I tucked my hands to my chest and stood up from the ground. “How dare you hurt my sister! How dare you bring my family into this! I’ve done everything the Council has asked!”
“What makes you think we’re bound by any rules?”
“Elyse was innocent!”
She raised an eyebrow to challenge me. “And we’re both demons. I don’t see your point.”
“You preyed on my sister’s kindness and lured me out here as bait!” I wailed, panting furiously. “And I am going to make you pay for that!”
The girl raised her hand towards me as I came at her. My throat collapsed as a vacuum took the air from my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. “I did not kill your sister, but when Lucifer told me of his plan, there was no way I would pass up such a glorious opportunity to beat you! My name’s Sathanus,” she told me gleefully. “And I want you to play with me.”
I couldn’t answer with the invisible force choking the life out of me, but she didn’t seem that interested in my response anyways. “Lucifer knew you were hiding something. Once he figured out what Mammon’s gift was, we decided to test our theory. Unfortunately, your sister got to be the guinea pig.”
When I didn’t respond, she rolled her eyes and released me. I gasped for breath and tears streamed down my blood stained face. I glared at her with all the hate and loathing I could muster. “When this is over, I am going to carve your heart out with my teeth!”
Sathanus smiled, a cherubic grin on her youthful face. “You can’t even defend yourself, how could you possibly expect to beat me?”
“I’ve bested three of you before, I’ll be more than happy to add another notch to my belt!”
“Two,” she corrected simply. “You didn’t conquer Mammon, the Guardian did. You may have defeated Abaddon and Belphegor, but I think you’ll find my power to be a bit more formidable.”
I roared in fury and threw myself through the air at her in a fit of rage. It didn’t matter that she was a Demon Lord. It didn’t matter that I had no plan. All I wanted to do was rip her limb from limb. All logic and strategy left me as I charged forwards with seething ferocity. Sathanus raised her arms and sliced them through the air and a tremendous force knocked me to the side.
I got up and started towards her again, my hands curled into the precise shape of her tiny neck. Again, she slashed me down from thin air. I peered at her from the ground, my face stinging from the asphalt.
She merely smiled, completely unfazed, as if still waiting for me to start.
My aura, black with hatred, began to ooze slowly towards her, as if she was drawing it in. She giggled and I noticed that her image had solidified and sharpened while I had been attacking her.
I stood again to face her when suddenly she rose into the air. Her arms outstretched and her mouth opened unnaturally wide. She inhaled, sucking in and consuming everything around her. An overwhelming force surged towards her, her small body absorbing the dark tendrils of my smoky aura filled with hate, fury and rage.
As she drained mine, her aura grew, billowing around her as I fought against the tempestuous gale of her power. I fell to my knees panting for breath when the windstorm stopped just as suddenly as it began.
Absolute silence followed. So silent I could hear blood thumping in my ears.
I looked up to see the demon child swollen and dark with power, every ounce of my anger had added fuel to the fire.
Wrath. She was Wrath.
I realized this too late and barely had time to shield myself as she launched all of that violence back at me in one intense volley. My body buckled and I collapsed in a heap on the pavement. The pressure was so immense, I didn’t know how I was still alive. It felt like gravity had grown tenfold, swallowing me into a black hole of rage and hysteria. When she finally relented, I rolled over and coughed up a mouthful of blood and pulled myself from the ground.
My limbs trembled and I could barely stand, but I would not let Elyse’s murderer get away. All the other Lords had assumed I would fail when they came to administer their tests — she was the first one who didn’t underestimate me. Maybe it was because she’d already seen me defeat the other two — she knew that she could be beaten.
“Still trying to avenge her?” Sathanus asked in a cheery tune. “I wouldn’t recommend it. You’re already exhausted and have no way to defend yourself.”
“I am going to defeat you,” I spat, but even to me it sounded pitiful.
She cocked her head to the side, intrigued, and gave a laugh.
I spun around on my heel and pounced at her again, this time only missing her by an inch as she shimmered out of place. In the fraction of a second, I saw her reappear in the distance. I conjured some throwing knives and launched them at her. A dozen different blades went flying through the air towards her, but she just raised her hand and they stopped, flipping around so they were now pointed at me. My eyes grew wide for a moment and I dove behind a car to use as a shield. The knives came piercing through the air and planted themselves deep in the metal.
As I cowered behind the impaled car, I looked and saw Sathanus’ doll lying in the grass. Not sure if it was a good idea, I grabbed it and held it aloft as hostage, standing up to face her.
I immediately regretted it.
The minute I touched it, I could feel something dark inside it, something old and powerful. It was evil. Sathanus stopped laughing and stamped her little foot. “I wouldn’t have done that if I were you.”
She snapped and the doll, my bargaining chip, had vanished. Her blonde curls bounced as she came walking towards me. Her cherubic face no longer giggled with glee and it was in a much older voice she spat, “You’ve been so concerned with becoming ‘powerful’ you have shirked your studies of all else. The only tool you have is your anger. It’s what got you out of the land of dreams and helped you defeat Belphegor. Your hate is the only thing you cling to with your victim-mentality. But I, I am the Lord of Wrath! Anger is my domain. Your pitiful attempts at ‘fury’ is like watching an ant attack a lion. I have moved nations to war! And you come at me with knives?” She slapped me across the face. “Honestly, I don’t understand his infatuation with you. Even with proper training, I doubt you’d amount to anything.” Sathanus leaned in to look me in the eyes. “How exactly do you plan on fighting without hate?”
I ground my teeth together with rage, clinging helplessly to the remaining shreds of sanity I had left. My heart pounded inside my chest, from fear and sadness, being overwhelmed and not knowing what to do. Sathanus hadn’t attacked me once, just reflected my own violence back at me. I was never going to conquer Wrath by fighting her.
I couldn’t fight hate with hate.
Bitter tears streamed down my cheeks and I fell to my knees in anguish. I’d just lost my sister and all I could do was choose to taint the memory of her loss with rage, or allow myself to grieve — I couldn’t do both. I had to let her go.
“Why aren’t you attacking?” she asked, her musical voice piercing the silence. Her words had no effect on me as I resigned myself to sadness. I let go of all that hatred, all the anger and instead remembered the sister I loved. It felt as though a hole had been punched right through my chest as the pain of loss ripped through me. Sathanus was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her past my memories of Elyse’s beautiful smile. When I looked up, the little girl was once again becoming transparent and she slowly faded into nothingness. I looked down and saw there was another twinkling crystal on my necklace.
I was shaking when I got to my feet and stumbled over to the driver. He was still delirious from my beating and looked up at me in fear.
“Wynn!”
I stopped at the sound of my name and turned to see Lacey standing in the road behind me, watching me with horror. “Wynn, just let him go. It isn’t worth it.”
My bottom lip quivered when I looked down at my black, scaly hands and saw talons instead of fingernails. Lacey had just seen everything — she knew what I really was. I took a few deep breaths
until I could focus enough to rearrange the glamour spell, even down to my blood soaked prom dress. My skin and hands were back to normal when I grabbed the man by his collar. “I’m not going to kill you,” I told him acidly. Then with a mighty blow, I knocked him on the backside of his head and he fell unconscious on the street. “I'm going to let the cops deal with you instead.”
Lacey gulped as she walked up to me. “Is he…?”
I bent down and placed two fingers at the base of his neck to check his pulse. “He’s fine. It’s going to hurt like crap when he wakes up though.”
“Okay, this looks bad. We need to put him back in the car. The injuries will look like they happened in the crash.”
She didn’t even look phased that she just witnessed a full-fledged demon battle. Before I knew what was happening, she was helping me drag his body back towards the car and put him in the driver’s seat. Once she was done, the scene looked pretty convincing, no one would suspect that anything else had happened. She wiped her hands and grabbed me by the arm. “Now let’s get out of here before someone sees us.”
“Lacey, I—”
She dug her nails into my arm and hissed, “Don’t talk. If anyone asks, just tell them what you saw made you sick. I took you over to the bushes so you could throw up.”
“But—”
“That’s the story, just stick to it,” she insisted. I nodded nervously, even though I could still feel my chest convulsing. I couldn’t believe Lacey was not just helping me, but that she so coolly dressed up the scene of my own crime. She was apparently used to cleaning up after people’s messes. Seeing her in this light gave me an odd mix of respect for her competence, and a dawning horror for what she must have seen in her own past.
When we arrived back at the accident, there was a growing crowd around the body in the road and an ambulance had just arrived. Two policemen were questioning some witnesses at the scene and one of them pointed to me as we walked up. I could only imagine how this looked, my prom dress covered in blood and my hair now torn askew. The officer walked up to us with a notebook in his hand.
“Do either of you know this woman?” he asked.
I nodded weakly and my heart hitched in my chest when I saw them lift her on a gurney. “Yes, she’s my sister.”
“Name?”
“Elyse Hendricks,” I responded weakly. “She’s twenty-four.”
“And do you know anything about what happened?”
I could feel hot tears tricking down my cheek. “I was on the curb … a white truck came barreling down the road, too fast. His tires jumped the curb. Elyse saw that he was going to hit me and pushed me out of the way. She saved my life.”
The officer’s eyes narrowed as he continued writing down my statement. “And why weren’t you here when we arrived?”
“That’s my fault,” Lacey interjected. “When she saw what happened to Elyse…”
He nodded solemnly and scribbled something in his notebook. “It wouldn’t be the first time a witness lost their lunch. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
“Why don’t you call your parents and have them meet us at the hospital?”
I nodded solemnly, but then remembered that I didn’t have my phone. “Oh … I must have left it at the dance.”
“You can use mine,” Lacey offered kindly, handing me her phone. I looked at the girl who had seen me at my worst, a demon about to kill, but managed to help bring her friend back down to earth. Was she really that unflappable, or was the adrenaline numbing — or blinding — her to the impossible reality of what just happened? Concentrating on her phone, I dialed my house and listened to it ring, hardly knowing what I was going to say. Nate picked up on the other line, “Hello?”
“Nate, it’s me,” I told him desperately. “I need you to get Dad and have him meet us at the hospital.”
There was a pause on the other line, before he responded. “Wynn, what happened?”
“Elyse has been in an accident, I’m in the ambulance with her now, but I need you to meet us at the hospital.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
I had been asking myself the same question, hoping to deny reality for as long as I could. “No.” My voice broke. “No she’s not. I’ll see you there.”
On the other line I could hear his voice getting frantic. “You’re not giving me enough information!” he accused in a high pitched squeal. “Dad! You need to get your keys! We’ve got to meet Wynn at the hospital … no Elyse. All right, we’re heading out—”
“Nate!” I cut him off.
“Yeah?”
I choked back the sob rising in my throat and asked the question I was really thinking. “Is Kevin working tonight?”
“No, he’s off.”
“You should probably give him a call … he’ll want to be there too.” I hung up the phone before he was able to ask any more questions and handed it back to Lacey.
“Go on, I’ll follow right behind you,” she offered.
When the EMTs started wheeling her into the back of the ambulance I jogged along behind them and accepted his assistance into the back of the truck. The driver shut the doors behind us and I sat down miserably on the bench they had inside. Around me, the two men flitted around her corpse still trying to revive her. As the engine roared to life beneath us, I saw them glance nervously in my direction. I knew they were debating on whether not to tell me, but I already knew. She was lost.
~ * ~
It was a long drive from the The Red Door to USA Children’s and Women’s Hospital. Kevin, Dad, and Nate all met us there, all waiting expectantly outside the Emergency room.
As they wheeled her out on a gurney, I climbed out of the ambulance behind them and my face told them everything. Kevin’s eyes went to her frantically, but as he chased them down the hall, he was stopped by one of the nurses. “Elyse baby, hang in there. You’re going to make it through this!” he called out after them, but the words were strangled by a sob.
Dad and Nate both followed suit and tried to get glimpses of her through the window. “What happened?” Dad asked in near hysterics. “You’re supposed to be at prom!!”
“I left early,” I told him bitterly. “I wanted to see Elyse…” My voice cracked on the final word and I started crying once again. My dress was covered in blood and I could feel it drying on my hands.
Lacey came in the door behind us looking worried and saw me standing with my dad. “Wynn! You’re here!”
“Who’s this?” my father asked in confusion.
“I’m just a friend,” she responded politely. “Is there anything I can get you?”
On the other side of the windows I saw the doctors and nurses all step back. One of them checked the time while removing both his gloves and called out something to his peers. A nurse wrote it down while the others started turning off the machines. The doctors face was solemn when he came to greet my father and tell him the awful news. “Hello, Mr. Hendricks, I’m Dr. Morrison. Would you mind if we spoke in private?”
Dad’s face was ashen as he looked back at Kevin. He could barely stutter his response, “This is my daughter’s fiancé, he can come too.” The doctor nodded and I watched the three of them walk back into her room.
I will never, for the rest of my life, forget the agony on his face when he saw her on the stretcher. Kevin took one look at her and fell to his knees in horror. “No! No no no! Elyse, don’t leave me!”
Seeing Kevin cry over her lifeless body, his soulmate ripped from his life, I promised I would hunt Aidan down and kill him if it was the last thing I did on this Earth. I would make him feel what true suffering was.
I couldn't stand to be in the same room as her, it was a constant reminder of how I’d failed. Sitting on the bench outside, I could hear the three of them crying. I thought the kindest thing I could do for them was to remove myself from the situation, since I was the one to blame. I folded my arms in front of my chest protectively while a tear rolled down my che
ek. Lacey came and sat down next to me. I couldn’t believe she was still in the same county as me after what she saw. “Um, Lace … about earlier…” I began.
She shook her head quietly, “You’re not the only one with a dark past,” she told me. “You don’t have to explain anything.”
My jaw dropped, but before I could ask her anything about it, Nathan came storming out next to me. “What happened?” he demanded.
I swallowed hard. “Another demon,” I told him simply. “He’s lashing out at me for refusing to work with him.”
The two of us stared at each other, agonized, until I found the strength to speak. “It’s my fault she’s dead, I know it. She died trying to protect me.”
He choked back an enormous sob and placed both hands on his hips. “I thought you had told me everything.”
“There’s just so much to tell. I never thought that he’d come after her.”
Nathan’s chest convulsed with heavy sobs as he collapsed in the seat beside me and wrapped his arms around me in a hug. “I know you didn’t.”
Lacey went to get everyone coffee and we cried together for a long while as Dad and Kevin both wept beside Elyse in the other room. I curled into the fetal position and covered my face with my hands. I couldn't believe this was really happening. It was like some horrible nightmare I’d eventually wake up from. I have no idea how he heard, or how he knew to come, but fifteen minutes later Ryan was at the hospital with us. He came whirling around the corner at the help desk while calling out my name, “Wynn?”
I looked up to see him running towards me, my glittered purse clutched between his hands. “Ryan, we’re over here.”
“Oh my God, I just heard. Wynn, I’m so sorry!”
“Who called you?” I asked him a little confused.
“I did,” Lacey admitted from down the hall. “I didn’t want you to be alone.” She had two drink holders full of beverages and a sheepish expression on her face.
I nodded robotically. “Well, thank you for being here, but it’s not like you can do anything. Elyse is gone.”
His eyes softened with deep concern as he wrapped his arms around me. “I know, I know. There was nothing you could do.”
Dealing with the Devil (The Earthwalker Trilogy Book 1) Page 34