Demon Heart (The Darkworld Series Book 3) (18 page)

“Anyone fancy a drink?” said Claudia, trying to placate him.

“Nah, I’m all right,” said Howard, and he sloped off without so much as a goodbye.

“What’s up with him?” I asked in a whisper when he was out of sight.

“Guilt,” said Claudia. “Him and Berenice… Well, you know how they are. Only turns out he didn’t think she ever really had feelings for him, so things have gone a bit awkward.”

“I heard you said something at the hospital,” said Cyrus.

“Great, so it’s my fault?” I said. “Berenice has been acting weird since the fortune-teller mentioned Mephistopheles, anyway. Well, she’s always acted weird, really, so…”

“It wasn’t Ash’s fault, Cy,” said Leo. “If anything, it’s Howard’s. Who cares, anyway? You up for a quick one?”

“Deadline’s tomorrow,” said Cyrus, with a martyred expression as though he faced the noose. “Three more to go, and then I can drink myself into oblivion.”

“What’re you doing next?” said Claudia. “You going to stick around for next term?”

“Nah, I’m travelling at the end of March. Going to Vegas.”

“You’re not twenty-one yet, Cy,” Leo reminded him.

“Shit, good point.”

Claudia laughed. “Well, send me a postcard from wherever you end up.”

“Will do.”

We headed for the Coach and Horses, finding a table at the back where we could talk without people overhearing us and thinking we were nut-jobs.

“There’s one thing that just doesn’t add up,” I said. “Jude definitely wasn’t possessed when he broke into the Headquarters. I think the demon must have been talking to him before that. Must have persuaded him, somehow.”

“He wasn’t acting on his own, either way,” said Leo.

“Lucifer,” I said. “He said he was under Lucifer’s command. He said all the demons were.”

I cut myself off, having forgotten for a moment that I hadn’t intended to tell anyone else about the other demon I’d been speaking to. That had been a stupid, reckless thing to do, and I should have known it wouldn’t be worth it.
I could have asked the spirits instead.
I wished I’d asked the fortune-teller how to do that.

I wished I’d asked her a lot of things. But I’d never in a million years have thought she’d let herself be captured like that. If she did have an ulterior motive, it was beyond me to guess it.

We had to find a way to get her out of there. What use did the Venantium think keeping her out of the action would do?

What if Jude attacked again, and she couldn’t help everyone?

It’ll have to be us,
I thought.
Me.

“Ash.”

The voice sounded chilling and familiar, both alien and disturbingly close to home. I opened my eyes, although I knew almost instantly that I was dreaming.

I lay in the centre of a field, although no grass grew around me and the ground was scorched black. The ruin of the Blackstone manor sat nearby. A girl stood in front of it, smiling a sinister smile. The doppelganger. Her demon eyes found mine, and her smile turned cruel, making me feel as though she stripped me down to the core.

“Long time, no see,” said the doppelganger.

“Go away,” I said.

“You wound me, Ashlyn.”

“This is a dream. You can’t hurt me, so don’t even try.”

“Have you learnt nothing from your dreams? I am more real than you are, Ash. And at least I’m not in denial about my true self.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a fool. You might wear your frail human heart on your sleeve, but your other heart needs nourishing, too. Otherwise, it’ll take what it wants for itself.”

“What’re you―”

Before I could finish, cold pierced me all over, and shadows sprung up, wrapping around my wrists. The pendant burned against my chest, and my vision darkened, turning into the purple-tinted monochrome of a demon.

I fought against the shadows, but they held me like the arms of a giant.

“Let me go!” I screamed.

Never.

The voice echoed, both in my head and aloud, both mine and not mine. But the doppelganger hadn’t opened her mouth.

Was that
me? The demon?

No. It couldn’t be.

“Conflicted, Ash?”

“You. What have you done?”

“I’ve not done a thing. I’m trying to
help
you, even though you
destroyed
my second chance at life. You’re like us, and the sooner you accept that, the better.”

And suddenly the surroundings were clear again, including the building behind the doppelganger. But it was no longer a ruin. The mansion all but gleamed, its white walls and balconies as spotless and whole as if newly made.

No way.

“A word of advice, Ash. Choose your path wisely. There’s no turning back from the Darkworld.”

Now we stood inside, in Melivia’s bedroom. The painting of the girl smiled at me from the wall. Another painting had been pinned to a canvas in the centre of the room, showing a whirlwind of flames engulfing a mass of shadowy black shapes.

And the room was burning, too. Flames leapt around us, devouring the gilt paintings, the rosewood desk, the plush carpets.

The doppelganger vanished, and in her place crouched the frail shape of Melivia, trembling as she faced the flames.

“Burn,” she whispered, “burn with me.” The fire answered, flickering toward her.

“That won’t be necessary.”

Another voice spoke out of the shadows. I tried to turn my head to see who it was, but paralysis gripped me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the figure offer Melivia a hand.

“I can help you,” whispered the voice, and it sounded so… emotionless. Human, but chilling as any demon’s. “Come with me.”

Melivia shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut as though hoping to push the demon away. “I have to die. This is the only way. I… I killed them.”

“Nothing dies forever,” whispered the voice. “Not in the Darkworld. We can find them again. You
never
have to die, not if you don’t want to. Let me show you immortality.”

The hand appeared again, and this time she took it.

“Show me,” she whispered.

The flames sprang up in front of me, cutting me off, singeing my skin, and I awoke with my skin afire.

reathing heavily, I leant back on my pillow. Sweat soaked my covers, but no flames licked at my skin. Safe.

What the hell happened?

I got up and paced the room, trying to reassure myself that I was fine, that I was in the here and now, and that dreams were as insubstantial as ever.

Except I knew that to be a lie. My dreams were more real than most people’s because the demons liked to manipulate my deepest fears and use them against me. For some reason, they’d decided that I needed to see Melivia’s past.

Let me show you immortality.

I’d thought she’d died in the fire. But now it occurred to me that anything could have happened. With no witnesses, there was no one to say whether she’d survived or not―save the demons. The demons alone knew what had really happened. If she had survived, what had happened to her?

What about the doppelganger? It shouldn’t exist, not even in my dreams. A higher demon had killed it. Unless…
Nothing dies forever. Not in the Darkworld.

Of course, there was no way of knowing whether a single demon manipulated my dreams, or if it was a collective effort. Given that every demon I’d met had been fascinated with me, I suspected that I might never be able to find out.

I still felt too hot, like I’d stood too close to a bonfire. I opened the window wide, inhaling the cool night air, feeling it soothe my skin. The sky outside was clear, like a jewelled gown of deep blue studded with stars. The forest was serene, barely disturbed by a faint breeze.

I needed to take a walk and clear my head of thoughts of demons. I dressed quickly and dragged a brush through my hair, banking on not running into anyone out there to notice or care that I looked like a scruff-bag.

Bar a single early-morning jogger, the path was completely deserted, and I walked swiftly through the woods, trying to escape my own thoughts. The cold air calmed my racing heart, but my mind continued to spin, turning back to demons.

The idea that they might be listening in on my thoughts crept up on me occasionally, and although I couldn’t pretend it didn’t disturb me, I couldn’t do anything to prevent it. But when coupled with the knowledge that someone conspired against me in the real world, I felt like a wild animal caught off guard by a trap, a fish caught in a net.

Melivia’s face flashed before my eyes, her expression turning from terrified, to defiant, to the blankness of possession. However uninteresting a person she’d seemed in her journal, in that moment she’d been braver and stronger than almost anyone I knew…

Crap. I really am an idiot
, I thought. The diary. If anywhere had any answers about what I’d seen in the dream, it was Melivia’s diary.

I power walked back to the student village. Back in my room, I opened Melivia Blackstone’s journal to the last marked page. It was time to find out the truth.

I’d left off after Melivia’s first meeting with the sorcerer who would go on to trick her into killing her family, and this knowledge made me determined to slog through the rest of the book until the end.

The diary became more fragmented at this point. From what I could gather, the mysterious sorcerer continued to visit, always when Melivia was alone in the house. She continued to naively believe that it was coincidence, that he really did meant to speak to her mother, but kept missing her. It made me uncomfortable, like reading one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, knowing the characters hurtled towards disaster and there was no way to avoid it; it had already been written. In hindsight, the tragedy of Melivia, too, was set in motion.

The sorcerer had started teaching her magic. She referred to him as a “conjuror,” making fire out of nothing, performing wondrous tricks, never thinking for a minute that he might be up to anything sinister. Reading between the lines, I could tell that Melivia had become forgetful, that she had gaps in her memory, that cold things wove their way into her dreams.
“I felt as though I lived an animated death, like I was no longer in my own body but something separate, floating in a void… It entranced and terrified me.”