A Demon's Wrath: Part II (Peachville High Demons) (9 page)

I stumbled when we reappeared inside the cave,
falling against the crumbling wall. My stomach lurched and I leaned
forward, feeling like I was going to throw up.

“What the hell just happened?” Ourelia
asked.

Andros and Lea took a moment to catch their breath
and regain their footing before either of them answered her.

“Lea’s a memory keeper,” he
said.

Ourelia’s eyes grew wide and her mouth fell
open in awe.

“I never knew I could do that,” Lea
said. “That was insane.”

She laughed, but then almost collapsed. I stepped
forward and caught her before she hit the ground.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Her eyes fluttered open and she gave me a weak
smile. “I think so,” she said. “I think I just need
a few minutes to recover. That was amazing.”

“It’s more than amazing,” Andros
said. “It’s a rare and very important gift. I have heard
rumors that your father, the king, also possesses this gift, but I
never believed it was true until this moment.”

Lea looked up at him with questions in her eyes.
“My father has this memory gift? I’ve never heard anyone
speak of it my entire life,” she said.

“I honestly thought it was just a rumor, but
now that I’ve seen you with the same gift, I feel certain your
father must also posses this same power.”

“Why would he keep it hidden?” she
asked. She tried to stand, but was still too weak. I let her lean
against me.

“I am not sure,” he said. “Either
he has a good reason to believe the rest of the kingdom does not need
to know about this power or…”

His voice trailed off and he turned away.

“Or what?” I asked.

He rubbed his hand across his cheek, thinking.
“Rare abilities like this are often passed down to the next
generation,” he said. “Maybe your father never told you
about this because he was afraid you might also have the same
ability.”

Lea shook her head. “Why would he be afraid
of that? Why wouldn’t he want to help me discover all of my
abilities so that I could be the strongest leader I could be
someday?”

Andros paced in front of us. “A memory
keeper can be very dangerous to someone who is trying to keep
secrets,” he said. “Like I told you before, everything
has memory. Even places. If you had stumbled upon this ability in the
middle of the throne room, for example, just think of what you might
have been able to learn. You could have used your ability to uncover
all of his secrets.”

Lea fell back against my chest.

What Andros was saying made perfect sense. If a
young Lazalea had been encouraged to develop this power, she might
have wanted to practice throughout the castle. She might have
discovered some secret conversations or touched an item that held an
important memory he didn’t want her to know about.

Considering how far he’d gone to keep the
Order of Shadows a secret, I didn’t doubt that he’d kept
this power from Lea on purpose.

“If you hadn’t touched an item with
such a strong memory that had been locked away for so long, it might
have been decades before you even realized you had this power. If
ever.”

“So what makes this stone so special?”
she asked.

“I think I can answer that,” I said.
“I think we were watching that older witch turn the younger one
into a hunter.” I nodded toward the pile of bones and rags.
“This hunter.”

“I think you’re right,” Andros
said. “The stone must have been imbued with a very dark spell
that somehow enabled the transition.”

“What I don’t understand is why I got
to see the memory, too,” I said.

“Because Lea touched you,” Andros
said. “And once I realized, or guessed, what was happening, I
grabbed Lea’s arm to join the two of you inside the memory.”

“Wait, you touched me after the memory
began? Lea asked. “So our bodies didn’t actually go
anywhere?”

Andros shook his head. “No, you were here
the entire time.”

She looked around the cave with wonder. “It
really felt like we had traveled.”

“You did in a way,” he said. “Just
not in a traditional sense.”

“It’s been a big day,” I said,
watching Lea once again fall back against me when she tried to stand.
“I think we should think about heading back to the village for
now.”

“That’s a good idea,” Andros
said. “Lea may need a few days to recover from using such a
strong burst of magic like this.”

“I’ll gather some of the others to
help me clear out this cave and bring these books and items to the
village so we can study them,” Ourelia said.

Andros stared down at the brittle bones of the
dead hunter. “They can be killed. Portals and hunters can both
be defeated. Just knowing it and seeing it with our own eyes gives us
all new hope. This is a big day for The Resistance.”

I left them there to clear out the cave while I
carried an exhausted Lea back to the village. She slept most of the
way, leaving me to focus on the memory we’d seen. There was
something about it that kept nagging at me, but I couldn’t
quite figure it out.

It wasn’t until long after I’d settled
Lea into her bed that it finally hit me.

Even though we hadn’t been able to hear what
the two witches in the memory were saying to each other, some part of
my brain had registered this one fact.

The young woman in the memory had said the older
woman’s name several times.

She’d called her Priestess Winter.

The year that followed was one of the most
productive and important in the building of the demon resistance
against the Order of Shadows.

The books we’d found in the cave were in
fact spellbooks belonging to young witches training to become a part
of the Order. It took some time to learn to read the human language,
but after a few months, many of us had a working knowledge of the
basics.

One of the most important books we found was the
hunter’s own personal journal. Through it, we confirmed what
we’d already suspected. The hunter used to be human. All
hunters had been human witches in the Order at some point.

Her name had been Julia when she was human. She
had been an initiate of the Order of Shadows just like her mother
before her. She became a full member at the age of eighteen in a
ritual ceremony, but unfortunately, she didn’t describe what
that ceremony entailed.

Did it have something to do with the portal
ceremonies we had witnessed? The terrified girls that always seemed
to be a part of the ceremony could very well have been eighteen. We
had no way of gaging human age, but they all seemed to be very young.

When she was in her twenties, she tried to talk
her younger cousin out of joining the Order of Shadows. The exact
details weren’t clear, but she had broken an important rule of
the Order by exposing some of their darker secrets to the younger
recruits. One of the girls betrayed her confidence and she was thrown
into some kind of prison in the basement of the priestess who ruled
over all of the blue demon gates.

Priestess Winter.

She rules over all the blue gates. She knows
where my brother is.

As punishment, Priestess Winter used a special
stone to strip away all of the young witch’s normal powers. We
guessed this was the memory we had witnessed when Lea touched the
blue stone in the hunter’s den.

After her powers were taken from her, they were
then replaced with darker magic. Something that allowed the hunter to
live here in the demon world much longer than a normal human
lifespan. Their bodies decayed but they continued to live on as
ghosts of a sort.

As a hunter, she was given a new name. She seemed
to retain a lot of her memories, but she had no real will of her own
anymore. No ability to deny the Order what they asked, and no way to
redeem herself. The passages in the journal were often tinged with
madness, so the information was not always easy to understand or
interpret, but we were at least able to understand that all of the
hunters used to be human witches who had broken the rules or angered
the priestess. The hunters were banished to the shadow world and
doomed to a life of solitude and madness, their only job to locate
demons who were powerful enough to be used in the human world.

Unfortunately the journals still didn’t help
us understand just how the demons were being used by the humans. All
we were able to understand was that somehow the demons were being
used to provide greater power to the witches over there.

During that year of intense study, while I looked
for answers that might help me find my brother, Lea practiced her
ability to see the memories of the past. We spent more and more of
our time apart and I think she had begun to see that there was no
room in my heart—or my life—for love.

All I knew was revenge.

Andros and Ourelia continued their work with the
black roses. Now that they had some of the Order’s spell books,
they were able to understand some of the magic behind the roses’
ability to bind a demon to a specific spot. They began to experiment
with the different components of the portal rituals, adding soul
stones to the center of the roses. It was dangerous work—one
wrong word or step could leave a demon’s powers or energy
trapped inside the stone forever—but what they learned was
invaluable to the cause.

On this particular day, just over a year since we
had discovered the abandoned portal in the cave, they both came
running up to the village, their faces filled with excitement.

“You will not believe what we’ve
discovered,” Ourelia said.

“It’s incredible,” Andros said.
“Something that will change everything.”

“A portal?” I asked, my heart racing.

“Better,” Andros said, smiling. “Get
the others.”

It took us some time to round everyone up.
Especially Lea. She’d been growing more and more distant
lately. When I finally found her, she was sitting alone looking out
over the sea. There were storms in the distance, causing the waves to
rise and fall violently. Not a calm day today.

“Andros wants to show us something
important,” I said. I noticed the sadness etched on her face.
“Are you okay?”

She turned and gave me a strange, sad smile. “I’m
okay,” she said.

“Have you been out here alone all morning?”
I asked.

“Let’s see what Andros has to show
us,” she said, standing. She didn’t answer my question.

Her sadness frightened me. Had she seen something
in the memories of the past?

She joined me in the village. Ourelia and Andros
had already gathered the rest of the group together in the village
center. By this time, there were nearly two hundred of us.

“I know there has been some concern lately
about our growing numbers,” Andros began, addressing the crowd
now that we had arrived. “We need as many demons to join our
cause as possible, but since we know the king will not approve of
what we are doing, we have to be careful not to draw too much
attention.”

“For now, we’ve managed to avoid his
concern. All we’ve done is help rebuild the villages and other
harmless actions,” Ourelia added. “But the more we learn
about the Order, the more we feel that battle is close. When that
moment comes, we are going to need a safe place to hide, away from
the eyes of both the king and the Order.”

She glanced at Lea, who did not drop her gaze or
act in any way.

“Recently, we lucked upon a very happy
gift,” Andros said, a smile bigger than any I’d ever seen
on his face before. “A few weeks ago, while looking for a new,
larger home for our camp, Ourelia and I stumbled upon the entrance to
a cave.”

“A very large cave,” Ourelia said.
They were both giggling like children. “We spent several days
exploring the area to make sure it was safe and uninhabited. You are
not going to believe this place.”

“You’ll have to see for yourself to
understand the magnitude of this discovery,” Andros said. “But
I think we’ve found a new home for The Resistance.”

They led us through the Obsidian Forest and across
a small stream to a clearing in the woods. In the center of the
clearing was a ring of black roses. Confused, I turned to Andros.

“I thought you said you found a cave. This
looks like one of the Order’s portals,” I said.

Andros smiled. “That’s the other big
surprise,” he said. “Through my experiments with the
roses, I was able to develop a security system of sorts. Ourelia and
I spent the last week covering the original entrance to the caves
with this new door.”

“How does it work?” Lea asked.

“When the black roses and the soul stones
are used together, they can pull a demon into a circle and hold them
there,” he said. “This is how the order uses the magic.
But I learned that if I put roses on both sides, I could actually
turn this into more of a doorway. A passage, allowing a demon to
enter one side and come out the other. It’s like a portal of
sorts, but since we control the magic, we can also control who can
enter.”

“And it’s safe?” Azira asked,
wringing her hands together.

“Completely,” Andros said. “I’ll
prove it.”

He stepped into the circle of roses and his body
disappeared. The crowd around us gasped.

I looked to Ourelia. “Where did he go?”

“He’s inside the cave below us now,”
she said. “Trust us.”

She motioned for me to enter the circle, but I was
afraid. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Andros. It was just
more of a fear of the unknown. I had no idea how Andros had figured
out the way the roses worked, but what if he was wrong?

Lea stepped forward and took my hand in hers. It
had been months since we’d touched and the feel of her skin on
mine surprised me.

“We’ll go together,” she said.

I nodded and squeezed her hand. Together, we
walked into the center of the roses.