Demon (The Faery Chronicles Book 2)

by Leslie Claire Walker

  Melody had disappeared from the hall, leaving only me and the former god who waited for me. He blocked my path. He narrowed his eyes and studied mine.

  “What’s up, Malek?”

  Watch yourself, he signed.

  “Trust me, I am.”

  He shook his head. You’re falling.

  “Into what?” I asked.

  Stupidity.

  “Isn’t that a little harsh? Especially since I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I’m talking about Melody. She’s taking you in.

  “There’s nothing to take.”

  Only your soul.

  So far, I’d seen her lie like a boss. I’d seen her magic out of control. I’d also seen her vulnerable as hell. She understood what I was going through. I noticed her body. Who wouldn’t? I might be half-monster, but I wasn’t dead.

  She just wanted to belong somewhere. To someone. She wanted to be loved.

  Everything she’d ever known about herself had been slashed to ribbons the instant she found out about her real father. She’d done stuff she never would’ve dreamed of before because her demon blood gave her the power to get what she needed. She thought she could control it, but she couldn’t. In the end, it could destroy her. It could destroy everyone and everything around her.

  I understood. God, I understood.

  I held Malek’s gaze. “I have no intention of doing anything I shouldn’t.”

  I’m calling it like I see it.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I’m the seer here.”

  Not anymore. You’re something else. You’re on the edge.

  He stared at me so hard my feet wanted to backpedal.

  I held my ground—barely. “The edge of what?”

  His eyes filled with sadness.

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  You won’t. It’ll feel normal to you.

  “That scares me worse than anything.”

  I know. That’s what makes you who you are.

  “So what do I do?”

  Watch out for yourself. Best you can. I’ll help you if I can.

  “Thanks,” I said. What he’d said reminded me of another conversation. “Malek, you knew I was there in the shop when you were with Amy, right?”

  He nodded.

  “What did you do to her?”

  That’s for her to tell.

  “Even if she’s not saying? I mean, she hasn’t breathed a word about it. And Kevin’s getting ready to take her to get the water. It’ll just be the two of them. Is there something he needs to know?”

  Watch out for her.

  He turned on his heel and walked away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mr. Landon didn’t have enough eggs in the house to feed so many people, so breakfast ended up part eggs and part browned ground beef, sliced green apples, spinach salad, and watered-down orange juice. The scrape of forks on plates and the occasional burp took the place of conversation.

  I made an extra plate for Zach. He ate hugely. Talked to Mr. Landon about finding a bag of kibble. He seemed to have some ideas about where to go. One of the empty neighbor’s houses. One bright spot in a world of dark. I tried to hold onto it. I couldn’t.

  My breakfast turned to acid in my stomach.

  I worried about Amy. About Kevin. I told him what Malek said. He said he could handle it.

  I worried that even if the group split up to make the gathering go faster, we had too much to do. Barely enough time. Not to mention the arrival of the Demon in the home stretch and what the hell to do about that after. If it all played out like we planned. When had that ever happened?

  We didn’t have working phones. We couldn’t keep in touch with each other after we went our separate ways. If anything else went sideways for any one of us, that meant the end. Didn’t it?

  We had to see this whole thing through. If we couldn’t complete the spell, then we had no chance to restore the city and everyone in it. We’d be stuck. Slide into some kind of apocalyptic devolution.

  Bad to worse. We wouldn’t even know it until too late.

  There had to be a way to stay in touch. The traditional methods? No go. Nontraditional involved magic.

  Seer’s magic could work. It’d be a big spell, though. Beyond my power to do, at least at this stage of the game. One, because of the way my scales tipped toward Destroyer every time I used my power; and two, because I hadn’t had the time to develop a full seer’s skill set. Hard to do that when you’re called up from the second string with two minutes left in the game.

  I needed help. One other person in the room had what it took.

  I crooked my finger at Stacy as soon as she shoveled the last bite of spinach into her mouth. She chewed while we wove through the crowd and the laundry room to the back door with its single bare window. The dog followed us, but stopped short of bounding outside. We stepped onto the patio. He stood on his hind legs and watched us through the glass.

  “Jeez,” she said. “Kevin’s dad let the yard go, didn’t he?”

  Where the patio ended, knee-high grass full of dandelions took over. A trio of old, tall pines stood guard over the mess. Grackles brooded in the branches. Had to be at least twenty of them. It took everything I had not to flinch, the way they looked at me.

  I lifted my chin toward the lot of them. “What’s up with that? I keep seeing them around town.”

  Stacy followed my gaze. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Whether they understand what we’re saying.”

  “Really? And here I just thought it was creepy. I’ve been seeing them ever since Melody showed up at the pub looking for my help. Before all this.”

  “Makes sense,” she said. “Things have changed with them because of the spell she cast.”

  “Like some of us are changing,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Please tell me the birds aren’t gonna go all Alfred Hitchcock?”

  “Doubt it. But they’re definitely listening. I can tell.”

  I took her word for it. She had the Witch thing going on. For her, the natural world was not only alive, it had consciousness she could sense. Every kind of being from bees to trees had a job to do. Work that kept the world turning on its axis. For her, every living thing was a face of God.

  A breeze blew from the southeast. It smelled like the Gulf of Mexico, salty and humid. And rain. A storm coming in.

  “They listening for themselves?” I asked. “Or for someone else?”

  “I don’t sense any connection that would tell me another person is working them.”

  I looked at her. “You can tell just like that? No spell? No trance?”

  “Yeah. It’s my thing.”

  “So why’re they here?”

  “We have major mojo in the house, Rude. Come on—the Singer, Malek. You and Kevin. The cops. Oh, and hey, Melody. That kind of thing attracts attention.”

  “Grackles. Why not dragons?”

  “No such thing. Least not on the corporeal plane.”

  The plane of solid matter. This realm.

  She read the serious expression on my face. “It’s a joke? You know, a joke?”

  I flashed a nervous smile.

  “Besides,” she said, “grackles are smart bastards. Corvids—that’s what kind of birds they are. Same as crows and rooks and ravens and blue jays. Scientists do experiments with them. They remember faces. They learn. Teach their kids. They’d make bad enemies. Excellent friends.”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way. I hadn’t thought about it at all except for how freaked out I felt seeing them everywhere.

  “Stacy, I had a question for you when I asked you to follow me out here.”

  She waited.

  “I wanted to know whether you could do some kind of magic to help us keep tabs on each other. You know, in case somebody gets in trouble, the others would know. That way we can watch each others’ backs.”

  “And make sure we get the spell done,” she said.

  “Exactly.
”

  She pushed her hair behind her ears. “I could do something like that, sure. But I can only do it one to one. I could build a connection between, say, you and Kevin. You’d be able to check in with him and vice versa, but that’s it.”

  “If we go that way, then Kev and me are buddies. Buddy system. We’d have to connect two by two.”

  “Dude, who’s ‘we’? I’m the one you’re voluntolding here.”

  I held up my hands. “Sorry, Stace.”

  “Whatever.” She glanced at the birds. “There’s a better way, but you’ll have to chill out about the grackles.”

  It took me a minute to follow her train of thought—the conversation we’d been having about the birds listening by themselves. About the possibility that they could listen, or watch, for somebody else. “For real?”

  “It’ll take a little more juice than what I’ve got, but we have that in spades, right?”

  “That, and trouble.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Seriously, if we can get the birds to agree to keep an eye out, we could split them up. We could ask two of them to follow each of our pairs. Reporting in would be a problem, potentially. They’d have to fly back to home base, or to a designated person, which would most likely be me.”

  “I follow your logic, but there’s one thing unaccounted for. My intuition. My ability to vision. We could work that in. I could be the home base, only the birds wouldn’t have to fly to me. They could just tell me through a link to my intuition. Boom. The messages could go straight into my mind.”

  “Your intuition? Oh, you mean that thing where every time you use it, your change accelerates? The Singer told me. You sure it’s a good idea to keep tempting fate like that?”

  “I don’t think it’s a temptation thing, Stace. I think the change will happen no matter what I do. Seems like a worse option not to do something that will help because I’m afraid of the consequences. I can take responsibility for what happens.”

  She met my gaze. “We might not be able to.”

  “If I end up bad.”

  “When, Rude. Not if.”

  I sat down on the concrete. “What would you do?”

  She looked away. Behind her, the velvet sky began to lighten to indigo. Dawn soon.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s no good choice.”

  “Déjà vu. I had a similar conversation with Melody about choices. How everybody has one.”

  “But you don’t think you do?”

  “You’re actually asking me that?”

  “Yes. How does it feel to be a hypocrite?”

  “Outstanding.”

  “Figures,” she said. “For the record, I agree with you. We don’t have the time, especially if something goes wrong, which it will. Because, Murphy’s Law. Also, because we’re us.”

  “So we do this.”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she headed inside with a swish of her skirt, leaving me alone with the grackles.

  They watched me with more than curiosity. They eyed me with expectation.

  I folded my arms over my chest. Rocked back and forth on the heels of my sneakers. The breeze gusted again. Set off a cacophony of noise in the trees. Rattling branches. Bird screeches.

  I couldn’t help the feeling that they made the sounds for my benefit. Trying to tell me something I had no way to understand yet.

  If I didn’t get it, I couldn’t say anything back. Didn’t mean I couldn’t try to communicate anyway. Even if I felt like a complete doofus.

  “You hear all that?” I asked. “What Stacy and I talked about?”

  They settled down with ruffled feathers and trained their gaze on me again.

  I tried again. “That all right with you?”

  Stacy’s voice came from behind me. “We’ll know in a few.”

  My cheeks flushed red. Redder when I turned around and saw that she’d come back with the Singer and Malek.

  “I’d have brought Kevin, too, but he’s watching Melody with Amy,” she said.

  “She’s in a house full of people. She knows we’re gonna help her. She won’t run away,” I said.

  She can do plenty without bolting. Malek pointed that remark at me like a sword.

  As if whatever he thought she’d do, she’d do to me. Back to our little talk in the hall. Falling over the edge. The things I’d noticed about her. Without thinking that maybe she noticed them about me, too.

  “No,” I said.

  He blinked at me, obviously meaning yes.

  “She’s acting,” I said.

  Just remember what you promised me before you kick it.

  “No worries.”

  He frowned. Meaning yeah, I should worry.

  I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead.

  “Y’all done with the small talk?” Stacy asked.

  The corners of the Singer’s mouth twitched. “Is that what you’d call it?”

  Stacy raised her voice. “Pay attention, people. We have a spell to do.”

  “All of us together?” I asked.

  “I told you, this is beyond what I can do on my own. They’re going to help. We need a circle and we’d best do it out here where the birds are. The three of us will set it up and give it plenty of juice. Then I’ll put you in touch with the grackles. You do the rest.”

  “Ask them to be our lookouts,” I said.

  She held up her hand in the shape of a gun and pulled the trigger. “Bingo.”

  “Mixed metaphors.”

  She reached up and patted my face. “Good demon. Let’s circle around the tree.”

  “Hey, I’m not a—”

  She marched off. The Singer winked at me and strode after her in a human, tripped-over-her-own-feet kind of way. My mouth fell open.

  Move, Malek signed.

  “But she—” I bit off what I’d been about to say. No point. I’d spent so much time thinking about my own change. I wasn’t the only one going through a radical reordering of my everything.

  How long before the Singer lost the faery magic that augmented her voice? How long before she was just a girl with a very unusual ability to move people when she sang?

  Nothing you can do about it, Malek signed. Go sit on the ground. Put your back to the trunk of that tree. The closest one.

  I did what he told me. The grass tickled my legs and even worse, stuck up inside my cargo shorts when I sat down. My luck, I’d sit on a fire ant bed I couldn’t see and spend the rest of the operation numbed on Ibuprofen and covered in a thick, pink layer of calamine lotion. I waited for the stinging to begin. No such luck.

  The trunk of the tree felt scratchy against my back, but solid. I let my weight sink into it and into the ground while Stacy, the Singer, and Malek squatted nearby for a magical chat.

  I couldn’t hear what they said, only the murmur of their voices. I closed my eyes. Started to drift off. I hadn’t slept in so long.

  A hard smack woke me up. Stacy’s hand, not so gentle this time. “Awake,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “We do this now. Then you can power nap.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Can you follow your intuition without dreaming?” she asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “Know so.”

  I nodded once. Forcefully.

  “Good,” she said. “Determination will get you everywhere.”

  She backed away. Stood in front of me. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the Singer. Several feet away from Stace. If they were circled around the tree, that’d put Malek behind me.

  Stacy and the Singer stretched their arms out on both sides like they were reaching for each other. A moment later, I saw a connection between them. A spiral of blue fire between the Singer’s hand and Stacy’s. Another that stretched from Stacy’s hand around to Malek’s. Stacy and the Singer began to walk along the path of the circle, their shoes trampling the grass. Three steps.

  On the fourth, they moved closer to the tree. To me. The pressure
dropped, just like before a thunderstorm. My ears popped. A wave of crickets that had hidden in the grass jumped. Ran for their lives.

  Stacy and Malek and the Singer began to circle again. The blue fire between them sizzled and cracked like lightning. Three steps around. One in.

  The air around me magnetized. Every hair on my body rose like antennae. The grackles screeched overhead. Their claws clipped at the branches. The birds in the other trees took flight. Converged above me.

  Three steps around. One in.

  The lightning between them darkened. Blue to purple. Stacy’s magic taking over. Pounding the circle into the ground—and at the same time lifting it to encompass the whole tree. All the way to the top. Surrounding me. Surrounding the birds. They stilled. Didn’t move—didn’t even blink. As if time had stopped.

  Stacy met my gaze.

  I closed my eyes. This time, not to sleep. This time, to dive deep into my seer’s intuition—whatever remained. I expected not as much as before. But enough. Please, let it be enough. What I found? Oh, God. More. So much more. Dark fire, infected with the Destroyer’s power. Still on a leash. Still mine to control. But I could feel its frustration. Anger. It wanted to break free. To lose control. To wreak havoc. Tear down the trees and the birds and my friends.

  More than that, it wanted to un-make them. To wipe them completely from the world as if they’d never existed at all. I smelled shredded earth and burnt flesh.

  No.

  I wrestled it into submission. Forced it to obey. It did, but only just. Even then, it didn’t give up. It tried to find a way around. Searching. Searching. Battering me. The blows struck me in the gut. In the head. On the mouth. I tasted blood.

  No.

  The flames wanted to wrap around my will like a whip. Didn’t feel right. Felt like a weapon. I needed a peace offering. How could I ever mold this fire into that? It wasn’t possible. It would overrun me. Break my grasp. Unleash itself on everyone and everything.

  It filled my mind with the vision of an empty city. An empty world. Windblown rubble. Rusted metal. Strangled weeds. Bones picked clean.

  No.

  I formed the fire into the shape of a bird. I held it as tightly as I could. Rode it up through the air, into the branches of the pine. I saw the grackles. They saw me.