’t worry about the electric bill. Or Beth was afraid of the dark.

  She threw a glance over her shoulder. “Conspicuous consumption, I know.”

  “What?”

  “My mom has more money than sense. It’s just the two of us. We don’t need all this space. But it makes her feel better.”

  “Not judging.”

  “Of course you are. Everybody does.”

  “You live here. It’s your home.”

  “It’s my fourth home in twelve years. And I’m an environmentalist.”

  Of course she was. That was why she’d hooked up with Melody to summon a demon. Environmentalists did that sort of thing all the time.

  Her room was the third one on the right. Trek posters lined three walls. A bookcase took up the fourth. A blue rag rug warmed up the floor. A denim comforter and a mass of matching decorative pillows covered the full-sized bed.

  She peeled back the comforter, dumping half the pillows on the floor. She lifted the mattress and reached under it, pulling out the book. It looked exactly the way I remembered. She held it out.

  I took it. It felt heavy. And kind of alive. As if it had a mind of its own. Consciousness. And it was checking me out. Paying attention to the temperature of my hand. Whether my palm sweated. How tightly I held it. What my intentions were.

  Talk about crazy craziness.

  “You notice anything funny about this book?” I asked.

  “Besides the part where it’s full of magic spells?”

  I nodded.

  “It smells strange.”

  I raised the volume to my face. Breathed in. “Smells like an old book.”

  “In your experience, do old books try to put you to sleep while you’re trying to read them?”

  “Most books do that to me.”

  “Right. You’re the party guy. Class clown. Probably you never read.”

  “I read to find out stuff. Then I’m done. I don’t have to like it.”

  “Your loss,” she said. “Anyway, that book? The times I’ve read it, it’s like I can’t keep my eyes open for more than two paragraphs. Like it’s trying to keep me from figuring out what’s inside. Maybe it’s got some spell on it as well as in it. You know, something designed to keep people from reading it?”

  I’d never heard of a spell like that, but then again, I was still learning. And if the book had spells in it that would summon demons with a capital D, and if Oscar kept that book safe in his library, then maybe Oscar had spelled it to keep people’s prying eyes the hell out.

  “When did you notice that?” I asked.

  “First time I picked it up. At that house.”

  “Should’ve been your first clue.”

  “I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “You’re super smart in all the ways that the university of your choice will love. But in my world, you’re not exactly on top of the mountain.”

  “What world is that?”

  “The one with the demons and faeries. I deal with magic every day. It’s real. You need a different kind of smart.”

  “Street smart?”

  “I see you’ve heard of it.”

  “You don’t have to be an asshole, Rude.”

  Actually, it felt like I did. But I didn’t want to be. The two emotions warred
in my chest. I hated the way it felt. Not to mention the big bite of fear that I suddenly seemed to have bitten off, the one that was stuck in my throat. One word filled my mind. Destroyer.

  Fuck. That. Noise.

  I spoke from between clenched teeth. “Sorry.”

  “You’re scary. You know that?”

  “Sorry,” I said again. This time, without my jaw locked. “Let’s go downstairs and you can show up the exact spell you two used. Yeah?”

  “Fine, but you go first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want you walking behind me. It’s too creeptastic.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up all the way down. I looked over my shoulder at her twice to make sure she was coming. She made nervous, silly faces at me both times.

  The book in my hand felt like it was trying to tell me something. Like it had a voice that whispered in my ear. I didn’t understand the language.

  If I could get the gist, would it be good or bad? A book like this, there could only be one answer.

  I wanted only to put it down. I picked up the pace until I reached the bottom of the stairs. Shooed Melody off the coffee table and then I dropped it. The second the leather left off contact with my skin, the whispering stopped. The feeling of being seen, judged, vanished.

  “Show me,” I said.

  Beth hunkered down and flipped through the pages. “There. Page seventy-eight.”

  I peered at the text. The spell took up two whole pages. Hard to read. Made me want to take a nap. “You weren’t kidding, were you?”

  “Not really,” Beth said.

  The spell included a long list of instructions. Things that had to be done in order before the magic could even be called up.

  Do magic to become part of the land. (The ink Malek gave Melody)

  Spill your blood on the spiritual center of that land to compel its help.

  I looked at Melody. “What’s this?”

  She grimaced. “You know where the spiritual center of the land is, right? I mean, your teacher would’ve showed you.”

  I had to think about it, and think hard. Oscar had taken me downtown once near the beginning of my training. There was a willow in Tranquility Park on top of a hill near the fountain pool. Oscar said that the tree was important.

  Trees were priests. All trees. They moved the energy of the underworld through our world. Their branches reached toward heaven.

  I didn’t know anything about that except what he’d told me. And that some trees, like the oak near the pub—ground zero—served as portals.

  The willow served as the heart of the city.

  “It’s a tree, I think, but it’s not there anymore,” I said. “Hurricane Ike took it down.”

  She nodded. “In the physical world.”

  “What’s that mean?” Kevin asked.

  “That the willow still exists,” I said. “Just not as bark and leaves. It’s a ghost.”

  He pushed the hair back from his forehead. “Trees have ghosts. Really?”

  “In this case, yeah,” Melody said. “If you look sideways, you can see it.”

  Beth reached behind to scratch her own back. “What’s look sideways?”

  The Singer answered. “A lot of people think that to see into other worlds, you have to do all this elaborate shit. That’s not necessarily so. To get there bodily, sure. That’s big work. But seeing inside isn’t so complicated. You’ve heard that there are veils between the worlds, right? Barriers?”

  Beth shook her head. “I never heard any of this stuff until Melody started sleeping on the sofa.”

  The Singer stared at her. “You’re taking all of this way too easy. Not nearly enough freak-out. Not any, actually.”

  “Maybe I’m in shock.”

  “Or you’re lying,” the Singer said.

  Beth crossed her arms over her chest. “Fuck you.”

  “Would that be fuck you for insulting me or fuck you for seeing through my bullshit and calling me on it?”

  Beth looked away. Only for a second, but that was long enough for me know we were looking at door number two.

  “Spill,” I said.

  “I had a traumatic childhood.”

  “What kind of trauma?” I asked.

  “I was bored. A lot.” She let her hands fall to her sides. “So I investigated a lot of things. Like the number of microbes in the soil and all the different types of birds in the backyard and how to cook and bake stuff because it’s not like Mom was ever home to do it. Also, the occult.”

  “Dude. I love how you tacked that on at the end. Like the occult is the same as learning how to bake cookies.”

  She grinned at me. It came out more like a grimace. “It was all books. Coded instructions on how to do magic with esoteric ingredients. Overblown stories. I thought they were exaggerating.”

  “So,” the Singer said, “when Melody came, it stopped being pretend—or theoretical—and started being real.”

  Beth walked around us and plopped down on the empty arm of the sofa. “I thought it was awesome. Except for the part where real means, you know, real. The spell was fun and all, but after? I never expected all this.”

  I got that. “We need to go to the tree. See if there’s a way to reverse what’s been done.”

  I did my best to look reassuring. Not so easy with demon eyes and the super pale skin. But I tried. “It’ll be all right.”

  She reached for the coffee table. Knocked wood.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Streetlights lit the edges of the park. The rest of it lay in shadow.

  The oaks whose roots pushed up the bricks of the sidewalk, their branches stained black with hundreds of grackles. The noise of the damned birds drowned out all other sound except the cicadas’ steady rhythm. The tall silver fountains, shut down for the night, stood guard over the dark, rippling pools at their feet.

  Anticipation made me fidget—except it wasn’t just my feeling or Kev’s or Melody’s or anyone else’s. It felt like the park knew we’d gathered there to do something big. Possibly something bad. Like it was a sentient being. With a mind of its own—just like the book. Alive. Waiting. Holding its breath.

  I sensed the presences next to me. Around me. Kevin to my left. Melody to my right. Beth and the Singer in the back with the dog, who’d barked like crazy when we tried to leave him in the car. In my mind’s eye, each of them had their own color, their own scent.

  Kev? White. Same as his wings. He smelled like a pile of leaves on a blustery fall day. Melody? Red. Sulfur. Beth smelled like a library. And she seemed yellow.

  The Singer was a spinning column of blinding blue light. Like ice. Melting ice. She smelled like a winter day at the beach—all salt air and chilled north wind and the sun that had come out to warm her face.

  The dog looked and smelled just like himself. Nothing concealed behind his black and white shaggy-dog exterior.

  It had to mean something that I could see and smell all of that. It couldn’t be anything good, though, could it?

  I scanned the park until I saw the shadow of the hill where the willow had stood once upon a time. I pointed at it in case the others hadn’t caught a glimpse yet.

  The back of my neck itched. I reached to scratch it with sweaty fingers. The hairs on my arms stood up like antennae. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other like as if I had to pee. Which I suddenly did. Like a racehorse.

  “Anyone else feel that?”

  Kevin’s wing nudged my shoulder. “Like we’ve got a target on our backs?”

  Exactly. “Melody, did you do anything here you didn’t tell us about?”

  “Only what the spell called for. You read it.”

  Pouring her blood at the foot of the tree. Making herself part of the land. Making it possible for her to summon her Demon dad.

  I took a step toward the hill. The ground shook under me. A small tremor.

  “Y’all feel that?” I asked.

  “Check,” Kevin said
.

  A second step. Another tremor. Stronger this time. The whole park reverberated with a low moan. “I think this is gonna be harder than we thought.”

  The Singer’s voice rose behind me. “Something’s wrong, Davies. This shouldn’t be happening.”

  I glanced at Melody. She didn’t return the favor. In fact, she seemed to be trying real hard not to look at me. She lit a cigarette instead.

  Normally, that would make me want one, too. But no.

  I hadn’t wanted a smoke since that night she’d gone kaboom. Since I’d started to change.

  I wasn’t the only thing that’d changed.

  Whatever she’d done, it’d been more than just making herself part of the land. She’d altered something fundamental in the land itself.

  Could the city have been Gothamed if she hadn’t changed the foundation beneath it? Holy crap.

  Slow going toward the hill wouldn’t help anything. There were a lot of steps between here and there. A lot of chances for whatever was waiting for us to put us in a world of hurt.

  If something happened to me, I could deal. If something happened to my friends?

  I took off at a full run.

  “Rude!” Kevin yelled behind me.

  I didn’t look back. Picked up speed. My sneakers slapped the concrete. The earth shook again—and didn’t stop. So hard my ankle twisted. I went down like a sack of rocks. Pushed to my feet again. Ignored the shooting pain. Kept running.

  Down the sidewalk. Around the back of the hill. Onto the metal bridge over the fountain pool. Where the bridge met the rise of earth, I launched myself onto the incline. Clawed at the grass for a foothold. Climbed with my hands and feet until I reached the top.

  The place where the willow had once been sat empty. Grass filled in where the City had pulled the stump. Somebody’d slept there recently. They’d left a blanket roll and an empty plastic water bottle that rattled with the tremors.

  I fell to my knees. My ankle screamed. My heart pounded. The rush of blood in my ears drowned out everything except the park’s moans.

  Something—someone—shoved into me from behind. Knocked me on my face. Grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me up again.

  Melody. Her face a mask of pain. Whatever the park did to me, it’d clearly done something much worse to her. Was still doing it.