A Demon's Wrath: Part II (Peachville High Demons)

by Cannon, Sarra

  Emerald would be next.

  I looked through the window at the party going on inside and soaked in the sounds of happiness. Laughter. Music. Footsteps dancing across the hardwoods. If I could have, I would have bottled that happiness and taken it back in time with me to the day I had to face that dark memory. I would have told my younger self that even though the darkest of times lay just ahead, there was hope of better days.

  Harper had taught me that.

  There is always hope.

  I made my way back to the steps of the front porch and sat down on the top step. I picked up the discarded memory stone and held it tight in my fist. I was almost finished, but the the rest of my journey to Peachville was the most difficult part.

  As much as I wanted to put off the memories of what came next, I was running out of time. I had to talk to Harper tonight. I had to finish this and give it to Harper before tomorrow came.

  Because I had seen the future.

  And tomorrow would be too late.

  You Were Already Broken

  The Shadow World – Fifty-One Years Ago

  When the memory had faded and our minds had returned to the field of black rock, Lea held me close and let me weep. I moved between rage and sorrow, tearing at my clothes one minute and sobbing the next.

  It took me a long time to calm myself, but Lea waited patiently, never leaving my side.

  Finally, she touched my arm.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” she said. “But I know you needed to see so that you could understand.”

  I nodded, my throat raw from screaming, my eyelids heavy and tired.

  “I can’t even imagine what kind of torture he has been through,” I said. “He didn’t deserve that.”

  “No,” she said softly. “No one deserves that.”

  I clenched my jaw and my lips trembled. “Priestess Winter and the witches she commands deserve that and worse,” I said. “They can’t be allowed to continue this madness. We have to stop them.”

  The words were passionate, but I had no energy left to shout them. I felt weak, trapped between a strong desire for vengeance and an ignorance of how to achieve it.

  I remembered then what Lea had said to me just before she showed me the memory. She said to forgive her for taking this long to show it to me.

  “How long have you known about this memory?” I asked. “When did you come by it?”

  Her eyes fluttered closed and she looked away, toward the cliffs where the suns had begun to rise.

  “Almost twenty years ago,” she said. “The day Andros showed us the troll caves.”

  I nodded, my heart in so much pain I was numb to it. “The day I found you sitting by these cliffs alone,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you wait?”

  “Because I was afraid it would break you,” she said. She opened her eyes and stared straight into me. “I was afraid that if you saw this memory, every hope I had of a future with you would die forever and that you would be lost to pain and rage.”

  Tears gathered in her eyes, then cascaded down her face like a waterfall of sorrow.

  “Only, the problem is, I think I lost you a long time ago. I was just too blind to see it,” she said. Her chest hitched with each breath. She reached a hand out toward my arm, but then drew it back. “The light of love in your heart stone was the brightest, most brilliant light of my life. I have always loved you, Denaer, but I never dreamed you could love me back. You have no idea how hard it has been for me the past fifty years. To know your love only for an instant before you reclaimed it.”

  She brought her fist to her chest and clutched at her shirt, then lowered her head, resting it on her fist as she cried.

  “I thought that maybe if I was patient and waited by your side, you would come to realize that I was more important to you than your brother,” she said. “And I know that’s horrible because how could I mean as much to you as he does?” She lifted her eyes to mine again and they sparkled with the drops of a thousand tears. “God, how I have wanted you to love me the way I love you. I have waited for the bright love I saw in that heart stone to shine through your eyes when you looked at me. I would give anything to know, just for one more moment, that you loved me. But whatever they did to you—and to Aerden—stole that from me. From both of us. I’ve been a fool to believe we could go back to the way things might have been. I was afraid the memory of this ritual would break you, but I know now that you were already broken. You’ve been broken since the moment they ripped him from this world. All that is left for me is to let you go.”

  I reached for her hand and brought it to my lips in a soft kiss.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  I was so incredibly sorry. I never intended to cause her this pain. All I had ever wanted was to do the right thing by everyone. By my country, my parents, my brother. I wanted to make everyone else happy. But in the end, following your heart is the only way to happiness, even if it means disappointing those around you.

  It was a lesson I would have to learn many times before I really came to understand it.

  Lea lifted her hand to my cheek and wiped away my tears. She straightened her shoulders and when she looked at me again, I saw that something inside her hand changed tonight. She seemed resolved. As if her moment of weakness had given birth to a new kind of strength.

  “Come with me,” she said, her voice still raw but strong. “I’ll take you to the portal.”

  I’ve Carried It With Me

  I called an emergency meeting of the council as soon as we returned to the Underground.

  “What’s happened?” Ourelia asked.

  Andros, Ourelia, Azira, Jericho, Lea and I all took our places around a large wooden table in the library. We’d been meeting here to discuss plans for training and organizing for years, but in my mind, this was the single most important meeting we’d ever had. I needed them to be with me on this.

  And if they weren’t, I would go alone.

  “I have found the portal where my brother was taken,” I said.

  Azira gasped, then clamped a hand over her mouth.

  Andros swallowed, his eyes darting toward Ourelia for a moment. They looked more worried than excited, and I knew before they even said a word that they did not want to help me fight.

  I pressed my lips together tightly to keep from saying something I might regret.

  “The portal is near the Black Cliffs,” Lea said. “Not too far from the king’s city, among the fields of black stone.”

  Azira’s mouth was slightly open. She shook her head in wonder. “All this time and it was right there?” she asked. “How did we miss it? We must have searched that area a thousand times.”

  “It’s very difficult to see the black roses among the rocks,” I said. “The entire clearing blends in so well, you have to be almost standing directly on top of it to notice it. Lea’s the one who found it.”

  I didn’t mention how long ago she had found the portal because thinking about her keeping this a secret for so long made me feel ill and unsettled. I understood why she did it, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

  “I discovered the memory of the portal some time ago,” she said. “I had an item of Aerden’s I had kept with me and I spent some of my memory training traveling to different locations throughout the kingdom and concentrating on his memory.”

  I turned. She hadn’t mentioned this to me when we were alone. “What item?”

  She brought a silver key from her pocket and placed it on the table. She ran her finger across the top of it. “Aerden gave me this key a few days before he disappeared,” she said. She didn’t look up at me. This was another secret she had kept from me. “He wouldn’t even tell me what it went to. He only said it was important for me to keep it. That it would keep me safe. I didn’t think much of it until after he was gone, but I’ve carried it with me ever since.”

  I leaned over and picked up the key, turning it over in my hand. It
was a small key with a long, slender stem. The top of the key was adorned with a set of intricate knots, a small clear stone set in the center. Was it enchanted?

  I handed it back to her, wondering why she had kept it a secret all this time.

  What other secrets had she been keeping?

  “It took me a long time, but one day, there it was. The memory of him being taken,” she said. “It was very weak at first. I could barely make out the events of the day and I couldn’t hear anything they were saying. But over time, the closer I moved to the portal itself, the stronger the memory became.”

  “That must have been very difficult for you to see,” Azira said, concern etched on her face.

  “It was necessary,” I said. “The ritual the Order performed when Aerden was taken was different from the other rituals we’ve seen.”

  I reached for a tattered book I had found among the hunter’s belongings inside the cave. I flipped through the pages until I found what I’d been looking for, then opened it completely and slid it across the table toward Andros.

  “This passage describes the prima. We already knew she was the one who led the rituals at each portal. In this book it says that prima means first. The first demon pulled through the portal, somehow bound to the first witch,” I said. “It doesn’t explain how they are bound, but it seems to be some type of slavery where the witch is using the demon’s essence to fuel her own magic. The prima is created at the same time the portal itself is created. This matches up with what we saw with Aerden. When the ritual began, there were no roses and there was no portal. At first, there was the witch—Priestess Winter—who we already know is connected to all of the blue portals. She performed the ritual which then opened this particular portal for the first time.”

  Andros and Ourelia poured over the book I’d passed to them.

  Finally Andros looked up from the page. “And you believe Aerden was one of these firsts?” he asked. “That he is a prima?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Either that or he is somehow tied to the prima. We won’t know the exact hierarchy until we are able to get over there and see it for ourselves.”

  “Wait a moment,” Andros said, standing. “We can’t send anyone over there. It would be suicide without an army to back them up.”

  “Maybe not.” I lifted my palm, wanting him to just hear me out. I had been working on a plan for years and even though I knew Andros was against fighting the Order until we had more information about their weaknesses, I felt there was a way around it. “What if we were able to go through for only a few minutes? What if we could guarantee a small amount of time on the other side without anyone being in real danger? We could get a look at the other side. We could see what the witches are doing and whether they are keeping the demons there in the portal room. If Aerden’s there—”

  “How would we ever be able to guarantee anyone’s safety while they were over there? Not to mention those of us here on the other side. If the witches saw us, what would keep the hunter and the witches inside the portal from coming after us? This is madness,” Ourelia said.

  “In the memory of Aerden’s disappearance, I saw a demon rush forward. A demon wearing a red dragon on his armband just like yours,” I said, motioning toward the band on Andros’ arm. It was his family’s insignia and one that had become a symbol of The Resistance. “You said you knew that demon.”

  “Mirabi.”

  “Yes. He must have seen the ritual taking place and rushed forward to try to help,” I said. “I don’t know why he chose to act. Maybe it was because this ritual was different from the others. Maybe he recognized Aerden. We’ll never know for sure. But when he interrupted the ritual, he used his sword to cut down some of the black roses. Immediately, the blue light of the portal disappeared, as if the magic of the portal couldn’t work without the roses.”

  Andros studied me. “What are you proposing?”

  I went through my plan and everyone listened quietly. When I was finished, I felt certain they would agree to help me. This was my chance to save my brother. Or if not save him, at least to get enough information about the witches holding him captive that we could come up with a better, stronger plan for rescuing him later.

  “Aerden’s alive over there,” I said. “I just want a few moments to get a better look at the other side.”

  Ourelia shook her head. “I don’t think we’re ready for something like this,” she said. “If we attack them or show any kind of aggressive behavior, they are going to send hunters after us. Or other human witches. We don’t understand their magic enough to defeat them.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, my anger ruling me. “We’ve done nothing but talk and learn and try to understand for decades now. When is it going to be time to fight back? How will we learn to fight them if we don’t actually fight? It’s the best way to learn. Andros, you know that. You’re the one who taught me that. We have to fight in order to learn how to fight better.”

  Andros nodded. “Yes, I know I said that, but we’ve got so much at stake right now,” he said. “We’ve built this entire Underground to keep people safe. If we start a battle now, before we’re really ready, we risk putting them all in danger.”

  “The only reason these demons need a safe place to live is because the Order of Shadows has made their homelands unsafe,” I said. “Hiding a thousand demons in caves is no different from the king himself hiding away inside his gated city.”

  Andros lowered his head to his hands. He knew I was right. They couldn’t hide here forever. Yes, it would be hard to lose anyone, but wars meant loss.

  They also meant fighting for freedom.

  “We have to do something. We can’t just sit here in the safety of these caves for the rest of our days,” I said. “It won’t make any real difference because out there, the Order will still be stealing demons from their homes and turning them into slaves.”

  “I agree with you,” Ourelia said. “There will come a time when we have to stand and fight, but it’s not that time yet. I know you want to save your brother, but what chance will you really have of saving him? We don’t know the first thing about what goes on in the human world.”

  “And how do you think we’re ever going to find out?” I asked. “The only way is to go over there ourselves and get the answers we seek.”

  “I agree with Denaer,” Jericho said. It was the first time he had spoken since we first gathered together in the library. “I think it’s worth a shot. We don’t have to start a fight or even attack anyone. We just send someone through to gather information and then bring them back.”

  “We all know who would go through,” Azira said, looking to me. “I think losing you is too much of a risk right now. Maybe we should spend a few years gathering more information about this particular portal. If we could observe a few of their rituals, maybe we could find out something specific about the witches who operate that portal.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t wait years. I had already waited far too long.

  I listened to the others argue and debate, trying to look patient and understanding. But inside, I was losing my mind. How could we even be debating this? After fifty long years, I finally knew where my brother was. There was no way I would sit back and watch while more demons were pulled through that portal. For what? Research?

  Screw research. We had done enough watching and waiting.

  It was time to act.

  “Denaer?” Lea’s voice pulled me from my thoughts. I had been sitting with my head cupped between my hands, shaking my head furiously from side-to-side.

  I realized now everyone was watching me. Waiting to hear what I would have to say.

  I swallowed, looking to her with questions in my eyes.

  She gave me a sad smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The council agrees that we need more time. More information.”

  I sat back, then studied the faces of my friends sitting around the table. My heart filled with sorrow and rage. I had no words. No final plea. They had alread
y heard what I had to say and they had still decided against me.

  I placed my hands flat against the top of the table as ice gathered on my fingertips. I stood, then shook my head.

  I slammed my hand down on the table and ice cracked like glass, shattering and spraying in all directions across the top of the table. I turned and shifted, leaving the room before anyone could stop by. I felt completely abandoned.

  I had nothing more to say to them. If they wouldn’t help me, I would have to go alone.

  Impossible

  I flew through the tall corridor, wanting to go straight to the portal and charge through. I wanted to force them to give my brother back to me.

  But I knew that was impossible.

  I couldn’t save my brother simply by force of will. These witches weren’t going to hand him over simply because I asked. But knowing where he was, how could I live another minute without going after him?

  The floor iced over as I passed, frost spreading up the wall like growing vines.

  I flew toward the only place where I knew I could let out my frustration without hurting anyone. The training rooms.

  The training hall was empty this time of morning and I went into the first room, slamming the door behind me. I lifted Aerden’s axe from the strap across my back and initiated the battle sequence Lea had set up. One of her abilities was to create illusions of warriors. We had used these illusions to simulate real battles. That was Andros’ idea. He’d been saying from the beginning that a great warrior was best trained by fighting great opponents.

  So why was he so hesitant to fight against the Order?

  How were we ever going to become great warriors if we were too afraid to face them? How would we ever make a difference?

  The battle illusions began and four witches appeared in the different corners of the room.

  I focused my rage on their human faces, wanting to destroy every human that ever lived. Wanting to wipe them from existence for their evil. I lifted the axe and flew through the air, gathering my power in my hands so that the entire axe became encased in a thick layer of cold blue ice. I approached the witch from above, bringing my weapon down on her head, splitting her in two. The illusion fell to the floor, then vanished.