A Demon's Wrath: Part I (Peachville High Demons) (7 page)

My vision blurred and I let my head fall back
against the cool glass wall.

"He’s ill, can’t you see that?"
Lea said, standing and placing herself between her parents and me.
"He needs rest and a shaman, not questions."

"It is not your place to give me orders,"
the king said. His voice echoed through the chamber room. "Now,
stand aside."

Lea lifted her chin, but sat down as she was told.

I reached for her hand and she clasped it tight.

"This morning, I went looking for Aerden and
he was gone," I said. "I can’t tell you why he left,
but it unsettled me the rest of the day."

"Did you know about this?" the king
asked my father.

He nodded. "Yes, we knew Aerden was gone, but
he had left of his own will."

I studied my father. I couldn’t help but
feel there was an undertone of secrecy in his voice. What was he
keeping from me?

"Go on," the king said, looking to me.

"Throughout the ceremony, I couldn’t
stop thinking of him," I said. I paused as pain pulsed through
my chest. "I couldn’t help but feel something was wrong,
so I reached out with my magic like I’d done a million times
before."

"And you found him?" my mother asked,
bringing a trembling hand to her mouth.

I met her eyes and shook my head. "Not at
first," I said. "I wondered if maybe he had gotten too far
away, beyond the reach of my bond with him. It had never happened
before, but we hadn’t really ever tested it."

Lea stroked my arm and having her by my side made
this moment both worse and better at the same time. I was glad to
have her support when I was being questioned this way. But at the
same time, with her there, I couldn’t be completely honest,
either.

"But then, when we were inside the veil,
exchanging our stones, I felt him appear at the edge of my
awareness," I said. I couldn’t tell them why I was
thinking of him when Lea touched her stone, so I pushed slightly
beyond the boundaries of the truth. "I think he was reaching out
to me, to tell me he was in trouble."

"What did you see?"

"I saw my brother," I said, the vision
of him in chains bringing new pain to the surface. I tightened my
jaw, anger and agony running through my body. "He was shackled
and bleeding, kneeling in a field of black roses."

Lea’s mother gasped and turned away. The
king’s head snapped toward his wife, but the look on his face
was one of warning rather than comfort. It struck me as odd, and I
wondered if I was wrong to tell them everything I had seen. I felt
separated from them, as if they were keeping a great secret.

But I had to tell them. If they knew more than
they were telling me, then they were our best hope for finding
Aerden’s killers and bringing them to justice.

"Some kind of bright light hovered in the air
in front of him. It was almost like a shimmering waterfall, but it
was oval and perfectly formed," I said.

"An emerald light?" my mother asked. She
clutched her robes in her fists.

I met her eyes. She definitely knew something
about this light. I could see it in her face. In all their faces.

"No," I said, not taking my eyes from
her. "A sapphire blue light, as bright and clear as the garden
of lillies in your back yard."

She swallowed, her lips trembling, betraying the
importance of the light. She turned to my father, her eyes filled
with rage and terror.

He held his palm up, silencing her before she had
a chance to say another word.

The others stood stone-still. I saw fear in their
eyes. Even the eyes of the King of the North.

"What else?" my father asked when he’d
found his voice again.

"A woman," I said. "I couldn’t
see her face or her form. She wore a hood of blue velvet over her
head. She appeared inside the portal. Then, a flash of something that
looked like the insignia of a dragon on a man’s coat. That was
when Aerden seemed to look straight at me. He said my name and then
he was just gone."

I lowered my head, tears flowing from somewhere
deep inside my soul. The pain and regret in my brother’s voice
would haunt me forever.

"That’s how I knew this wasn’t a
vision of the future," I said. "Because he knew I was there
with him. He was trying to tell me something, but he never got the
chance. Whoever they were, they killed him. I felt him ripped from me
as if he’d been cut from my own flesh."

I cried out and struggled to my feet. I wanted to
ask them what they knew. I wanted to demand the truth from them all.

But the moment I stood, a darkness washed over me.
I fell to the marble floor, unable to control the seizure that
hammered its way through my body.

When it stopped, my mother’s face appeared
above me, stained with tears and lined with worry. She stroked my
forehead, then lifted her eyes to my father.

"It was them, wasn’t it?" she
asked him. "What have we done?"

That was the last thing I heard before the pain
dragged me under its dark curtain.

When I awoke, Lea was sitting by my side. Her head
rested against the blanket covering my legs and her hand lay
stretched out toward mine.

I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry and
cracked. My tongue seemed to be permanently stuck to the roof of my
mouth.

I lifted my head, pushing up on the bed with my
arms. Some of my strength had returned, but I still felt less.
Diminished, somehow. Would I ever be whole again? Or would I spend
the rest of my life as half of a demon, eternally missing my
brother’s presence at my side?

Lea woke, her dark eyes searching mine.

Her lower lip trembled and she reached for my
hand. “Denaer, how are you feeling?”

An impossible question. “I feel broken,”
I said, my voice rough as the rocky shore of the Sea of Glass.

Lea stood and walked to a cart that held water,
cheese, fruit and breads that smelled freshly made. She poured a
glass of water and brought it to me. “Here, this will help,”
she said.

I drank it down, then asked for more.

“How long have I been asleep?” I
cursed myself for being too weak to stay conscious. With every moment
that passed, Aerden’s killer had a chance to get farther away.
We couldn’t let the trail go cold. We had to find that field of
black roses and search for any clues that might have been left
behind.

Lea handed me a fresh glass of water. She pressed
her lips together and furrowed her brow.

“It’s been two weeks,” she said,
sinking back down into the chair by the bed.

I sat up with a jerk, then immediately regretted
it. The sore muscles on my side burned as if they’d been ripped
open and held to a flame.

Lea placed her hands on my shoulders and gently
pushed me back against the pillows. “It’s going to take
time,” she said. “You have to be patient.”

“What’s happening to me?” I
asked.

She shook her head. “They aren’t
sure,” she said. “We’ve had three shamans in to
examine you, but they can’t seem to find anything physically
wrong with you except that your aura is weak. In meditation, father’s
shaman could sense a rip down the left side of your power, as if—”

“As if a piece of myself had been ripped
from my body.” I already knew. I felt it the moment my brother
was taken from me.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She
lifted my hand toward her face and nuzzled her cheek against my
knuckles.

I pulled away.

I didn’t deserve her affections. If it had
been Aerden standing inside the veil with her, he never would have
died. Instead, I took his sacrifice and passed it off as my own truth
while he was being tortured.

I would never forgive myself.

Hurt registered on Lea’s face, but she
recovered quickly, standing and pacing the floor beside my bed.

“Your parents will want to know you’re
awake,” she said. “Do you want me to go get them?”

I looked around for the first time since I’d
regained consciousness. Instead of my own room, I was in a room I
didn’t recognize. The walls here were adorned with strips of
gold woven together in an intricate pattern. The fabrics were lush
and heavy in colors like deep navy and burgundy.

“Where am I?” I asked. “Are we
in the castle?”

“Yes,” she said. Her hand fluttered to
the golden locket she now wore on a long chain around her neck. “Your
home is here now that we are officially promised to each other.”

I brought my hand to my lips. Our kiss hadn’t
been mutual, but all the veil needed was a kiss.

And now I was promised to a princess I didn’t
love.

But I had also made a promise to my brother. I
told him I would never hurt Lea. I promised that she would never know
the truth about the stone I gave to her.

I held my hand out to her and she walked toward
me. She placed her small hand inside mine and I slowly brought it to
my lips, tears welling up in my eyes.

“Lea,” I said.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“Can I trust you?” I asked.

She drew her eyebrows together and tilted her head
to the side. “Of course,” she said. “Why are you
asking me that?”

I pushed myself up again, wincing slightly at the
pain, but learning now to ignore it and move beyond it. I had no time
for rest. I’d already lost way too much time as it was.

“Because I need to know that if given a
choice of loyalty, you would choose me above all others,” I
said. I knew I was asking too much of her. I knew it was wrong when
she believed my love for her ran deeper than it did, but I needed
her. She was all I had in this world. “I need to know that you
would never betray me. Not even if the king himself asked you to.”

My heart thrummed in my ears.

Her lips parted and she sucked in a deep breath.
She raised a hand again to her locket, closing her fist around it.

Finally, she nodded. “I am yours now,”
she said. “I would die for you if you asked me to. And I will
never, ever betray you.”

I kissed her hand again, then leaned back against
the pillows, worn out from even such small exertions.

Guilt pierced through my chest.

Would she have given so much of herself and been
willing to make such sacrifices if she had known the truth?

But it was too late to worry about things like
that. Aerden was gone and even those we should have trusted most knew
more than they were willing to admit. I was determined to reveal
their secrets and find the truth about what happened to my brother.

And someday, whoever took him would pay for what
they had done.

I would never rest until that day came.

No matter how many times I questioned my parents,
they insisted they knew nothing about what happened to Aerden or who
would have wanted to hurt him.

They claimed the king had dispatched a group of
guards to investigate the murder, but that so far, no one had found
any evidence of who might have taken him.

Months passed with no answers, and every time I
asked about the guards’ progress, I was given a vague answer
with no concrete details.

Lea and I spent hours going through maps of the
Northern Kingdom, searching for any mention of black roses. Even in
the older maps, we couldn’t find anything promising.

The search for Aerden’s killer ruled my days
and nightmares of his death ruled my nights.

Always, he was kneeling across the thorns, crying
out for me.

Some nights, I could feel the silver shackles
cutting into my wrists. They were real to me and when I woke my
wrists would be sore and red, as if my nightmares were taking over my
life. The only way I could shake them was to draw exactly what I saw.

I’d never been interested in art or drawing,
but I found that it helped me to get my memories and my visions on
paper.

Sometimes, I stayed up several days in a row
working to perfect a single image. I couldn’t rest until every
single detail was exactly the way I’d seen it in my mind. What
if something that seemed insignificant turned out to be the key to it
all? So I learned to pay attention to my visions in a new way. I
learned to see the entire picture, piece by piece, and hold it there
in my mind until I could get it on paper.

Years went by like this.

When we’d been through all of the maps, I
started going from village to village with my drawings in hand,
asking for any information on black roses, a silver dagger with blue
stones, a woman in blue velvet robes with intricately woven patterns
of silver. A red dragon. No one would talk to me.

After ten years, I was beginning to lose hope.

“Someone has to know something,” I
said to Lea one day on our way home from the village of Baurmon.
“Aerden had only been gone a day. Hours, really. He could only
have gone so far away in that short of time. Someone within that
radius around the city has to know where there is a field of black
roses. They are too rare to miss.”

“I don’t know.” She sighed.
“We’ve been over this a thousand times. What if we never
find the answers?”

I snapped my head toward her. “Don’t
say that. It’s only been ten years. We have an eternity to find
answers.”

She closed her eyes and swallowed. “We
cannot spend the rest of our days tirelessly searching for answers,”
she said. She placed her hand on my arm. “This won’t
bring him back.”

I yanked my arm from her touch, my jaw tense. “It
isn’t about bringing him back,” I said.

“Then what is it about?”

“Do you really have to ask me that?” I
pushed up the sleeves of my long coat. “You don’t know me
at all.”

Lea lifted her chin. “I know this is all you
think about,” she said. “You’re obsessed to the
point of losing yourself, Denaer.”

I turned away from her, but she stepped behind me,
gripping my arm.