Sacrifice Me: The Darkness (Episode 3) (6 page)

I gasped, taking two steps back in surprise. My
eyes traveled up to Azure’s face. She stared down at the
glasses with great concentration, one palm lifted and curled, as if
she held them in her hand. She raised her palm up and all ten glasses
followed her movement, rising through the air and back onto her
outstretched tray.

“Whoa,” I said. “That was
amazing.”

She glared at me, then slowly let her eyes travel
down my body. Shit, I was still wearing Rend’s shirt and my
hair was probably tousled, like I’d just had a good ride in the
sack.

I straightened the shirt and squared my shoulders,
daring her to say one damned word to me about it.

She cleared her throat, the muscles around her
mouth tightening. “Well, I guess now we know where you
disappeared to last night.”

I was all ready to tell her to fuck off, except
that there was a twinge of sadness mixed into her hateful tone. Even
though she turned away to try to hide it, I saw her eyes fill with
shiny tears.

Crap, did she have a thing for Rend? Had he
treated her like this, too? Kissing her and leading her to believe
there was something between them, only to back off just when things
were getting intense? I felt cheap and used, suddenly sure that what
I had thought was special between Rend and me was just some kind of
game he liked to play.

“Look,” I said, reaching out to put my
hand on her arm. “It’s not what you think, trust me.”

She snapped away from my touch, her glare back.
And this time it had daggers in it. “I’m sure it’s
completely innocent.”

Sarcasm dripped from her tone like acid.

I crossed my arms in front of my chest, feeling
slightly naked even though I still had my dance outfit underneath.
“Fine, you don’t have to believe me if you don’t
want to, but Rend was just trying to help me out,” I said.
“Nothing happened.”

Okay, so not exactly nothing but she didn’t
need to know that.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to
me,” she said, sniffing and turning back toward the bar. “It’s
none of my business.”

No, it isn’t.

She obviously wasn’t going to respond well
to my attempts to be nice, so screw it. I had enough problems without
worrying about her.

“Okay, well, see you around, then,” I
said. She didn’t even bother to look back at me or say goodbye.
She just continued to clear the used glasses from the tables.

I glanced back before I disappeared behind the
black curtain and watched for a long moment as she used her magic to
clean the place. Glasses flew through the air in perfect lines,
lifting from the tables to the bar where they dipped gently into a
large sink full of soapy bubbles.

I briefly wondered why, if she could do that with
nothing more than a flick of her wrist, she’d been using the
tray at all. I wondered what kind of things I might be capable of if
I stayed in this world a little longer.

I shook my head and went back to the dressing
room, changed back into my own clothes, and left for home.

I got on the ’L’, but didn’t get
off near campus. Instead, I kept going, taking the familiar route
back to my mother’s old house.

I hadn’t been there in a full year.

Time had been hard on the place.

Greyish-white paint chipped off the exterior,
leaving the boards shabby and dirty. The bushes that lined the front
of the house were overgrown and misshapen. Paper cups and other trash
disintegrated in the weeds that owned the small front yard. The bay
window to the left of the porch that my mother had prized was now
covered in dirt and grime, the lace curtains inside yellowed and torn
in two places.

The bottom step had all but fallen in completely
now, and I stepped over it to walk up to the small porch.

Guilt still twisted in my stomach. I should have
taken better care of this place, but money was tight and I needed
every dime to pay for school.

The deed was still in my mother’s name.
Without a death certificate or any idea where she was or if she was
okay, there was nothing else to do with the house than just leave it
to rot away. Looking at it now, I realized I should have made it more
of a priority to pay someone to take care of the place.

Mom had loved this house. She’d fought so
hard to pay for it and keep it, saying how proud she was when she’d
finally been able to pay it off. And it had been a very rare thing to
see my mother excited about anything.

She was such a loser, always numbed by drugs and
alcohol.

But the day she closed on this house, she’d
been completely sober. I still remembered her blue eyes being so
bright, they almost sparkled.

She’d been happy.

At the time, I’d resented this stupid house.
Yes, it was nice to get out of cramped apartments and not have to
move around every few months. But at the same time, she had never
once looked at me with the same pride and happiness. She’d
rarely ever smiled at me, much less been happy about having me in her
life. I was nothing but a nuisance to her my whole life and she never
let me forget it.

The leaves had just recently begun to change and
fall and they covered the small front porch entirely in orange and
red and brown. They crackled under my feet.

The porch itself seemed to be holding up all right
except for one area in the front corner that had collapsed, the
boards sunken.

I sat down in the old swing hanging from the
ceiling of the porch. I must have come out here a thousand times when
I was younger and needed to get out of the house so I didn’t
have to stare at her zombie eyes. Sometimes, the house had felt like
a tomb. It often felt as if my mother was already dead. She was just
waiting for her body to follow her to the grave, so she’d
entombed herself inside this house.

I still wasn’t sure how she had gotten the
money to buy the place outright. It hadn’t seemed that strange
when I was little, but back then I didn’t understand how money
and loans worked. I just knew that one day we were worried about
getting evicted from yet another apartment and the next, we were
moving into this place and Mom never mentioned needing to leave.
She’d promised me we’d never have to move again.

And yet she had left. Three years ago, I had come
home to find the entire place empty, as if she had packed up and
moved again. Only, this time, she had forgotten to take me with her.

I stood and stilled the swing. The old memories
here were already pulling me into their sadness. What was I even
doing here?

I shook my head and looked around. Was I hoping to
find some kind of answers here? Some kind of proof that Rend had been
right about who I am and where I came from?

The front door was locked.

I stretched up and searched for the spare key
above the door frame. It was still there after all this time.
Probably, no one had even touched it since the last time I had come
here to sulk.

I opened the door and put the key back where I’d
found it.

“Hello?” I called into the house. I
don’t even know why I said it. It was obvious no one had been
in here in a long time, but I guess I just wanted to be sure.

Some stupid part of me imagined the furniture
she’d sold off in the months before her disappearance would be
back, set up just like it used to be. She’d be sitting there on
the old flower-patterned couch smoking a joint and in one of her
better moods. I could picture it now as if it were real.

“About time you brought your lazy ass home,”
she’d have said. “Get into the kitchen and make us some
dinner. I’m starving.”

The very idea that I thought of this as a fond
memory was so incredibly fucked up that I wanted to punch the wall.
She had been a terrible mother and if she was dead, the world was
better for it.

But even as the thought came into my head, I knew
it wasn’t true. There were times when I had seen the light in
my mother’s eyes. Times when I had so desperately wanted to
believe she loved me.

I realized then why I had come all this way. Why I
had come back to this house of horrors.

I wanted to feel close to my mother. I had somehow
believed that being back here, in her house, would allow me to see
the truth. Was she really dead? Or had Fallon been lying just to
upset me?

My eyes filled with tears and for the first time
in three years, I let them fall.

There was no one here to see me or judge me. I was
alone with my memories and my pain.

I wiped the wetness off my cheek and walked into
the empty living room.

Something in the shadows caught my eye and I
sniffed, then walked over to it, crouching to get a better look.

With a trembling hand, I reached for it, taking it
between my fingers and twirling it around with wonder.

A single black feather.

Rend had been telling me the truth.

I stayed at my mother’s house for a few
hours, wandering around the empty rooms and looking for any clues
that she had been here recently.

I kept the black feather in my pocket, convinced
it was one of hers.

I thought of the dream I’d had and the
flutter of wings in the alley the other night after I’d
followed someone who looked like her out into the darkness. My mind
raced ahead, trying to make sense of all the questions running
through it.

Was my mother dead? Or had she been at Venom the
other night?

But if that was her, why would she have turned
herself into a crow and left me there with those other demons? It
didn’t make sense. Just because she didn’t want to be
around me anymore didn’t mean she would willingly lead me to my
death. I refused to believe that.

If it wasn’t her, though, who could it have
been?

Lyla and the other dancers used glamours to make
themselves look younger and more beautiful. Did that mean they could
make themselves look like another person?

Anything might be possible in this new world,
which made it even more difficult to figure out what was really going
on around me.

Then there was Rend.

There was no denying the way my body reacted to
him, but I would be lying to say there wasn’t more to it than
that. I thought he had felt it, too, but just when we’d started
to give in to our desires, he had pulled away as if I disgusted him.

I would be smart to stay away from him, but even
the thought of him now made my whole body flush with warmth. It was
dangerous to be around him, but dangerous to stay away. I was
trapped.

I needed him in a hundred different ways.

Which was exactly why I needed to stay away from
him until I could get this need under control. I would stay home and
go about my normal life as best I could until I’d somehow
managed to put some emotional distance between us.

I just had to hope Fallon and the Devil wouldn’t
come after me before that happened.

With a plan in place, I closed up my mother’s
house and headed back home on the train. I was looking forward to
seeing Katy, even if I couldn’t tell her everything that had
been going on.

But Katy wasn’t home.

Disappointment flooded through me. I could really
use a friend right now, and the last thing I needed was to be alone.

She’d left a note on the whiteboard we’d
mounted on the back of the door.

Sorry we keep missing each other. Derek’s
home this weekend so going to stay with my parents for a few days.
Hugs, Katy.

I sat down at the kitchen table where my open
books were still waiting for me. Derek was Katy’s older
brother. He was two years older than she and was working on his law
degree at Columbia. She didn’t get to see him much, so whenever
he came home, she usually went to stay with her parents in Highland
Park for a few days, only coming back to campus for class.

Suddenly the thought of Rend’s safe house in
the mountains didn’t sound so bad. I told myself I wasn’t
scared to be alone here all night, but I was lying to myself. I was
terrified.

The Devil, whoever he was, had known about me
before I even knew demons existed. I was fairly certain he was the
one who had sent me those flowers, which meant he knew where I lived.
What was stopping him from coming in here right now and killing me?

I rested my head in my hands.

So why hadn’t he?

My brain worked through the problem, putting a
question to his actions for the first time.

If he wanted to kill me so badly, why invite me to
a club where I would be introduced to an entire world of people just
like me? People who despised him. And most of all, why introduce me
to someone like Rend when he was offering the only protection a girl
like me could find?

It didn’t make sense.

What kind of game was the Devil playing?

If he’d wanted me so badly, he could have
come in and taken me without a powerful guy like Rend ever knowing
about it. Or about me.

I stared at my homework and sighed. There was no
way I was getting this done tonight. Even if I wasn’t
completely exhausted, I couldn’t get my mind off the events of
the past few days. What I needed was sleep. I would have to ask my
professor for an extension on the homework. I’d tell him I had
a family emergency or something, which was actually somewhat close to
the truth.

I closed the book with a thud, then headed back to
my bedroom.

I stripped off my work clothes and went to grab my
discarded PJ’s from this morning when my eyes landed on the
white dress shirt I’d laid across my chair.

Rend’s shirt.

I knew I should have it cleaned and taken back to
him, but right now, I wanted to curl up in it and fall asleep. I
wanted a reminder that even if I was alone here tonight, no matter
what his motivation for doing it, Rend was watching out for me. He
wanted to keep me safe.